Opinion: #VoteRemain - Love it, or shove it

OK, it really is love it or shove it time for this writer – having followed, with a growing sense of dismay, outrage, and, yes, disgust at the antics of the 'Leave' camp during the official referendum campaign period, the time has come for me to state, in no uncertain terms, why 'Remain' is the only way to go, writes EU Reporter Production Editor James Drew.

Let's go back to the beginning, shall we? When then prime minister Margaret Thatcher signed the Single European Act in 1986, it handed over legal powers to the EC, affording more legal powers than the subsequent EU Treaties of Maastricht or Nice. Thatcher was interested in one thing: the rebate. The future could hang, and she was not interested in the details.

Second. When then prime minister John Major was desperate to get Maastricht through a very hostile house of Commons in 1991 (battling 'the bastards', as he christened that particular faction of his party), he saw an opportunity to secure an opt-out from the Social Charter (Chapter) which was set to enforce basic employee rights such a minimum wages and maximum working hours. This was a massive bulwark against a very disaffected right wing that was busy destroying his party.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in charge of a euphoric but very imbalanced post-reunification German economy saw the international recognition of Croatia (Yugoslavia no longer existed) as a newly (re)established state as an easy quick win in terms of cheap foreign labour and capital investment streams. Of all of the then 15 EU states, only Greece, Sweden and the UK were against this proposal.

One of the many UK advisers against this putative international (United Nations) recognition of Croatia was Lord Carrington, not easily identified as a pacifist liberal, but who nonetheless foresaw a deeply prolonged bloodbath in the former Yugoslavia. Without protected minority voting rights in Croatia and without an enforced tripartite party system in Bosnia (to protect the Muslims from both the Serb and Croat nationalists) and with a neo-fascist president in Croatia and a post-Kremlin but high-era Stalinist Milosevic in Belgrade, this would surely end in internecine war, as far as he was concerned.

It was a no-brainer.

But, off the record, and largely out of parliamentary sight, Major and Kohl reached an agreement. Major got an opt out of the minimum wage and Kohl got his rich friends a glorious slice of the Dalmatian coast.

The outcome was way out of the EU’s bathetic ambit; it took three years of genocide, a mere two hours' flight from London. Major gave the Germans their koolies in Croatia, while fat-of-the-land Kohl gave Major denuded employment rights for Liverpool and Swansea. Happy days. Things changed eventually – thanks to Bill Clinton’s commitment to end the conflict, and only after he finally resolved Senate versus Congressional opposition –fuelled entirely by a distaste for a boots-on-the-ground conflict so soon after Iraq 1.

At best, it remains the greatest indictment of the EU’s ineffectualism of the 90s. At worst, it was an example of how single-state interests could use our European institutions to exploit the collapse of several very close neighbours' economies and turn them into a living Hades.

Third. PHARE. Never heard of it? Nor has anyone else, but on many occasions it was used as a method of delivering reconstruction and development projects to post-communist accession states, with insanely well paid UK, German and French consultants going to those states and offering five-star advice. Countries who the IMF and World Bank and European Bank of reconstruction and Development had chastised into impoverishing their state provisions, slashing their services, destroying the bureaucracies, and in many cases, having fire-saled their world-class higher education systems and sacking their own experts.

Post-Brexit, we will have ten years' minimum of renegotiating deals we already have got. The Germans and French both have very important elections next year where they will have to be combatant against far-right groups, and they will have to remain to be seen to be not letting each other get off lightly.

The Bank of England, IMF, OECD foresee a 3-5% shrinkage in the UK economy by 2020, in the event of Brexit. In plain terms, that’s yet another big recession that's just around the corner.

Oh yes, and immigration. Well, they are already here. We’re not about to be swamped. How does a 1962-style poster about sending them back work?

It doesn’t and it won’t.

Do you really think that outside of the EU, in a continued first-past-the-post electoral system, where everyone is terrified (because it makes no difference, in or out, who is going to asset-strip your company or pension), that we will somehow have a lovely electorally responsible British elite, post-Brexit? Are you saying, really, that you cannot remember the MPs' expenses scandal?

Do you really think the elite who are running the UK from Monaco, California, Shanghai, Moscow give a tinker's cuss about you? Or how they take away your quality of life – people who say that things like holiday pay, sick pay, clean beaches, protected national parks and wildlife species and, dare I say it, culture, yes, certainly culture are merely “transactional”.

Because that’s who you are exposing yourself to by a factor of thousands if you vote Leave.

Don’t throw away something you can change, no matter how ineffectual that seems, in favour of something that is by definition forever unchangeable, purely sovereign, in all its true definition and forms.

Those are my conclusions.

Think. Remain.

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