At a recent LSE talk, Danny Dorling argued that we should stay in the European Union. Here, he unpicks the absurdity of some of the arguments against our EU membership. Those for Brexit are not only likely to come from areas with few immigrants, but they want highly-skilled lowly-paid young Europeans out of the country, all while British expat pensioners rely on someone else’s health system. And who are the decision-makers to be? Those who got to vote in the 1975 referendum will get a second vote in this one – but 16 and 17 year-olds, who will have to build an entire life on the consequences, will not.
Recently the front cover of Private Eye depicted Obama telling Prince George “…and then your little country left the EU and was never heard of again”. It is possible. Scotland could leave and the Kingdom and we would no longer be united. The most powerful entity in the world, before the United Kingdom, was the United Provinces, in what is now the Netherlands. It is possible to disappear and be largely forgotten, even if you had once been so very central.
The UK is not a typical country in Europe. If we were more typical I would have more patience with those who suggest that we could leave and our lives would improve. But in many ways we’re a poorly performing affluent country. This poor performance has little to do with the EU, and a lot to do with us, and our legacy of having had an Empire. From the Suez crisis right through to the Panama papers, there’s a series of embarrassments that have occurred and, in a way, this referendum is just another one of those embarrassments.
Some people have a fantasy (enjoyed by the majority of the Brexit group, particularly the Cabinet ministers) that if we were to leave we would become ‘Great’ again. We could become the richest country in the world again, and our EU membership is why we are not ‘Great’. However, the UK is the most economically unequal state within Europe. Among the top 10 per cent, some 9 per cent of us share 14 per cent of total income, while the best off 1 per cent take 14 per cent. Nowhere else in Europe do they take 14 per cent, nowhere else do the top 10 percent take 28 percent of all income. Every year our 1 per cent take twice as much as the best-off 1 per cent in Switzerland take.
In real terms, the poorest tenth of households in Switzerland live on more than twice as much as our poorest tenth in the UK. You might say Switzerland isn’t in the EU, so it is possible to perform well outside of the EU. But Switzerland is a very, very different country to us. It’s a country where people respect each other more. We are not a country where people respect each other much. We are a country which has its own particular (and world famous) social class system, which is all about disrespect.
Alongside being riven with class-driven prejudice and tolerating this, we are a remarkably tolerant country in other ways. We don’t yet have a successful far-right party, unlike most other large countries of Europe. But that’s partly because we had an Empire. Even if you are pretty slow and bloody-minded, following several decades of people coming to the UK from that Empire and ‘you’ mixing with them – it’s quite hard to stay bigoted given time and decent interaction. However, although we do mix ethnically, we don’t mix well in other ways, including geographically – and it was not the EU that grew the UK North-South divide. In other EU states, especially Germany, regional divides have narrowed.
We entered what is now the European Union at a time of great solidarity, when economic and geographical divides were at the lowest they had been for decades. And after we entered we gave people a chance to vote on whether they approved of that decision, which included the commitment to ever-closer union. I do wonder why people who got to vote in 1975 are being allowed to have a second vote now?
I’m talking about people aged over 60 having had two votes in their lifetime. They won’t have to deal with the consequences of their vote for very long. I would like to see a legal challenge by 16 and 17 year-olds asking why we didn’t give them a vote but we let these old people vote in both 1975 and 2016. I’d like to see a legal challenge by a young adult prisoner asking why they were not allowed to vote on an issue that effects them so much for so far into the future? And on why most of our fellow EU citizens who live in the UK but who were born-overseas not get a vote? And why we have become so afraid of immigration – of them? Who made us so afraid?
Normally people celebrate population growth. It’s the kind of thing that happened in California in the 1960s. They sang about it! People understand that if people are coming to where you are, that’s good news. And if they are leaving the city you live in, as they did for forty years in the cases of Glasgow and Liverpool, that’s bad news. But we are not normal people in a normal European country living in normal times.
The UKIP vote has traditionally been higher in places like Doncaster where they have held their annual conference. A few years ago the biggest immigrant group in Doncaster were German-born. They were the children of the Army of the Rhine who had to come back with their English born parents. It’s a strange, strange country we live in. People most dislike immigrants where there are the least immigrants.
I think I partly understand racism. I grew up in the 1970s, I remember the National Front well. I know there are nasty people. I was afraid of the National Front and I am afraid of their successors. I am not afraid of immigrants. I don’t understand why there is a concern about so many usually young, often highly skilled people coming into the country I have always lived in. I am not concerned that they help teach in the schools that my children go to, or that they help run the health service that I rely on. I find it impossible to become scared of people who come and do that for us. And we did not even pay to educate them.
I find it impossible to become scared of the fact that if we do decide to build 200,000 homes a year we can do it: because there are enough builders in Europe who’ll come and help us do the building work. But some people see that as a threat. And I don’t understand why we’d much rather be in a position where we don’t build many houses and don’t let skilled builders in from the mainland to do it.
Much more important than immigration is our emigration, all the people born in Britain who’ve gone to live somewhere else and are not yet dead – our home grown immigrants to other places. On average they are not young and not highly skilled and not particularly innovative – the people who leave this country to live somewhere else have, in many cases, just stopped working and entered retirement. They go on to rely on someone else’s health service, and very conveniently they leave here and go and live in Malta, or Spain, or Crete, or Portugal, where there are nice golf courses, sea and sun – and someone else’s budget pays for much of their care.
We export thousands of our elderly every year to get free health care from another state’s health service. If we do vote to ‘Leave’ then I suspect there will be a second referendum, but before there’s a second referendum, I think that some of those people who are outside of the country will begin to think that perhaps they should return – in case they don’t have enough money to pay for private healthcare there, which most of them don’t. If we leave the EU we lose our rights in the EU.
I believe we will begin to get an influx of our expats. And we can’t easily cope with that number of elderly people coming in, because our health and social services are in such a poor state. It’s possible to imagine British expats becoming scared that we might actually not give them the right to re-enter in perpetuity in future. Now you might think, this is ridiculous, but this is what we did in the 1960s to people with a British passport– we just did it to folk who were mostly not white.
I know there’s a lot wrong in Europe, I know the EU is a rich boy’s club, I know it’s undemocratic – although I am not sure it’s as undemocratic as our Westminster voting system and our private school dominated elite. I know many in positions of power in the EU currently favour TTIP and very big business, but I don’t think it favours these things as much as our own governments have tended to.
What has really annoyed me is the argument that we can’t fund the NHS as much as we’d like to because we are paying so much money into Europe. Our NHS is very efficient. It wins international awards constantly. It came first in the last five national comparisons that I have studied. But it also doesn’t work very well because we fund it so lowly. We do not fund it so lowly because we have to make some payments to the EU, but because we’ve chosen to fund it so lowly. The Swiss spend twice as much per person on health. Norway 81 per cent more. The Netherlands 59 per cent, Germany 49 per cent, Demark 41 per cent, even France commits 27 per cent higher spending on healthcare per person. We could spend more on health if we chose to tax more (as most other affluent EU countries choose) and we chose to spend less on other things. But we are unusual. It is not the EU that makes us spend so little on our health care.
But it’s not just in health. We are abysmally low public spenders on housing policy. We have the highest rents and highest housing costs for the lowest quality housing in the whole of Western Europe. We have the least rights for our tenants. None of this was imposed by Brussels on us. We are not in a good state because of our own mistakes.
Education is another area we do poorly in and where the EU is not to blame and where membership of the EU could help in future. If you look at data on ability at maths up to age 24, you’ll see that we are – along with the United States – pretty bad at basic mathematics. All the small countries clustered around Japan in the graph of affluent states shown below are European countries.
The UK and USA lag behind on maths ability. Source: Statistics Views
It doesn’t look quite so bad when our children are aged 16 and when they take GCSEs, because we are quite good at teaching people how to get an A or a C at maths without them actually understanding what they are doing. In every other country in Europe for which there is data, people are taught mathematics in a way that means they are still more numerate ten years later. They are tested less at school and taught more. The only affluent country worse in terms of educational outcomes than the UK is the USA. But we are lucky, numerate Europeans from the mainland can come here and teach our children. The same applies to problem-solving and literacy, where young adults in the UK also rank so low on the European league table. But we chose not to learn from the EU, let alone to look across at places like Japan.
Our politicians fly off to America thinking that is where to go to learn. Gordon Brown used to go every year. It’s not just The US record in education. America is abysmal on housing; America is particularly abysmal on health. It is the only affluent state in the world that makes our record on social progress look good, including on public spending. We are heading towards being the lowest public spending country in Europe. Other countries within the EU choose to spend far more of their money collectively – like Denmark, France, and Sweden, and Italy, and Norway – and get better health outcomes and better education and better housing outcomes. They get more innovation. People produce more scientific papers. More patents, more entrepreneurs. We kid ourselves when we claim we do this.
We don’t pay very much to be in Europe, net. They pay more per head in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. It is entirely our own fault that we have chosen to spend so little on our healthcare as compared to nearby countries. My explanation for that is that we are still adjusting to losing the income that indirect-tribute from Empire once gave us. We still spend too much on arms and all the other ‘Bads’ that a state which had an empire needs, and which we no longer need. And we still tax too little, partly because we have not realised that we can no longer make the monopoly profits that a country with an Empire can enjoy.
But I’d like to end on some good news. At 8pm tomorrow, the grand final of the Eurovision song contest begins. Joe and Jack are representing the United Kingdom. Their chorus is, ‘you’re not alone, we’re in this together’. They’re from Stoke on Trent in England and Ruthin in Wales, places which have recently become UKIP target areas. I won’t tell you the last line of the song, you’ll need to listen yourself, or perhaps you’ll soon be forced to listen if it becomes popular. Last year the UK only won 5 votes. Our friends and neighbours in the Eurovision area have a choice and at least this one vote in that one European tradition. I am happy to predict that whatever happens next, the UK entry will get more than 5 votes, votes for Joe and Jack, and for their song about staying together…in Europe.
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The full talk is available as a podcast from LSE Events.
Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. He was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. He has also worked in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and New Zealand, went to university in Newcastle upon Tyne, and to school in Oxford. In 2015 he was a commissioner of the London Fairness Commission, which reported in 2016. His most recent book is ‘A Better Politics: How Government Can Make Us Happier” a free PDF is available here.
(Image source: Eric Fischer CC BY 2.0)
As a professor of geography it surprises me that uk food security and the availability of green infrastructure is not mentioned. That said, 200,000 additional homes and employment spaces to accommodate migration-led growth can only mean turning green infrastructure into grey infrastructure. This means less agricultural land and other green belt/field sites, less food security, less wildlife habitats and less ecosystem services. So overall, continued eu membership is expected to reduce available environmental goods and services and replace these with more pollution, more climate change and more congestion.
Is this a blindspot or an intentional omission?
Hi Danny, even though your article considers the cultural milieu of the UK empire it is also a little UK-centric, you state: “The most powerful entity in the world, before the United Kingdom, was the United Provinces, in what is now the Netherlands. It is possible to disappear and be largely forgotten, even if you had once been so very central.”
I don’t think one of the largest agricultural traders in the world can be forgotten, nor by the plethora of the multinational corporations that operate from the Netherlands because of logistics, language skills and the money making acumen of the Dutch – though small, they are the 9th richest nation. Not that that is a virtue in itself considering our environmental limits but their work-life balance is better than a lot of other European nations. Thanks for your thoughts.
Sorry to copy and paste but wanted Danny to consider my ideas regarding how uk politics can be used as a conduit for re-evaluating how we place value and worth between ourselves. Not read your book yet but maybe these ideas are already included. Cheers……..
Obviously the Corbynite critics in the comment section here, who then plump for the status quo of the Tories do not realise that currently the govt has run up a budget deficit of £7500 per inhabitant (eurostat 2015) and that our national debt is currently £1.65 trillion and is, as we speak, growing at a rate of £5,170 per second!
Effectively the Tories have taken the country into a debt crisis in which we spend £45bn a year in interest payments alone and their cure – migration-led economic growth.
However considering that every extra inhabitant is costing the tax payer an extra £7500 a year (eurostat 2015) which is increasing the national debt rather than reducing it, then effectively, without resorting to increasing taxation, then the only options are more austerity, more public service cutbacks (which currently manifests as the junior doctors dispute) and more general impoverishment of society whilst at the same time, profits will continue to flow upwards to further enrich the already rich.
At heart, the problem with Tory ideology is the failure to accept that it is society as a whole that creates all the goods and services we need to survive and prosper. Of course it is individuals that are contributing but it is only the collective efforts of individuals that produces our well-being not individuals working and competing in isolation from one another.
In this respect, a debate is to be had to determine to what extent the value of each individual contribution can be considered equal to another considering the fact that each contribution is dependant on another in order to produce the final good or service. This is what is known as interdependance and is the principle by which all ecosystems function whether they are arbitrarily delineated as small or large..
Current Tory ideology places a strictly vertical hierarchical value on different contributions which is quite obviously far removed from the natural reality of interdependance and far removed from the fact that interdependance is at core a natural principle which is not only self-evident but is also the only way in which systems whether ecological or human can even function.
As such, the current Tory policy of a ‘hard’ version of eu economic policy (aka ‘hard’ eu neoliberalism) is tearing our communities apart, exploiting to the max our keyworkers, sending uk houses prices spiralling out of control, reducing work to the casualisation of labour through the proliferation of zero hour contracts and agency work and at the same time giving huge tax breaks to their corporate chums, facilitating tax dodging on an enormous scale and facilitating the hollowing out of our national resilience and sustainability.
In effect the Tories are ‘progressively’ wrecking our home and planet simply because they believe that different contributions are only connected by a very weak form of interdependance which then justifies a strictly vertical hierarchy of value and worth in relation to all our interdependant contributions.
In effect the Tories are trying to sell us an unnatural doctrine and so we desperately need a societal debate to assess what is the natural balance of value and worth in relation to the different contributions that everyone makes towards the functioning of our society and then distribute rewards and taxation measures accordingly.
Danny Dorling has beautifully summarized the true social, economic and realistic condition of the UK. It is an island falling apart with minimal industry or captivating innovation which truly has opened the pandora’s view of what is really happening on the ground. When the average low income worker or semi unemployed youngster is growing up in the country, there really isn’t much of a future for them. The lucky ones who complete further education and “actually” find a job are going to join the daily grind of slogging out a hard day’s deliverables and receiving a meager remuneration package. This reward will amount to a month to month existence which can hardly allow them to own their own property or do something substantial with
their lives. The crime and subtle poverty that has existed for the last 50 years will only become more rampant as was demonstrated in the recent riots. The rest of the world has moved on and Britain needs Europe and Europe can do without Britain. We have a great opportunity to market our products to Europe and be inclusive. The moment we exit, will make us into the Byzantine empire where everything goes downhill. Danny is opening our eyes, so lets learn and do something about it.
There is absolutely no evidence base to your argument that a brexit uk will be economically isolated when all non-eu european countries are prospering. This kind of obscurist thinking is dangerous propoganda. Please stop in the name of reason and rationality.
Ralph, democracy is not justified in so far as it promotes socialism, faces down a particular government, or promotes whatever a particular individual believes in. It is justified – and people like the Chartists fought and died for it – as it enables the people to decide their own fate.
The various left movements in Europe established their voice in national polities. There is a long tradition of politics that is national in form (seeking power, democratically, in nations) but internationalist in content (seeking to challenge the limits of politics as is). There is no European polity, just a European bureaucracy.
I fear that Varoufakis, Sassen, possibly Dorling and co’s looking to a Europe for the workers is what the left have always done-when the British working class don’t agree with you, bypass them and look elsewhere for inspiration.
This is effectively offshoring politics.
This is an interesting and what I consider to be a very grounded take on the nature of politics. Politics always starts with an idea that is first localised and then expands out. The opposite is totalitarianism. The eu tries to justify its totalitarianism by trying to demonstrate good governance with bits and pieces of internal democracy.
The importance of retaining a political logic and coherence to the fundamental premise of how politics actually works is at the heart of the Brexit campaign. Even politically uneducated people know this political logic but for some reason it escapes the political intelligentsia.
The distinct advantage of politics retaining a strong national base is that it encourages diversity and innovation which is just what the human species currently needs, not more dressed up totalitarianism with a we know best attitude whilst europe crashes economically.
Danny likes to bash the US, but apparently hasn’t considered the role of policy centralisation in this. The US has done a lot to centralise education policies over the last few decades, under presidents from both parties. And the EU is inherently a project of doing the same thing. Uniformisation and centralisation is what the EU stands for. Danny not only ignores what this has done in the US but implicitly also endorses similar moves in the EU when he says that the EU could “in future” help with education….
Also, Danny praises Switzerland and Norway a number of times as doing better than the UK. Both are outside of the EU. Maybe it’s not so bad after all?
I’m not really sure what the point being made in this article was. The EU isn’t that bad and the UK is a backwards hovel full of innumerate, tight-fisted racists?
This is essentially an article written for the remain group by the remain group. It does the strange thing that so many pro-EU types do which is casually dismissing the fears and concerns of those that want to leave and then wondering how they can be so irrational.
Take immigration for example. You didn’t even try to look at the real argument put forward by Brexiters: that uncontrolled EU migration drives down wages, fractures working class communities, and puts enormous pressure on crowded housing markets in the UK. Instead you said they should be flattered that immigrants want to come here, that all those people whining live in white areas, and then claimed immigrants will build our new houses and are the only people that can teach our kids mathematics.
The reality is that California has huge problems with immigration at the moment and there are countless examples where immigration has led to quite terrifying problems (Israel for example).
What you need to do is understand their concerns (which are real), but point out the problem isn’t really immigrants it’s that we have terrible worker’s rights and a rigged housing market. If you made things more equal there wouldn’t be the same incentive for companies to exploit cheap labour. And in fact the EU might just be the best way for us to fix these things.
What this article fails to tell you is that the UK is treaty bound to conform to eu economic policy. It also fails to mention that when you look at eurostat, the offical eu commission stats website, then you will discover that the average uk government expenditure per inhabitant in 2013 was £11040. On the same graph but using average taxes received per inhabitant then it is £3490. Therefore the averaged out deficit per inhabitant in the UK is £7550 for the year 2013. And this figure is pretty much the same for each year since 1992. Consequently UK national debt is now 1.6trillion and rising.
Therefore lets put EU economic governance into perspective……..
1. EU economic policy (which every elected party has to conform to) is not working and has reduced consumer demand as a result of high unemployment and eurozone instability right across Europe. Also the economic policy of free movement has a downward pressure on wages due to increased supply and increased competition which also encourages zero hour contracts and agency work. Migration puts an upward pressure on housing costs which acts to reduce disposible incomes and puts an upward pressure on govt expenditure which results in austerity and public service cutbacks.
2. Each eu migrant raises the national debt by around £7500 per year.
Brexit creates the freedom to formulate our own economic policy around our fiscal concerns which includes how to better raise tax revenues, how to better increase disposible incomes and how to better reduce government expenditure.
Immigration control amongst other measures achieves all these things by removing the downward pressure on wages, removing the upward pressure on housing costs and removing the need to increase infrastructure capacity. In fact some level of managed economic protectionism is always good for fiscal policy.
However, the so called economic benefits of remaining are simply on the basis of taking advantage of yet more migration which increases profits but in no way reduces down our national debt or in no way increases our quality of living. It facts it reduces it by encouraging zero hour contracts and agency work (market casualisation of labour).
In effect Bremainers are blaming the possibility of Brexit for the current failings of EU economic governance.
Only Brexit has the right approach to resolving our ecpnomic problems which comes from reclaiming our economic freedom to determine our own economic system, our own levels of tariffs and non tariff barriers and our own fiscal priorities.
In this respect, the Bremain political/corporate/business elites only want in because they are the ones that directly profit from the EU policy of laissez faire and free movement which is why, day after day they spew out their lies and half truths in order to try and convince a fearful and gullible public.
Call it a highly ambiguous information war if you like.
As a point of fact, economic immigration is driven by demand; it was true in the 1960’s well before we even entered the Common Market, and it’s still true now. Business wants cheap workers, and they’ve shown they have the means to buy legislation to get it, EU or no EU.
The majority of the immigrant workers in my line of work (City IT) who are driving down wages are from India, Pakistan, Australia, the US, China and Russia. There are a few Poles but they are very few and that’s about all. Even the office cleaning staff are from Africa, the Caribbean and South America. The nearest I get to EU types is when I pick up my breakfast from Pret.
Point being, your argument about immigration is a complete red herring. Brexit will not even make a dent in that. Except maybe in Pret a Manger
Well I guess we will see. If every inhabitant is running a budget deficit of £7500 then somethings got to change because the eu cannot deliver the growth that is necessary to pay down our national debt.
Migration following the war was driven by a reduced population and a lack of workers to bring the UK back to its pre war gdp. Much of immigration usually finds its way into the service sector. These days migration is the only way to grow an economy which is why it is facilitated. Demand in the face of increasing supply comes after.
Danny has largely avoided what is for me the single biggest issue, that of democracy. There is no European polity and the EU is profoundly undemocratic. There is a UK polity and a democratic government. That is of central importance. On immigration and social equality I am largely in agreement with the article. However, I believe in persuading the electorate of that, not looking to a commission to override their wishes. That is democracy-you persuade the demos.
You briefly dismiss the democracy argument and say that perhaps the UK is less democratic than the EU. That is a really unsustainable argument. Chartism, the labour movement and the suffragettes showed that democracy is worth fighting for. Don’t write off the electorate as controlled by ‘posh boys’ .
If you have to go back to the Suffragettes and the Chartists to find a political movement with enough support to face down the government, that’s not very reassuring.
I am in agreement with Danny on this point. Political activism is much more vibrant elsewhere in Europe. There is much more likelihood of a popular Socialist movement swelling across the whole of the EU and booting the neoliberals out of Brussels than there is of any radical swing to the left in an isolated UK. Especially with Scotland out of the picture, and it’s almost a certainty that the Scots will not be joining us, at least not for long. What chance for a Labour government then?
It is interesting that your arguments never contain smy evidrnce base just your opinion. As it happens I participated in a programme of young german higher education students visiting Brighton and London local food projects and they each assured me that the UK leads in political activism and that the UK is the envy of our european brothers and sisters. As such they have importing our climate camp concept, have imported our ecological squat concept and currently use these activist ideas to thwart the expansion of the largest open cast coalmine in Europe. It is because the UK has such a deep history of political activism that we have govts that are reasonably responsive and why we do not have far right governments. And why the UK is serious about Brexit.
The trouble with free speech and democracy. People can say and distort anything but most of it is just opinion.
Immigrants and children of immigrants in the West Midlands voice concerns over a United States of Europe that echo concerns shared by descendants of much earlier strangers to these British shores (Normans, Danes, English, Celts, etc), with the biggest question being what happens to British sovereignty in a corporate-dominated EU when British votes are reduced to the level of Florida votes in Washington, D.C.? The U.S. case illuminates well a system of 50 states united under a federal government that today largely represents deep-pocketed interests in a military-industrial complex. When election and re-election campaigns at the federal level require $7 spent for each vote, representative government in a union that large cannot really be other than a corporative one. A corporate-dominated EU with power centered in Brussels will leave the average British voter to the margins. http://www.poclad.org
I agree modt of the points made.
But, I do not like suppressed zeros in graphs.
And don’ t states accepting the card we can apply for to get health treatnent in for example Spain charge the UK government to recover costs?