t is interesting to learn that Sikorski was at Oxford with Cameron and Osborne, and a member of the infamous Bullindon Club. He is also married to Anne Applebaum. M.
Belatedly fisking Radek Sikorski (long but comprehensive)
Better off out?
When Radek Sikorski, the ambitious Polish foreign minister, warned us in The Times against leaving the EU, I ignored it. Britons, in common with other peoples, don't take kindly to being hectored by foreign politicians. Such pieces are invariably counterproductive.
Since then, though, lots of people have emailed or Tweeted asking me to fisk the piece. And it now seems clear that several other EU politicians are lining up to deliver the same message, as Angela Merkel did last week. So, rather after the event, here goes.
'Myth No 1 Britain’s trade with the EU is less important than its trade with the outside world.
Fact In 2011 the UK trade deficit with China was £19.7 billion. You ran a deficit with Russia, too. Roughly half of UK exports go to the EU. The UK has until recently traded more each year with Ireland than with Brazil, Russia, India and China put together. Trade growth with new EU members is even more dynamic. Between 2003 and 2011 British exports to Poland increased threefold.'
Poland, having wisely stayed out of the euro under its previous government, is the exception. The EU as a whole is becoming economically less relevant by the hour.
In his conference speech the prime minister cited, with justified pride, our surge in exports to non-EU markets: "Over the past two years, our exports to Brazil are up 25 per cent, to China 40 per cent, to Russia 80 per cent". What he didn't mention was that, over the same period, our exports to the EU have fallen.
The trend is accelerating. In the last three months for which we have figures, our exports to the EU fell by 7.3 per cent while our exports to non EU countries rose by 13.2 per cent.
Supporters of EU membership like to tell us that the EU accounts for half our trade. This was never true: the statistics are distorted by what economists call the Rotterdam Effect: British goods destined for non-European markets are often shipped through Antwerp and Rotterdam, thus showing up in the raw figures as "exports to the EU" . Now, even the raw data show that the EU accounts for a declining minority of our commerce. The latest official figures, published by the Office of National Statistics on 11 September, show that the EU now accounts for 43.6 per cent of our exports, the lowest share since the current measure was introduced in 1988.
As the EU shrinks, the Commonwealth is surging. Its economy overtook that of the eurozone in June 2012 and, according to the IMF, it will grow at 7.3 per cent annually over the next five years while the EU barely grows at all.
In the circumstances, it's odd that Sikorski should cite the figures he does about Ireland as an argument in favour of EU membership. Which is the better prospect: Ireland or India?
'Myth No 2 The EU forces Britain to adopt laws on human rights that are contrary in spirit to British tradition.
Fact These rulings come from the European Court of Human Rights, which is not part of the EU but part of the Council of Europe, a noble British creation that pre-dates the EU.'
Actually, plenty of these laws come from the EU's court: the European Court of Justice. It was the ECJ, for example, and not the ECHR, that imposed the 48-hour week. It is the ECJ, not the ECHR, that makes some of the more bizarre interpretations of sex equality rules (banning cheaper car insurance for women, for example).
It's true that others – votes for prisoners, for example – come from the ECHR, but it's not true to say that the ECHR is wholly unconnected to the EU. The two courts recognise each other's precedent. The two institutions share a flag. And, now that the EU as a whole has signed up to the ECHR, it is far from clear that we could repudiate the ECHR without also leaving the EU.
'Myth No 3 UK is bankrupting itself by funding Europe.
Fact The monstrous EU budget is about 1 per cent of the GDP of all EU members; UK public spending is nearly 50 per cent of Britain’s GDP. Your annual net contribution of £8 billion- £9 billion is similar to France’s and less than Germany’s. That is less than £15 per UK citizen. Moreover, some of this money comes home. UK companies have profited enormously from EU cohesion-fund investments in Central and Eastern Europe. That improved infrastructure benefits UK exporters: higher prosperity in those member states mean new markets for the UK.
The UK Government estimates that every household “earns” between £1,500 and £3,500 every year thanks to the Single Market. That is between five and fifteen times the UK’s net budget contribution. It’s a bargain.'
According to the Treasury, our contributions to the EU budget in 2011 were £19.7 billion gross, £9.2 billion net. To put that figure in context, all the government's domestic spending cuts in that year came to £6.2 billion.
Sikorski cites the net rather than the gross figure, and it is true that some of the money we hand over to the EU is spent in Britain. But it's not always spent in ways we'd have chosen for ourselves. Indeed, a great deal of it goes on advertising the EU. In any case, in what other field of politics do people cite the net rather than the gross contribution? It's rather like arguing that basic rate income tax isn't in fact 20 pence in the pound, but zero, because the whole sum is "given back" in roads, schools and hospitals.
'Myth No 4 The UK is drowning in EU bureaucracy.
Fact Yes, 33,000 people work for the European Commission, serving an entire continent. But more than 82,000 people work for HM Revenue & Customs alone. Spain has almost three million bureaucrats. In contrast to any of its members, the EU is a slimmed-down operation.'
Why count only the Commission? When you tot up the employees of the various EU agencies (the Court of Auditors, the European Economic and Social Committee, the Committee of the Regions, the European Ombudsman, the European Data Protection Supervisor, the European Central Bank etc) as well as the various Euro-quangoes (the European Food Safety Authority, the European Agency for Safety & Health at Work, the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and so on) you get to 170,000 staff. By way of comparison, the British Army employs just under 100,000 people.
These 170,000 Euro-functionaries sit at the apex of a bureaucratic pyramid. Every Monday, hundreds of national civil servants arrive in Brussels to take their marching orders back to their member states. The 82,000 HMRC employees whom Sikorski mentions are, at least in part, doing the bidding of Brussels, on whose behalf they collect VAT. So are their counterparts in every other department.
'Myth No 5 The UK is drowning in EU legislation and Brussels directives.
Fact We all have a good laugh when we hear about bendy bananas or euro-sausages. But these are not the fault of the European Commission. Usually they are proposed by member states trying to protect their former colonies or their national products.
Directives are not Brussels diktats, but regulations that British officials have agreed, approved and signed off. In any case, law inspired by Europe accounts for only 6.8 per cent of primary legislation passed by your Parliament.'
Commission Regulation 2257/94 lays down quality standards for bananas, including rules on "abnormal curvature". The Commission looked at repealing various fruit standardisation rules in 2008, but left the bendy bananas regulation in place.
Sikorski's 6.8 per cent figure is bizarre. The British Government has never carried out a formal study of what proportion of laws emanate from Brussels. Estimates range from nine per cent to 84 per cent. A survey by the House of Commons Library in 2010 found that while 14.3 per cent of primary legislation came from the EU, "the vast majority" of EU law was imposed through secondary legislation. In 2009, it said, 53 per cent of all laws passed were there, in one way or another, to give force to EU requirements.
'Myth No 6 The European Commission is a hotbed of socialism.
Fact Whether on Open Skies or business subsidies, the EU has helped to dismantle national monopolies and stopped national politicians subverting competition rules.'
No one claims that the Commission is socialist. The problem is that it is corporatist: an alliance of big businesses, big trade unions and big lobbyists united by their distrust of the electorate. Whenever Brussels passes some apparently insane law – the recent ban on certain vitamin and mineral supplements, for example – it almost always turns out that the new rules happen to suit one or another of these vested interests (in this case, the pharmaceutical corporations) who had lobbied to secure at EU level what they would never be able to get through a national parliament.
'Myth No 7 The EU stops hardworking Britons working longer hours than feckless continentals.
Fact The average Pole works 40.5 hours a week. The average Spaniard 38.1. The average for all the EU27 is 37.2. The average for the UK? 36.2.'
The EU's Working Time Directive (2003/88) lays down rules on paid breaks, annual leave and rest periods, as well as specifying a maximum working week of 48 hours. It was adopted in 1993, a year after John Major had opted out of the EU's social chapter. To get around this problem, the EU designated it a "health and safety" measure, which meant that it could be imposed on the UK by a majority vote of its competitors.
'Those are the myths. Now let’s look at the arguments. Because Britain’s market is too valuable for the rest of the Continent to ignore, Eurosceptics say, Britain could negotiate a trade deal that preserved all the advantages of the single market without any of the costs of membership.
Don’t count on it. Many states would hold a grudge against a country that had, in their view, selfishly left the EU. While you account for about 11 per cent of the rest of EU trade, 50 per cent of your total trade is with the EU. No prizes for guessing who would have the upper hand in negotiations.
Any free trade agreement would have a price. In exchange for access to a single market of 500 million people, Norway and Switzerland make big contributions to EU cohesion funds. They also have to adopt EU standards without any say in how they are written. At the moment, Norway’s net contribution to the EU budget is higher, per capita, than Britain’s.
Britain’s leaders must decide once again how best to use their influence in Europe. The EU is an English- speaking power. The Single Market was a British idea. A British commissioner runs our diplomatic service. You could, if only you wished, lead Europe’s defence policy.
But please don’t expect us to help you to wreck or paralyse the EU. Don’t underestimate our determination not to return to the politics of the 20th century. You were not occupied. Most of us on the Continent were. We’ll do almost anything to prevent it happening again. Europe’s leaders will step up integration to make the euro work. We believe the euro will survive, because it is in members’ interests for it to survive.'
Beyond the obvious point that Norway and Switzerland enjoy the highest living standards in Europe, and that both export more per head to the EU than we do, let's consider Sikorski's contention that the other member states would hold a grudge against Britain if it left.
It can't be stressed too often that, over the period of our membership as a whole, we have run a cumulative trade surplus with every continent in the world except Europe. Our current account deficit with the EU in 2010 was £46.6 billion; our surplus with the rest of the world was £10.3 billion.
The other members, in other words, are selling to us far more than they buy from us. Is it likely, in the event that we withdrew from the political structures of the EU, that they would want to limit this trade? I don't believe it. But if Sikorski is right – if we're dealing with people who resent us so much that they would cut off their noses to spite their faces – why do we let them rule us?
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