Australia tells Britain not to forsake the EU

May I offer a scenario just for exploratory purposes? The referendum takes place in 2017 and (while personally I believe we would vote to leave, for the purposes of this discussion only let us assume) the UK votes by 60% to 40% to stay in a “reformed EU”. The result is helped by the tendency for voters to support the status quo rather than switch to something new.

Please note that no one is suggesting at all that the 2017 referendum commits the UK in anyway whatsoever to a more integrate EU, granting extra powers to the EU or UK membership of the euro. It is simply about continued UK membership of a supposedly reformed less centralised and generally looser EU. (Which let’s be honest, is not what those who support a federalist agenda see as the way forward.)

Shortly afterwards it transpires that the reformation is not quite as reforming as the public were lead to believe. We are straight back into the arguments about the political elite miss selling the deal, just as we experienced after 1975. All the arguments we have been having for the last forty years resurface again with renewed anger and problems for the UK Government / EU.

The eurosceptics take comfort from the fact that the referendum lock remains in place. All UK political parties are committed to retaining this piece of legislation; indeed it is difficult to see how they could possibly remove it. Thus the UK is still unable to transfer significant powers to the EU without a specific referendum on each transfer, which unlike the 2017 vote cannot be hidden as anything other than submitting to Brussels. (This may have a knock on effect to other countries that will have to explain to their voters why they are not allowed to express their views while the perfidious British are. The French Government being forced to offer a referendum on the European Constitution due to Blair’s promise to the UK electorate being a case in point.)

As these prospective votes in the UK are attempts to move to a new position / relationship as opposed to maintaining the status quo, they will always be extremely difficult to pass. Governments, disliking the prospect of losing such votes will do their best to avoid holding them; therefore the UK freezes its current position almost entirely. Couple this with an unwillingness to join the euro (not even supported by the Europhiles any more), accept a single foreign policy, Schengen, unhappiness with amount of immigration etc. and the UK remains an extremely awkward customer.

Once you get beyond the camouflage of economic debate (which given the mutually beneficial nature of trade would be resolved if the UK left the EU) the hard politics intrude and this seems to me to be the position you could very easily end up with. As I say just a scenario, but does it seem wildly unrealistic?

Some how, I do not think the ordinary people in Australia would put up with voting and paying -plus expenses- to their elected Government and Parliament to govern them, only to find out that they prefer to pay complete foreigners to make alien laws, the kind they would never allow "their own" to put forward and other laws that are completely alien to them by those they cannot even converse with in all their foreign languages. We have to come out of the EU of course, for being in the EU is of course, absolutely contrary to our Oaths of Allegiance.

Foreign countries tell us we should stay in the eussr, well it isn't their choice and it isn't them that suffer the problems caused by the eussr, they will still trade with us just as they did before we got dumped into the so called common market, no one voted to be subsumed into a corruption ridden democratically deficient governance.