UK Edition
For four years, as Leader of the Opposition, my job was to interrogate Tony Blair every week at Prime Minister’s Questions; a close approximation to trying to nail jelly to a wall.
I used all the techniques ever devised of presenting him with a question demanding a “yes” or “no” answer, where both “yes” and “no” were politically impossible to say. And he employed every means known to a seasoned politician of addressing a question without ever coming down on either side of it.
Even one day when the First Minister of Wales resigned minutes before PMQs – news of which reached me but not him – and I immediately tried to trick him into expressing confidence in that Minister, Blair sniffed the air, smelt the rat, and talked about Wales in general. When it came to obfuscation, he was a class act.
The perfection of this art is the ability to say something that sounds very definite and even dramatic, but which really leaves the listener none the wiser. And while in the Commons this is just sport – my Chief Whip used to say to me each week “Thank God it’s only a game” – it is a little depressing to see so much of the referendum campaign based on this art.
This is an asymmetric campaign in that we all have a lot of experience of what it is like to remain in the EU, but have to imagine what it would be like to leave. For voters to make an informed decision, this puts some responsibility on the Leave side to provide some details of that unknown alternative, unless of course the objective is for people to make an uninformed decision.
Last week they did announce what an immigration policy would look like outside of the EU, in a neat example of how to sound specific while being studiously vague: there would be an Australian-style points system!
This sounds wonderfully tough. Those Aussies don’t take any nonsense, people think. Didn’t the Australian prime minister, or at least the last one but three – they’ve had a lot of prime ministers recently – sound very clear about deciding who comes to Australia?
Well, yes, except that Australia accepts far more migrants relative to its population than we do, including a much larger proportion of Syrian refugees. If we copied the Australian policy in detail we would have more immigration, not less. We could, of course, decide to let fewer in and not fill the jobs for which British people are unavailable, or unwilling to do. But saying we would have a points-based system could mean immigration into the UK is higher, or lower, or about the same, as it is now. It sounds good, but it could mean anything.
The immigration policy of the Leave campaign is therefore quite a specific and careful obfuscation. But the economic policy is something else altogether – it is genuine confusion, to such an extent that even something that sounds definite is difficult to come up with. This is something that would not be possible at PMQs: obfuscation by trying not to talk about it all.
The policy is that if anybody mentions it, talk about immigration quickly.
This issue is really at the heart of the decision we are making on June 23, and it is one of the main reasons that someone like me, who has opposed the euro and other deeply- flawed European ideas for decades, will nevertheless vote to Remain.
Playing with the jobs of millions of people is not a game. I could get verbally thumped in parliament, have a glass of wine and feel better about it. But if we leave the European single market to which we export tens of thousands of cars, huge quantities of chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the wings of Airbus planes and a myriad of financial services, without the foggiest idea what comes in its place, the problems caused will become worse every day and they won’t wear off with a stiff drink.
When they have discussed it in the past, some Leave campaigners have suggested that we could somehow stay in the single market but not have freedom of movement of people. This is beyond ridiculous: the rest of the EU is never going to give us a better arrangement than they have themselves. Others have said we could be like Norway and be in the European Economic Area, but Norwegians have to pay into the EU and accept higher immigration than we do while having no say over any of the rules.
Yet others have said we would be like Albania, but that country has an agreement based on ultimately joining the EU and the euro. Or like Canada, it has been said, before realising that the deal between the EU and Canada has already taken seven years to negotiate, still isn’t ratified and wouldn’t cover most of our economy. Well, then, we would just rely on the World Trade Organisation rules, like America and China, was, I think, the last option put forward by Leave campaigners.
Anyone with a job really needs to know what that means. It means a tariff of 10 per cent can be added to every car we make, or 20 per cent on our huge exports of whisky, or 36 per cent on a dairy product. British businesses would face all those extra costs, and yet if they still wanted to export to the rest of Europe they would have to comply with all the EU rules on their products, getting the worst of all worlds – the regulation on top of extra taxes, as well as customs to clear.
This week there have been rumours that a majority of MPs would vote to stay in the single market even if the country decided to leave the EU, provoking some outrage. But if no clear alternative is put to the people in the next two weeks, there will be no clear mandate from the electorate to do anything else. And businesses trying to decide whether to invest at the end of this month would have no indication of what the future might hold.
In the remaining 15 days of this campaign, it suits those asking us to leave the EU to avoid this subject. They have nearly made it to polling day without answering the main question before them and the country. To continue to dodge it would lead to maximum confusion if they were to win. That might be good politics, but it is not credible, responsible, or right.
The Leave campaign can’t keep dodging the biggest question