Best arguments for Leave

Just glancing over last night's posts an interesting question was asked, but not really answered. What are the good, positive reasons for the UK to leave the EU?

It's interesting because leaving aside the fantasies like £350m a week and so on, so many of the reasons people cite are negative.

There's the proxy argument: I live in a left-behind community ignored by liberal elites within both parties who prioritise their own politically-correct nonsense over the very real decline in my local economy over decades. I can vote to leave the EU as a proxy for my rage at this. Cf election of Trump, Donald in States of America, United. I think this is fundamentally misguided: but I also think the perceived contempt for those communities is more real than those liberal elites would like to pretend. I think the chattering classes are yet fully to comprehend, much less come up with solutions, to this problem. I do not think leaving the EU is any kind of help: in fact I think it will make the problem worse.

There's the sovereignty/control argument: but we are fundamentally part of a global economy now, in which no single country has actual control over everything it would like. Even the US and China don't always get it their own way and they're significantly bigger and more powerful than we'll ever be. We might in principle have choices but in practice the shape of the world means that only one choice makes sense anyway, in a whole raft of situations.

There's the immigration argument: but it's pretty well established that we need a level of immigration to survive and thrive, and that immigrants in general pay more in taxes and claim less in benefits than people born here. So given our economy needs immigrants, saying they won't come from the EU any more just means they'll be coming from other places.

There's the rotten state of the EU argument: I've spent decades, not years, working with Brussels institutions and I can absolutely confirm it's undemocratic, shockingly wasteful, there is arrogance around the natural superiority of a particular view of Europeanism, infighting and administrative sclerosis have actually ended up being designed in to the governance of the whole thing, I could go on. And yet despite all of that I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Remainer because I think economically we are simply better off, in "it's not even close" terms, as members of a larger trading bloc. It really does all come down to money and terms of trade in the end. And it seems obvious to me that we'll get worse deals as just us than as part of a larger bloc.

What positive arguments for Leave am I missing? I'd really like civil replies - you remainers/leavers are all stupid/racist/snowflakes/etc doesn't help anyone.

Posted By: Old Man on March 23rd 2019 at 10:42:18

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