Selfishness isn't enough

Tweet One of the more depressing aspects of what passes for debate in Wales about membership or otherwise of the EU is that it concentrates entirely on how much money and how many jobs Wales does or does not get as a result of membership.  It’s a very narrow and selfish way of looking at membership of any organisation.  Worse, it in some ways concedes the argument to the antis.

Whilst it’s true that many jobs in Wales ‘depend’ on the EU, that is saying little more than that extant employment patterns ‘depend’ on the status quo.  But that would be true for any ‘status quo’; and if the status quo changed, so would the employment patterns.  I seem to have a vague recollection of claims being made prior to entry into the then EEC that UK jobs ‘depended’ on trade with the rest of the world and would be damaged by membership.  It’s equally valid as an argument.

When it comes to Regional Aid, the antis are entirely correct when they say that, if the UK wasn’t making large payments to the EU, then it would be able to spend even more on regional policy within the UK.  Whether any UK government would actually do so or not is another question entirely, and the history of UK regional policy doesn’t give me much faith that they would.  But an argument in favour of membership of the EU based primarily on scepticism about whether any UK government would be as generous to Wales doesn’t seem to me to be a particularly well-based one.

And what if, by some amazing miracle, the situation in Wales were to be transformed, such that Wales became a net contributor to EU funds?  If the only argument in favour was that we get more out than we put in, then the logic flows the other way – which is pretty much the position of UKIP and Tory sceptics at a UK level: 'it costs us more than we get back'.  The point is that membership of any club requires a subscription, and if one of the aims of the club is an element of redistribution, then some members will contribute more than they get back, whilst others contribute less.  Every winner has to be matched by a willing loser somewhere else.  There has to be a better reason for joining any club than an expectation of benefiting at the expense of others. Universal selfishness leads, ultimately, to poverty for the majority.

And that gets us to the real economic debate about the EU, which is hidden behind claims about how much regional aid we get or how many jobs depend on membership.  The EU is a club which aims to enmesh and equalise the economies of Europe, through economic co-operation.  Redistribution is a key element of that (which is the underlying reason why the EU is more dependable than the UK in this context), but co-operation and redistributive policies are close to anathema for the Tories and UKIP; they want only a system of competition where the strong get stronger and the weak go to the wall.

That argument about co-operation, which is also about keeping the peace on a continent which was torn apart by war for centuries previously, is one which supporters of the EU seem unable or unwilling to put; but by failing to put it, they are in danger of conceding one of the basic points of the antis, which is that the only thing that matters is narrow economic self-interest.  There’s a lot of things that I don’t like about the way that the EU has evolved, and much that I’d like to change (although that’s a great deal wider than a self-interested renegotiation of the terms of membership which is all the Tories seem to be interested in); but given the choice of European co-operation or competition, I choose the former.  However, it’s a choice which isn’t being widely articulated.