Some thoughts on the EU Referendum.
I expect Remain will win – and it won’t be a disaster,
just more of the same. But that is precisely the reason why I’ll probably feel a
little disappointed on Friday. At one level a Remain vote will suit me – after
all I’m relatively comfortable and the current arrangements, if not exactly
working in my favour, don’t materially disadvantage me. I’m one of the many,
perhaps the majority, who do ok being part of the EU – but without being
sanctimonious about it I increasingly worry I’m living in a country where it’s not working for many others, and where we risk trading principles for pragmatism.
Winners &
Losers
It’s no surprise to me that ‘the Establishment’ (i.e. the
main power holding groups) such as the big political parties, the Bank of
England, the IMF, Corporations etc are strongly campaigning for the status quo
– after all the status quo serves them pretty well. They are by and large the
well-educated, the well-connected and the well-off. Many of them draw their
incomes and pensions from the very institutions and structures that a Brexit directly
threatens.
If you have professional ability or specialised skills
then the demand (and accompanying wages) for your services will generally be
high. However, if you are unskilled or semi-skilled in the UK – and thus are
completely interchangeable with any number of other people who are happy to work
for less money than you (but for whom those lower wages nonetheless represent a
considerable uplift from their previous incomes), then uncontrolled immigration
is likely to impoverish you. Of course that suits the already well-off – their
ironing bill gets cheaper, and shareholders can extract greater profits by
cutting staff costs.
I do worry that those who take the high moral ground in
this particular area tend to do so from a position of privilege and are often among the least affected. Indeed there is often an inverse racism that means
when one of the most deprived, left behind and under-achieving ethnic groups in
the country (i.e. the white working class) raise these issues, they are dismissed
as chavs and bigots. Here again the powerful insist on structures that uphold their interests at the expense of the weak - e.g. Germany over Greece (and the Greeks can vote away in Athens 'until the cows come home' but can't actually change anything).
This of course is not a uniquely EU problem, it is the
problem of unrestrained neo-capitalism in which more and more wealth is
concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. A system that is horribly inefficient as
wealth is hoarded (no matter how rich you are you can only drive one car at a
time or eat one meal at a time) rather than shared, leading ultimately to
dwindling economic growth and a growing sense of inequality and social
resentment. It is nevertheless a problem compounded when governments become
less and less accountable and thus those structures become less and less challengeable.
At all events just as my main concern in the 2014 Scottish
Referendum wasn’t the prediction that I’d be better-off in oil rich Scotland (ahem),
my main concern in the EU Referendum is not the prediction that by 2030 I will
be £4300pa worse off than I could have been (note, Osbourne’s figure is not
£4.3k worse off than I am now but than my potential earnings 15 years hence). Rather
there are bigger issues of principle at stake.
The worst form of Government
It seems to me that the EU is a structure so large and
complex – that it is almost impossible for it to be meaningfully held to account by
its citizens. Country can be played off against country and groups of powerful countries
can over-rule the weaker ones – so the individual voter becomes less and less
relevant. [It’s incidentally why I personally like the ‘First Past the Post’
electoral system in the UK, in most forms of PR you only get to shuffle the
cards – in FPtP you get the chance to ditch a dud hand and deal yourself a
completely fresh one every so often.]
Christians have often pointed out in recent years that
many of our society’s most cherished values (e.g. human rights) actually have
their basis in Christian theology. One such value is of course Democracy –
which as Churchill put it is the worst form of human government apart from all
the others that have been tried from time to time. Democracy recognises that in
a Fallen World concentrations of power in one person or oligarchies are
likely to be a recipe for abuse. It really is no surprise that the Western
demand for accountability in government arose as a fruit of the Reformation –
with its rejection of unaccountable hierarchies in the church (along with its recognition
of the ‘priesthood of all believers’).
The EU, it seems to me, is a project (whatever its good intentions) that is stealthily
reversing that process across Europe.
Pax Europa
Some of the strongest arguments for Remain put forwards by
Christians are around the freedom of movement the EU allows. The case here is
that EU allows Christians to freely move and work throughout Europe and it is
thus a great facilitator of mission, church planting etc. Indeed parallels have
been made with the Roman Empire and the spread of the Gospel in the first
century. These observations are undoubtedly true – I can travel to Bratislava or
Madrid and set up a church there without any extraneous paperwork or permissions.
So at this point in time the EU provides a bureaucratically friendly
environment for such activity and that can only be a great blessing and help. But of course, the imposition of paperwork to travel and work while cumbersome is not
the same as stopping those activities, after all plenty of US citizens are involved
in Mission activities in Europe.
However, staying in the EU for those reasons relies on
the continuation of its benign attitude to such activities and religion in
general. It is not certain that this will be the case – the fears about
militant Islam (heightened by large scale immigration) are already creating
demands for the imposition of restrictions on the activities of religious
groups. Evangelical Christians are likely to be a particular target (having a
range of non-PC views) and, in order to avoid accusations of Islamophobia, could
readily be ‘stamped on’ as a way of showing the impartiality of such policies.
Now that might happen at national level anyway but the issue comes back to
there being some direct democratic accountability in that process. An accountability
that the UK with its strong representative Parliamentary democracy and
relatively stronger church is more likely to benefit from if not subject to EU
over-rule.
In other words there is a danger of voting Remain for
short-term administrative convenience but inadvertently locking ourselves into
a structure that if the wind changes will present a much greater obstacle and
challenge to those same religious freedoms.
Fate & Future
I wrote in a blog before the Scottish Referendum that
whatever the result it would ultimately be no more than a footnote in the
history of a dying world. Well a Brexit might merit a paragraph but even that
will just be a bit of context for the big story – the story of God’s work in
the world throughout the centuries and millennia. The story that transcends all
empires (Babylon, Rome, Holy Roman, Ottoman, British, Soviet), even the EU. So Remain
or Leave on Friday the church’s fate and future will be where it has always
been – in the hands of God and in the eternal Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
This is very much a personal blog post rather than even a 'ministry one'. You can read some excellent blogs giving counter-points to all this from my colleague John Stevens
