Down and not Out

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