EURef Talking Points: “The best 36p you’ll ever spend”

EURef Talking Points is a new series of articles about words that work in everyday conversation,public debates or in writing when you make the case to remain in Europe.

Having spoken at hundreds of meetings on Europe, my personal view is that to make a winning case for IN you need to make 3 points and rebut 2.

The 3 points are Peace, Prosperity, and [advantages for] People. The 2 to rebut are sovereignty and cost, which are the two Leave arguments that have traction with many people but can both be answered.

In this article, I shall deal with rebutting the cost point.

Leave say that being in Europe costs us £50m a day or £350m per week. It is a figure that they have quoted for a long time and it is rhetorically powerful. It hits people in the chest.

They say that £350m is "enough to build a new hospital every week" while overlooking that the real big cost of a hospital is staffing and running it. These are people who have no thought hard about the realities of public services. They also overlook the fact that they simultaneously pledge all the EU funds spent in the UK will be matched by the UK government (Labour or Tory) if we leave - a tall claim that few voters believe.

The key point is that £50m a day is utterly bogus.

The website fullfact puts the UK's net contribution at £8.5bn (down from a previous estimate of £12bn). The website infacts puts it at only £6.3bn.

To get a sense of scale, I sometime put it this way:

The UK government spends 42% of GDP. That means for every £10 created in the economy, £4.20 is spent by the UK government. Do you know how much of that is spent by the European Union? [I sometimes ask the audience to have a guess] It's 10p. Just 10p. Just 1% of GDP. In fact the average English County Council spends 7 or 8 times per head that the EU does. If you worry about Big Government, Brussels is not where you find it.

It's good to put it in a way that boils the figure down to daily living and recalls the Peace, Prosperity, People points.

Let's err on the side of caution and for present purposes take fullfact's £8.5bn. Divide that by 65m people. Divide that by 365 days in a normal year. You get 36p per person per day.

I don't know about you, but 36p wouldn't change my life.

But if being in Europe gives one of my neighbours a job, that is my 36p well spent. If being IN brings one more business to this town, that is my 36p well spent. If the EU can shorten a conflict anywhere in the world by one day that is my 36p well spent.

[Some of you know that I have previously used 50p, based on fullfact's now revised £12bn figure.]

Remember: when talking about Europe keep it plain, direct and explain how it affects people's lives.

Let's get our message across.

* Antony Hook was #2 on the South East European list in 2014, is the English Party's representative on the Federal Executive and produces this sites EU Referendum Roundup.

Comments

John Marriott - Lincoln, Sleaford and North Hykeham

The out campaign's three main counters to the remain campaign appear to be, in no particular order:

1. It's NATO that has kept the peace in Europe, not the EU.
2. The UK is the world's fifth biggest economy. They can't ignore us.
3. We are effectively governed by Brussels.

The first is hard to deny. What I would say is, look at the Baltic States, which are now in NATO, thanks to some extent because they are part of the EU.

The second depends on where that 'bigness' came from. It certainly wasn't from making things; but probably from Financial Services, which could quite easily move elsewhere following a Brexit.

The third is a red herring. Most of our laws are still made here and not over the Channel.

One final point. I just wish the media would get away from tittle tattle like whether the Queen is for Brexit or whether Boris' office tried to gag its staff and look at the real issues. For goodness sake, treat the British people as intelligent sentient beings for once. Otherwise, we are in for a tedious four months. Both sides need to address these issues if they are going to win over the undecideds.