EU» money doesn’t come by magic from nowhere, it comes from the constituent countries. I’d far rather that funding for Cornwall came direct from HMG in London without being creamed off by EU administration, bureaucracy, and corruption.
Money spent by EU = Money put into EU – cost of keeping thousands of EU bureaucrats in a lifestyle we would all like to have.
You are right that EU money comes from the tax-payer - mainly. Some comes from tariffs on imports and fees, but the vast majority comes from subscriptions by member states. Plus a lot is spent on Eurocrats, although whether working in Brussels hundreds of miles from home is a lifestyle we would all like to have is open to debate.
The European Parliament budget for 2015 was €1.795 billion, of which 34% (€610.3 million) paid for staff, interpretation, and translation costs. Divide that by the 55,000 staff, and you get a massive fat-cat average salary, still taxable at home, of just under €11,100 pa, about £9,120.00, albeit more since last week in British terms. Someone has been a little sensationalist somewhere. Read any of the newspaper articles about the last pay rise, remove the words "fat", "massive", "inflation busting" etc, plus any mention of Jean-Claude Juncker's pay package - using the president's salary to demonstrate how highly paid the typists are is a standard media ploy - and you are left with a much more down-to-earth truth.
55,000 employees over the 28 member states averages 2,000 per nation member. Smaller states - Malta, the Baltics etc - will use up less resource, but not commensurately as we will see, so let us assume double that number are involved in administering the British interest, say 4,000. Let us assume for just a moment that those 55,000 employees, including "our" 4,000, actually do something other than drink coffee all day in subsidised canteens. What do they, and the EU generally, do that we will now have to do for ourselves?
An obvious place to start is in translation. Every major EU document has to be rendered into all of the 24 official and working languages, plus at times co-official languages such as Welsh and Catalan. As every member of the Parliament can address the house in his language and hear simultaneous translation of debates, someone must be able to translate discussions on pan-European electrical standards from Estonian into Maltese. This is why a simple average of people per nation pro-rata to populace wouldn't work - tiny states with their own language need as many staff on the translation side as states such as Germany and Austria, with a shared language but many times the populace. We might not need such wide skills as we negotiate our new trade agreements, but we will need language skills that are fit for the purpose, at a time when the number of language students at all levels is dwindling steadily. Since 1972 also, the EEC / EU has provided this service for us, albeit no doubt sometimes by our own people, when negotiating with governments outside of the European bloc. We will need all that and more for ourselves. It is no good saying that the foreigners had better come here and speak English if they want us to sell things to them - at best that is rude, and at worst likely to make them buy from somewhere who cares enough to learn the lingo. Wherever I go, I try to learn hello, goodbye, two beers please, thank you, and in some cases I surrender, and any other useful phrases. It makes for a more pleasant stay, even if the rest of the conversation has to be in English. At a national level, that is so much more important.
Speaking of trade agreements, we haven't really done much of that since 1972. The EU as a body negotiated over 50 that we are still party to until we formally leave, plus of course we have unfettered access to the markets of the other 27 member states. Now I think of myself as being reasonably intelligent, although no Donald Trump, and I have in the past interpreted and applied the law relating to Social Security, plus various laws relating to dishonesty and the administration of court proceedings. I once said that a particular regulation introduced by Statutory Instrument was probably beyond the Minister's powers, and would be overturned, leaving administrative chaos until it was and a bill much higher than the intended savings. My voice was too small and lowly, but I was right, and the House of Lords finally agreed with me 18 months later after the government had pressed on despite losing test cases in the High Court and Court of Appeal. But I would never be capable of negotiating or drafting an international bilateral trade agreement, compliant with WTO rules. I might, at a push, get away with adapting an existing one to fit a tiny island nation somewhere in the South Pacific, desperate to offload its surplus coconuts in exchange for flood defence know-how, but as to Canada, the US, Switzerland and the rest - not a chance. As with building nuclear power stations and everything else we haven't done for more than a decade, we have let the skills lapse. A whole generation of the Civil Service has passed from joining to retirement drinks at the Knights Templar, myself included, since we joined the then EEC, and we do not have the skills needed. We may get some as we repatriate our civil servants from the EU, although I wouldn't mind betting there are few who could do the job, being only so many fish in the pond.
Our domestic law is the next problem. Although the EU has been blamed for over-regulation, a lot of the things it has been accused of are actually subject to our own laws. There are many unsung EU regulations that, if properly applied, would have spared us the foot and mouth epidemic, and have probably staved off a number of other foul deeds. On the other side of the coin may be ash die-back, I don't know. But suffice to stay that most of the standards set by the EU for foodstuffs, human and animal, construction materials and methods, including Hinkley C, medicines, and a thousand other things will have to be rewritten into our domestic law.
My own former Department of the Civil Service cut thousands of jobs (sadly, not mine) over a period of years but is now hiring. That does relatively simple stuff. As we don't have the skilled negotiators in-house to strike the deals, which will include negotiating and consulting with business at home as well as governments abroad, nor the necessary legal draughtsmen, nor the people at University studying the subjects required, we may well have to draft people in from industry or employ consultants to do work we aren't currently doing but have suddenly thrust upon our own shoulders. That will not come cheap.
It doesn't end there. I currently hold an EU driving licence, valid for another 10 years until I have to do anything, which entitles me to drive in any member country and, by EU bilateral agreement, in the US and other countries. I have an EU passport valid for another 7 years. What will replace those? Am I going to have to buy an international driving licence and a visa for a holiday in France?
Some government Departments may shrink, although most have been cut back to the bone already. Energy and Climate change won't need people to count new wind panels and solar turbines or send out the subsidy cheques as we cease to be bound by European agreements (agreements, note, we agreed them) on pretending we are doing something about carbon dioxide emissions. But Trade and Industry, the Foreign Office, the Treasury, and others will need thousands of new faces. Lead negotiators, advisers to Ministers, legal draftsmen and the like will be at the top of the Civil Service pay structure, if not beyond it. Close to the Minister, we are talking Sir Humphrey, not Bernard, and certainly not Four Track, Now! (ret'd). They will sit atop a pyramid beginning, top down, with lesser negotiators who will turn the lofty ambitions agreed into the nitty gritty minutiae, then the people who will write it all down in both languages, passing it to and fro to iron out idiosyncrasies, (particularly difficult when dealing with the US) the lawyers who will intensely scrutinise every word with an intense scrute, right down to the guys who arrange diaries, meetings, travel, hotels etc, which is no mean feat in itself. On top of all that, we will need to maintain a trade presence within the EU, if and when we can negotiate an agreement with our current biggest trading partner.
We may get 4,000 back and have to hire 20,000, and they won't be on 9 grand a year. We will be able to pay for part of them from the subscription we won't have to pay (a lot less than the £350 million gross per week that was bandied about) and by not replacing the EU spending on Wales and Cornwall.
All of which makes me wonder. We could end up with a general election because of all this, which is not an absurd idea. I understand why the Prime Minister has not sought to call an election - he would need a big majority of
MPs▸ to agree to it under the Fixed Term Parliament Act 2011, and this is a party issue, not a government issue. The referendum was intended to unite the Conservative Party, even if it has ended up splitting not only that but the Labour Party. Given that 75% of MPs were against leaving, as are probably a few leading Brexiteers, could we end up with a Prime Minister who decides that it is an issue on which he or she should seek a clearer mandate than the referendum gave by going to the country on the actual process and legislation that would be needed to separate from the EU? We could end up with a government elected on a manifesto of effectively delaying departure for 10 years, to give most of the "leave" voters time to die, then holding a second referendum where as independent a body as you can find would analyse every single argument put out by both sides and publish the truth.
As to ChrisB's point:
"Convincing enough. If we ignore this one, there won't be any point in any more, if we can just choose to ignore afterwards"
- spot on. The point in this one was not to decide if we should leave the EU or not, but whether enough Tory voters could be persuaded not to vote UKIP. It was daft setting a simple majority as the benchmark on such a major constitutional issue, although had it been a 60% majority needed and the Out camp had manage 59.999%, peace and harmony would not have been restored. The Prime Minister would never have promised the referendum if he had not been 100% certain of winning.
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