Brexit won’t shield Britain from the horror of a disintegrating EU

Yannis Varoufakis in The Guardian


Leave won because too many British voters identified the EU with authoritarianism, irrationality and contempt for parliamentary democracy while too few believed those of us who claimed that another EU was possible.

I campaigned for a radical remain vote reflecting the values of our pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). I visited towns in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, seeking to convince progressives that dissolving the EU was not the solution. I argued that its disintegration would unleash deflationary forces of the type that predictably tighten the screws of austerity everywhere and end up favouring the establishment and its xenophobic sidekicks. Alongside John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Owen Jones, Paul Mason and others, I argued for a strategy of remaining in but against Europe’s established order and institutions. 

Against us was an alliance of David Cameron (whose Brussels’ fudge reminded Britons of what they despise about the EU), the Treasury (and its ludicrous pseudo-econometric scare-mongering), the City (whose insufferable self-absorbed arrogance put millions of voters off the EU), Brussels (busily applying its latest treatment of fiscal waterboarding to the European periphery), Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble (whose threats against British voters galvanised anti-German sentiment), France’s pitiable socialist government, Hillary Clinton and her merry Atlanticists (portraying the EU as part of another dangerous “coalition of the willing") and the Greek government (whose permanent surrender to punitive EU austerity made it so hard to convince the British working class that their rights were protected by Brussels).
The repercussions of the vote will be dire, albeit not the ones Cameron and Brussels had warned of. The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement. Schäuble and Brussels will huff and puff but they will, inevitably, seek such a settlement with London. The Tories will hang together, as they always do, guided by their powerful instinct of class interest. However, despite the relative tranquillity that will follow on from the current shock, insidious forces will be activated under the surface with a terrible capacity for inflicting damage on Europe and on Britain.

Italy, Finland, Spain, France, and certainly Greece, are unsustainable under the present arrangements. The architecture of the euro is a guarantee of stagnation and is deepening the debt-deflationary spiral that strengthens the xenophobic right. Populists in Italy and Finland, possibly in France, will demand referendums or other ways to disengage.

‘The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

The only man with a plan is Germany’s finance minister. Schäuble recognises in the post-Brexit fear his great opportunity to implement a permanent austerity union. Under his plan, eurozone states will be offered some carrots and a huge stick. The carrots will come in the form of a small eurozone budget to cover, in some part, unemployment benefits and bank deposit insurance. The stick will be a veto over national budgets.

If I am right, and Brexit leads to the construction of a permanent austerian iron cage for the remaining EU member states, there are two possible outcomes: One is that the cage will hold, in which case the institutionalised austerity will export deflation to Britain but also to China (whose further destabilisation will have secondary negative effects on Britain and the EU).

Another possibility is that the cage will be breached (by Italy or Finland leaving, for instance), the result being Germany’s own departure from the collapsing eurozone. But this will turn the new Deutschmark zone, which will probably end at the Ukrainian border, into a huge engine of deflation (as the new currency goes through the roof and German factories lose international markets). Britain and China had better brace themselves for an even greater deflation shock wave under this scenario.

The horror of these developments, from which Britain cannot be shielded by Brexit, is the main reason why I, and other members of DiEM25, tried to save the EU from the establishment that is driving Europeanism into the ground. I very much doubt that, despite their panic in Brexit’s aftermath, EU leaders will learn their lesson. They will continue to throttle voices calling for the EU’s democratisation and they will continue to rule through fear. Is it any wonder that many progressive Britons turned their back on this EU?

EU referendum full results – find out how your area voted



While I remain convinced that leave was the wrong choice, I welcome the British people’s determination to tackle the diminution of democratic sovereignty caused by the democratic deficit in the EU. And I refuse to be downcast, even though I count myself on the losing side of the referendum.

As of today, British and European democrats must seize on this vote to confront the establishment in London and Brussels more powerfully than before. The EU’s disintegration is now running at full speed. Building bridges across Europe, bringing democrats together across borders and political parties, is what Europe needs more than ever to avoid a slide into a xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss.

Likely Scenarios after the Brexit vote?

By Girish Menon

Now that a majority of Britons have voted to leave the EU, Nigel Farage has denied his claim to fund the NHS, David Cameron has resigned and the markets have fallen; so what happens next?

Scenario 1: The Status Quo

The Conservative party will elect a leader who will try to develop a national consensus on the EU. . S/he will then embark on negotiations with the EU and this time the spooked EU leaders will concede enough to make a difference. S/he will conduct another referendum in 1-2 years time and the UK will continue to be a part of the EU.

Scenario 2: The Nightmare

True Eurosceptics with strong neoliberal leanings will come to power. They will fan xenophobic forces to mask the budget cuts to public services. They will negotiate trade deals from a weak position, dilute workers' rights and help their rich funders convert England into another Russia.

Scenario 3: The Ideal

There will be intense and honest soul searching across the EU. A realisation will dawn that inequality is the major cause for the rise of fissiparous forces. The EU will become a transparent organisation with accountability. It will ensure a Universal and Unconditional Basic Income, Free Education, Free Health and subsidised Housing for all its citizens.

There could be many more scenarios which will be variations on the above themes. I hope the EU will choose scenario 3 but as a betting man I think it will choose scenario 1. The case for scenario 1 becomes stronger as the government is in no hurry to invoke Clause 50 which is the next step to start the Brexit negotiation and Boris Johnson appears subdued after the victory.

Cameron has lost his job – his Teflon cockiness has finally worn off

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

As the pound plunges and markets slide, remember that this referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. He has lost his gamble – and the country will pay the price

Friday 24 June 2016



Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.

Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.

All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the “small state”. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?

You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the prime minister. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.

Not all of this was his creation; much of it is his political inheritance. For the past 40 years, prime minister after prime minister has embraced a regime that has allowed a massive wealth gap to open up between those at the top and the rest of us, that has fattened up central London even while starving other regions of the country – and that has offered the rest of the country elected police chiefs and city mayors instead of an actual voice.

This morning’s results reflect those decades of calculated callousness and the distrust of the political elites they have produced. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: all pursued an economic inequality – which in turn bred a political and regional polarisation that marked out this referendum campaign. No wonder inner London voted so strongly for the status quo – it’s one of the few places that is doing well out of it. Likewise, it’s no wonder south Wales mutinied, when all the status quo has offered people there for the past four decades is broken promises and rolling immiseration. The shame of it is that all these justified resentments were mobilised by the racists and the hard-rightists. You know things are upside down when the “big merchant banks” are attacked by a former City trader called Nigel Farage.

As prime minister, Cameron had the chance to tackle this toxic mix of inequality and distrust – instead, he made it worse. Leading the remain campaign, he had the chance to address those who had been cut out of the national settlement – instead, he and George Osborne waved around a threat to house prices, even though housing is now this country’s biggest divide between the haves and the have-nots.

In tacit acceptance of his own lack of popular legitimacy, the prime minister invoked the authority of others: the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; the civil servants at the Treasury. Nothing showed up this politician’s own smallness as the technocrats he sheltered behind.

Now he has lost his big gamble and he has lost his job – but it will be the rest of the country that pays the price. He was never that good, he was just cocky. It was never luck, it was just Teflon. And now it’s worn off.

A basic income could be the best way to tackle inequality

Robert Skidelsky in The Guardian

Britain isn’t the only European country to hold a referendum this month. On 5 June, Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected, by 77% to 23%, the proposition that every citizen should be guaranteed an unconditional basic income (UBI). But that lopsided outcome doesn’t mean the issue is going away anytime soon.

The idea of a UBI has made recurrent appearances in history – starting with Thomas Paine in the 18th century. This time, though, it is likely to have greater staying power, as the prospect of sufficient income from jobs grows bleaker for the poor and less educated. Experiments with unconditional cash transfers have been taking place in poor as well as wealthy countries.

Swiss voters reject proposal to give basic income to every adult and child



UBI is a somewhat uneasy mix of two objectives: poverty relief and the rejection of work as the defining purpose of life. The first is political and practical; the second is philosophical or ethical.

The main argument for UBI as poverty relief is, as it has always been, the inability of available paid work to guarantee a secure and decent existence for all. In the industrial age, factory work became the only source of income for most people – a source that was interrupted by bouts of unemployment as the industrial machine periodically seized up. The labour movement responded by demanding “work or maintenance”. Acceptance of maintenance in lieu of work was reflected in the creation of a system of social security, “welfare capitalism”.

The aim of welfare capitalism was explicitly to provide people an income – typically through pooled compulsory insurance – during enforced interruptions of work. In no sense was income maintenance seen as an alternative to work. As the idea of interruption from work was extended to include the disabled and women bringing up children, so entitlements to income maintenance increased beyond the capacity of social insurance, with benefits paid to eligible individuals from general taxation.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher unwittingly extended the scope of welfare further, as they dismantled institutions and legislation designed to protect wages and jobs in their respective countries. With both left to the market, “in work” benefits, or tax credits, were introduced to enable employed workers to earn a “living wage”. At the same time, conservative governments, alarmed at the growing cost of social security, started to cut back on welfare entitlements.

In this newly precarious environment of work and welfare, UBI is seen as guaranteeing the basic income previously promised by work and welfare, but no longer reliably secured by either. (A leading advocate, Guy Standing at Soas, University of London, has written a book called The Precariat.) An additional argument, always resonant in this tradition, but particularly so today in poorer countries, is UBI’s emancipatory potential for women.

The ethical case for UBI is different. Its source is the idea, found both in the Bible and in classical economics, that work is a curse (or, as economists put it, a “cost”), undertaken only for the sake of making a living. As technological innovation causes per capita income to rise, people will need to work less to satisfy their needs.

Both John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes looked forward to a horizon of growing leisure: the reorientation of life away from the merely useful toward the beautiful and the true. UBI provides a practical path to navigate this transition.

Most of the hostility to UBI has come when it stated in this second form. A poster during the Swiss referendum campaign asked: “What would you do if your income were taken care of?” The objection of most UBI opponents is that a majority of people would respond: “Nothing at all.”

But to argue that an income independent of the job market is bound to be demoralising is as morally obtuse as it is historically inaccurate. If it were true, we would want to abolish all inherited income. The 19th-century European bourgeoisie were largely a rentier class, and few questioned their work effort. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman who wanted to write fiction “must have money and a room of her own”.

The explosion of robotics has given the demand for UBI renewed currency. Credible estimates suggest that it will be technically possible to automate between a quarter and a third of all current jobs in the western world within 20 years. At the very least, this will accelerate the trend toward the precariousness of jobs and income. At worst, it will make a sizeable share of the population redundant. A standard objection to UBI as a way to replace earnings from vanishing jobs is that it is unaffordable. This partly depends on what parameters are set: the UBI’s level; which benefits (if any) it replaces; whether only citizens or all residents are eligible; and so on.

But this is not the main point. The overwhelming evidence is that the lion’s share of productivity gains in the last 30 years has gone to the very wealthy. And that’s not all: 40% of the gains of quantitative easing in the UK have gone to the wealthiest 5% of households, not because they were more productive, but because the Bank of England directed its cash toward them. Even a partial reversal of this long regressive trend for wealth and income would fund a modest initial basic income.

Beyond this, a UBI scheme can be designed to grow in line with the wealth of the economy. Automation is bound to increase profits, because machines that make human labour redundant require no wages and only minimal investment in maintenance.

Unless we change our system of income generation, there will be no way to check the concentration of wealth in the hands of the rich and exceptionally entrepreneurial. A UBI that grows in line with capital productivity would ensure that the benefits of automation go to the many, not just to the few.

10 Tips on Writing from David Ogilvy

“Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints.”

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification,attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David Ogilvy’s 20 unconventional rules for getting clients

Regard the hunt for new clients as a sport.Once you land new business, that’s when it’s time to become dead serious — until then — save yourself from dying of ulcers over lost clients. Approach the search for new clients with “light-hearted gusto”. Play to win but enjoy the fun.

Never work for a client so big you can’t afford to lose them.
Why? The fear of losing them, alone, will wreck your life. You will be unable to give candid advice, and “slowly become a lackey”. David Ogilvy once turned down Ford, saying: “Your account would represent one-half of our total billing. This would make it difficult for us to sustain our independence in council.” Landing your ideal client immediately may not be as great for your business as you think.

Take immense pain in selecting your clients.On average, Ogilvy and Mather would turn down about 60 clients every year. You too should be choosing clients before they choose you. The truth is first-class agencies aren’t in high supply. You have the power to select who you work with, so do it carefully.

Only add 1 new client every 2 years.You want to keep the clients you have. For life. That should be your #1 goal. And if you’re working with great clients and keeping them, then you’ll need only a few clients. David Ogilvy also discovered other reasons adding too many new clients hurt his business. Growing too fast led to hiring too fast. This led to not having well-trained staff. That led to diverting too much of his agencies best brain power away from servicing old clients and failing at keeping clients for life. Plus starting new clients off is often the most difficult work; because you’re building everything from scratch. So screw finding new clients, keep old ones.

Only seek clients with a product or service you are proud of. Unlike lawyers and doctors, professionals in the creative field can’t detach themselves from their work. If you privately despise your client’s product or service, you will fail. You need to have a personal fondness for the client you service before you can help them succeed.

Only accept a client if you can improve their existing work. Ogilvy was famous for turning down the New York Times because he“didn’t think (he) could produce better advertisements than the brilliant ones they had been running.” Don’t think you can create better work than what’s already there? Don’t take on the client.

Don’t take on clients whose business is dying. 
This can be tough when you need work, but if a client approaches you who you know won’t be able to stay in business, regardless of if they hire you, don’t take them on. It doesn’t matter how great your work is, nothing you do will make up for their deficiencies. You may be hungry for work, but the success of your clients, ultimately defines you. Your profit margin is too slim to survive a prospective client’s bankruptcy.

Only work for clients who want you to make a profit. Just because you produce results for a client doesn’t mean you will automatically see those profits come your way. Every client service firm treads a thin line between over-servicing clients and going broke, or under-servicing them and getting fired. Make sure your client’s understand that you too are making money — by helping them make money. Make sure they understand you are planning to take a percentage of their profit (however small). Don’t shy away from it and don’t pretend otherwise.

Don’t publicly pursue clients.
If a client announced they were considering hiring Ogilvy, he would withdraw his company from the race. His reason? “I like to succeed in public, fail in secret.”

Avoid contests in which more than four other agencies are involved.It’s way too easy to waste your time in meetings. Especially when you’re on the shopping list of every prospective client. You have other fish to fry — the fish of your current clients. Ideally you wanted to be courted by clients who have no other prospects in mind.

Getting new clients is a solo performance. The person who decides to hire you is almost always the top decision maker at the company. David believed, “Chairmen should be harangued by chairmen.” Additionally, he felt having too many people on sales calls caused confusion. That’s why singularity is an important ingredient in winning accounts.

Remain flexible when selling clients.It’s OK to rehearse for sales calls but David hated speaking from prepared text. A slide deck or written text locks you into a position which may become irrelevant during the meeting.

Tell prospects about your weaknesses.
David picked this up from antique dealers. He realized that when a dealer drew your attention to a flaw in the furniture, he almost always gained your trust. If you do this too — before the client notices your flaws on their own, you will also gain their trust. It will make you more credible when you boast about your strong points.

Don’t get bogged down in case-studies or research numbers.
These things put prospects to sleep. “No manufacturer ever hired an agency because it increased market-share for somebody else.” Clients care about themselves, talk about them.

Explicitly tell clients why they should hire you.The day after a new business a new client meeting, David would send the client a 3-page letter on why they should pick him. Today you can send an equally brief email to help clients make the right decision.

Don’t pay an outside source a commission for new business.David Ogilvy believed the type of clients this brought in weren’t worth the trouble. Today commission-based lead finders include recruiters, head-hunters, and even other freelancers.

Beware of clients who have no budget but a great idea. Even though they might become huge if everything goes well, it’s more likely that things won’t go well. Servicing these companies will be expensive for you and very few of them will ever make it worth your while.

Don’t underestimate personality. The difference between client service firms is not as big as we like to believe. Most can show they produced results that increased sales for some of their clients. Very often the difference in new business depends on the personality of the head of the agency. Know you will win and lose some clients because of your personality.

Fire clients at least 5 times more often than you get fired. 
Always do it for the same reason: if their behavior erodes the morale of the people working on their account. Do not allow this from any client.

Use what you specialize in to find new clients. David Ogilvy created ads selling his ad agency. You should dog-food your own service too. So how does your work help clients? Can it help you in the same way? For example, do you help them find customers by creating content? Create content for your agency. Do you do graphic design? Create infographics for potential clients. The trick will be to not just make thing that you like or impress people in your industry, but to make things that impress potential clients.

40 facts about Britain and the EU

Oliver Wright in The Independent

We have claim, counter claim; claims of lies, claims of lying about lies; claims of fact, claims of using misleading facts.

It would be fair to say Britain's political class has not exactly done many favours for themselves during the nasty, brutish and long referendum campaign.

And now it our turn to try and work out the truth as we enter the polling station. To help we have tried - as impartially as possible - to lay out 40 ‘facts’ about Britain's relationship with Europe. Some will, of course, dispute them and even facts can themselves sometimes be subjective. But this is our best attempt. Over to you...

The Economy

1 Britain’s net financial contribution to the EU is £9.8 billion – or £188 million a week – which is the amount we pay in after the rebate is deducted along with the money we get back in grants. It is not £350 million a week that the Leave campaign claims it is.

2 Every family would not necessarily be £4,300 worse off if we left the EU. This figure was based on a Treasury projection suggesting that the economy would be 6.2 per cent smaller than it would have been if we stayed in the EU - this figure was then divided by the number of households in the UK.

But, as the fact check organisation FullFact points out, changes to the economy do not affect everyone in the same way. Some regions may gain or will lose more than others, and poorer households are unlikely to be affected in the same way as richer ones.

3 Most economic experts believe that in the short term the British economy will shrink if we vote to leave. Business investment is likely to be lower, house prices could fall as people put off moving while sterling is almost certain to fall – at least initially. But this is more due to uncertainty than any underlying problems with the UK economy as a result of Brexit.

4 A fall in Sterling is not necessarily a bad thing. It would make our exports cheaper – and if the EU imposed trade tariffs on British goods those could be partly off set by having a weaker currency. However, it would mean imported goods become more expensive – pushing up inflation.

5 Leaving the EU would mean the reintroduction of duty free allowances when travelling to Europe. But there would also be restrictions on how much you could bring back. The days of the booze cruise to France would be over.

6 The UK has provided a total of €6.5bn (£5bn) via the EU for two bailouts: €3bn for Ireland in November 2010 and €3.5bn for Portugal in May 2011. With both Ireland and Portugal now out of their bailout programmes, the UK has got this money back. The UK has not made a contribution via the EU for any other eurozone bailouts.

7 The UK will not pay for future eurozone bailouts. This has been agreed by EU leaders. In addition, the UK-EU deal from February, which will be implemented if the UK votes to stay in the EU, reinforces this and states that the UK would be reimbursed if the general EU budget is used for the cost of the eurozone crisis.

Sovereignty

8 Since 1999 the British Government has voted against laws passed in Brussels 56 times – which have been imposed upon us. But that represents two per cent of the total EU votes during that time and we’ve been on the winning side 2,466 times.

9 There is no way of accurately measuring how many UK laws originate from or are influenced by Brussels. The leave side claims up to 70 per cent of laws have some European element contained within them – while remain says it is less than 20 per cent. Both figures can be justified depending on how you count them. But those at the higher end count EU rules that aren’t really laws in any meaningful sense.

10 We would still be a member of the European Court of Human Rights if we pulled out of the EU. The ECHR has nothing to do with the EU and contains a number of non-EU countries. It’s rulings would still be binding on the UK.

11 We would no longer be subject to rulings by the European Court of Justice. This court rules on whether member states have broken EU treaties and if we pulled out we would no longer have to abide by its judgments.

12 The EU has banned powerful hoovers. Vacuums with an input power of more than 1600w were banned from sale in 2014.

13 The EU did not ban bendy bananas. They did however set standards for imported fruit. One of the standards said the fruit should be “free from malformation or abnormal curvature of the fingers”, although only premium bananas sold as “Extra” class had to be perfect. Class I and II bananas could have some defects in shape.

Immigration

14 EU nationals who are currently living and working in Britain will be allowed to stay in the country even if we vote to leave. The Leave campaign have made clear that they will not deport anyone currently in the country and restrictions will only be for new immigrants. It is unclear when these might come into force.

15 Around three million people living in the UK in 2014 were citizens of another EU country. That’s about 5 per cent of the UK population. Figures for 2015 suggest that 1.2 million people born in the UK live in other EU countries.

16 In 2015, an estimated 270,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK, and 85,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 185,000. That is the highest recorded level.

17 Britain still lets in more non-EU citizens every year – where there are immigration restrictions – than EU citizens. Last year 277,000 non-EU citizens came to live in Britain.

18 EU nationals of working age are more likely to be in work than UK nationals and non-EU citizens. About 78 per cent of working age EU citizens in the UK are in work, compared to around 74 per cent of UK nationals and 62 per cent of people from outside the EU.

19 Most research suggests that immigration does have a small effect on wages – benefitting medium and higher-waged workers and reducing pay for lower-waged workers.

20 Research by the Bank of England found that for lower-paid occupations, a 10 per cent rise in the ratio of immigrant workers to UK born workers was associated with a near 2 per cent reduction in pay. However it also found that immigration had no significant effect on overall average wages.

21 About five per cent of all staff working in the NHS have EU nationalities other than British. Of these 10 per cent of doctors and four per cent of nurses are EU citizens – the overall figure is made by including ancillary workers as well.

Trade

22 Currently the EU has trade deals with 52 countries. If the UK left the EU and wanted to retain preferential access to the markets of these countries, it would have to renegotiate trade deals with them.

23 Norway, which has access to the European Single Market, paid around £115 per head of population for that access in 2014. In the same year as a full member of the EU the UK paid in around £220 per head. It has to accept the free movement EU workers.

24 Canada has preferential access to the EU single market under the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement or Ceta. Leave campaigners say this could provide a model for the UK. But EU rules of origin require non-EU states to comply with detailed customs checks, to prevent imports entering the EU through a “back door”.So Canadian exporters have to prove that their goods are entirely “made in Canada”, which imposes extra costs.

Services make up about 80 per cent of the UK economy, yet they are only partially covered by Ceta. Importantly a Ceta-type deal would not give UK financial services the EU market access that they have now. It would be hard for London-based banks to get “passporting” rights for their services in the EU.

25 It is not strictly true to say, as the Leave campaign do, that since 1992, 27 other (non EU) countries have been more successful at exporting goods to the single market than the UK has. This figure merely looks at growth in exports – rather than the total amount. For example Vietnam is top of the list with a 544 per cent increase in exports – but it start at a low base of only £50 million a month.

26 TTIP would not allow American companies the right to "buy up" the NHS. This is a myth.

27 TTIP could make it harder for the UK Government to introduce such measures as a sugar tax or and alcohol levy. American companies selling into the EU could argue that they were being discriminated against and take there case to legally binding arbitration.

Free movement

28 Under the Dublin Regulation migrants who arrive in the EU have to claim asylum in the first country they enter. If they subsequently move countries they can be deported to the first country they arrived in. The UK deports around 1000 migrants a year using this process which would end if the UK pulled out of the EU.

29 If Britain pulled out of the EU there would still be free movement of people between Britain and Ireland as this was agreed in the 1923 Common Travel Area agreement – long before the EU was ever created.

30 The UK is not part of the Schengen Agreement – so anyone entering the country has to show a passport. But EU nationals cannot be turned away unless they pose a risk “on grounds of public policy, public security or public health”. The rules state that “criminal convictions shall not in themselves constitute grounds for taking such measures”.

31 Government statistics show that since 2010 the total number of EU passengers initially refused entry to the UK has been rising; in 2015 a total of 2,165 EU passengers were not allowed in. That is about 1 in 20,000 EU nationals coming to the UK.

New EU members

32 Turkey could not join the EU without the explicit permission of a British Prime Minister. All EU countries have an absolute veto on new members joining. However Britain’s official foreign policy at present is to support Turkey’s membership.

The NHS

33 The independent fact checking charity Full Fact estimates that in 2014, migration from the EU added £160 million in additional costs for the NHS across the UK.

34 Last year NHS costs went up by £2.8 billion due to inflation and rising wages.

Farming, fishing and science

35 EU subsidies account for 50 per cent of British farm incomes. In 2014, farmers in the UK received £3.19bn in subsidies. The average payment was £17,735. The highest was almost £2 million.

36 European fishing fleets are given equal access to EU waters and fishing grounds up to 12 nautical miles from the coasts of EU member states under the Common Fisheries Policy. e UK to leave the EU, the status of its fishing waters would depend on whether the UK would allow access by foreign vessels to its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). An EEZ extends 200 nautical miles (370km) off a country's coastline. It gives the state the authority to control the fish resources within it.

37 Between 2007 and 2013 official figures suggest Britain paid in 5.4 billion euros to EU research and development funds and received 8.8 billion back.

38 The European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU are two separate organisations with different member states, different competencies, and different rules and procedures. A UK exit from the European Union should not affect the country's involvement with ESA.

Crime

39 In 2014 the UK’s National Crime Agency issued 219 European Arrest Warrants for suspects in other EU countries and 228 in 2014. In return the National Crime Agency received 5,522 EAWs requests in 2013, and 13,460 in 2014. If Britain left the EU it would have to renegotiate with other countries about retaining the current system.

The Future of Brexit

40 Nothing would change with our relationship over night if we voted to leave. What would follow a leave vote is years of negotiations around our future relationship with Europe. In this process almost everything would be up for grabs. Even if we vote to leave today we would probably not ‘leave’ the EU much before 2020.