Heey, whats up everyone.
Welcome to my Brexit video, alternative title
: “Reality is often disappointing”.
The video we’re looking at today is from
fake university PragerU.
And ist not about why the UK should leave
the EU, that's an old hat by now, but why
it voted to leave.
I’ve chosen this one because as soon as
the referendum was over, a lot of talking
points from the pro-Brexit lot got dropped
and exposed as the obvious lies that they
were.
But this video, because it came out after
the referendum, only features the bare bones
of the pro-Brexit side.
It also asks bigger questions like “Is the
EU undemocratic?” or “What does sovereignty
really mean?”.
To top things of, it's made by Mr. Brexit
himself, former UKIP member Nigel Farage who
has been doing nothing but agitating for the
UK to leave the EU, so ideally, he should
offer the best arguments.
So, without stalling or endlessly prolonging
what will ultimately be a very painful experience,
lets dive into the video:
If one big government is bad, imagine how
much worse two big governments would be.
But that’s what people living in Europe
have had to deal with: their own nation’s
bloated government and the super-national
government of Europe, now known as the European
Union.
Bureaucracy times two!
How’s that for a horror show?
Well, actually, you’ve no idea.
It’s worse than you think.
Believe me—I know, because for seventeen
years, I’ve represented South East England
as a member of the European Parliament, the
EU’s legislative body.
Okay, big government.
And this is actually another reason why I
like this video about Brexit so much.
It becomes pretty clear from the get go that
this video is designed as propaganda, targeting
an American audience.
This is why the video starts out with the
“big government” talking point although
the dichotomy of small vs. Big government
usually isn’t used as a political slogan
in Europe.
Its predominantly a pejorative in the American
lexicon and doesn’t make much sense in the
context of European governmental bodies since
they’re pretty much all big by American
standards.
But Farage uses the slogan nonetheless, because
he wants to paint a picture of an overarching
giant bureaucracy wasting tax money by shoving
papers around.
That doesn’t really work with the EU though.
The percentage of the EU’s annual budget
that goes towards administrative costs is
about 6%, which is way less than what other
national governments spend.
Comparing the EU to any national governmental
body in terms of efficiency is going to end
up in a win for the EU, because its way smaller
and fulfills different functions.
A look at the EU’s costs per capita, makes
this blatantly obvious.
The EU doesn’t pay out social benefits or
any of that which allows it to pour the majority
of its budget directly back into its member
states, with the biggest chunk going towards
furthering economic development.
If you’re curious where the money goes that
your country pays in, you can just look it
up by selecting a country in the EU’s Budget
at a glance tool.
Or if you want to know how it might affect
you directly, you can visit “what-the-eu-does-for-me.eu”
and check out what local projects have been
supported with EU funds.
It's also wrong to think having the EU as
a super national body means significantly
more bureaucracy for its member states, let
alone times 2.
For instance, because of the common market,
national governments don’t have to negotiate
trade agreements with one another and because
of free travel there are no border checks
anymore.
The Big government slogan is put in this video
to cause a gut reaction from an American audience
to view the membership in the EU as bad, without
having to justify that claim.
And you could easily use the same big vs.
Small government dichotomy to justify any
kind of separatist cause.
Imagine having to deal with a city administration,
a state government and a federal government
on top of that!
Bureaucracy times three.
Ludacris, I tell you.
Let's get Germany back to when we had real
freedom as a patchwork of feudal city states.
But that was just the intro, so let's see
what Nigel Farage has in store for us.
I was also leader of the UK Independence Party,
or UKIP, where I lead Britain’s efforts
to leave the European Union.
To their everlasting credit, that’s just
what happened on June the 23rd, 2016: The
United Kingdom left the European Union.
The world knows it as “Brexit.”
Just a minor nitpick and some additional information
here.
It's worth mentioning that Nigel Farage has
left UKIP since this video came out of the
parties “anti-Islam fixation” and for
cuddling up to racist fraudster Tommy Robinson
or Andrew McMaster or whatever pseudonym he
goes by these days.
I’m also not sure why Farage claims the
UK left on June 23ed 2016 or why the video
is titled in the past tense.
The UK hasn’t left the EU, they just had
a non-binding referendum on if they should
do it but then again, minor nitpick.
Brexit is a statement of national sovereignty.
Don’t misunderstand me: I like nations.
I like borders.
I like the people that live within those borders
making their own laws.
But I don’t like it when faceless bureaucrats
make laws for nations they don’t even live
in.
But that’s what they do in the European
Union.
Imagine a Belgian telling a Brit how much
he can charge his customers—or the reverse.
The EU bureaucrats do this in a myriad of
different ways, all day, every day.
Okay.
First real point, sovereignty.
And what sovereignty actually means can vary
a lot depending on who you ask, but for the
sake of argument, let's use it as a standing
for self-governance.
So the question is “will the UK have more
self-governance outside the EU than inside.”
Well, it definitely will have in some regards.
Brushing aside that there are no EU laws on
the books, to whom the UK has not agreed,
there won’t be other nations involved in
the making of laws and regulations.
Or will there?
Looking at the trade talks that have been
going on since the referendum, it becomes
clear that the former supposed “shackles”
the UK had a say over, will be replaced by
new ones, with much less leveraging power
on the side of the Brits.
The US.
For instance, knows that the UK is in a weak
position at the moment and uses that to push
for de-regulation of British markets and to
get rid of consumer protection guidelines.
The most recent example being the US insisting
on lifting UK regulations on agricultural
goods as part of a post-Brexit trade deal.
This could also reduce the quality of food
for UK citizens since local industry might
have to lower its standards as well, to stay
competitive with US companies.
And this is not project fear, its reality.
It's happening right now.
The US to UK ambassador recently even felt
obliged to publish and op-ed defending the
practice of bleaching chicken meat with chlorine,
a practice that has been banned in the EU
since the late nineties.
And because these regulations are not linked
to access to the world's largest trading bloc
anymore, the UK doesn’t have much to combat
these demands.
How's that for sovereignty.
And if the UK wants to continue to sell its
goods on the European market, its will still
have to abide by EU rules but without having
a seat at the table in terms of what those
rules actually are.
Or take immigration for example, which I know
was a hot button issue prior to the referendum.
Again, brushing aside that the UK already
had complete control over outside EU immigration
and also asylum policy, it looks like leaving
the EU will have the exact opposite effect
of what a lot of Brexiteers hoped for.
While it's safe to say that immigration from
EU countries towards the UK will decline,
in fact that is already happening, immigration
from outside EU countries is rising, at the
same time.
And here is where we get back to leveraging
power.
Countries like India or China, will couple
trade agreements with easier access to visas
for their citizens, something we are also
already seeing.
Regarding those “faceless bureaucrats".
If I want to check who represents me in the
European parliament for instance, I can pretty
easily look up not only their faces but contact
details and parliamentary activities.
But, in all fairness, people from other EU
member states are involved in drafting and
passing legislation that affects the UK.
But it's not like those laws only affect the
UK.
They affect the entirety of the EU.
Similar to how MPS in British parliament get
to vote on legislation that not only affects
the district they represent, but the rest
of the country as well.
You see it right now with Brexit itself.
Scotland for instance voted to stay in the
EU but now are forced to leave regardless.
And sadly there is no body like the EU commission
in the UK in which Scotland could veto important
decisions.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.
It is a conspiracy of the elites.
Who are those elites?
Well, they’re a bunch of self-important,
overpaid, social engineers with useless college
degrees who have never done a proper day’s
work in their lives and have no connection
with ordinary, decent people.
I’ll take the good sense of an Italian farmer
or a French baker over the arid intellectualism
of an EU bureaucrat any day.
Now, there isn’t that much to say here except
that it's trying to frame Brexit as a “ordinary
people vs. Elites" issue, when I would say
it’s the exact opposite.
The winners of Brexit will be rich people,
who due to the weak pound, will have it way
easier snatching up property in the UK.
But regardless, if that prediction turns out
to be wrong it's not like Farage’s talking
point holds much water in the present.
A 2013 study on the EU’s MEPs has found
that the number of elected officials who have
never been employed outside of politics, comes
in at about 10%.
And while I had a hard time finding matching
data for the British parliament, a 2018 paper
by the House of Commons library puts the number
of MPS formerly working in politics at 17,1%
as of 2015.
It's true however, that the EU parliament
has a large share of people from the upper
categories of the social space, like all parliaments
really.
But there are also exceptions like former
President of the European Parliament Martin
Schulz, who was a bookseller prior to becoming
a politician.
Compare that to Farage himself, who is a former
Broker, definitely a real job there.
BUT if comrade Farage wants to make the case
how financial inequality translates into political
inequality, I’m all for that.
Power to the people and all.
I doubt that’s what he is going for though.
And this is kind of unrelated but looking
up Farage’s background I got curious about
some other top Brexiteers, you know, the vanguard
against the out of touch EU elites and what
I found was reeeeaaally entertaining.
For instance, while Jacob Rees Mogg was out
campaigning in his mid-twenties driving his
mother's Mercedes Benz he took the family
nanny with him.
*sigh* what a joke this all is.
And I say these things not as an anti-European;
I love Europe!
It’s a fantastic, exciting, great continent:
different peoples, languages, and cultures.
But these peoples, with their languages and
cultures, have effectively been hijacked by
a giant, ever-expanding bureaucracy: the European
Union.
People will say, “but isn’t there a parliament,
a European parliament, that represents the
people of Europe?”
Well, yes, but this body has got no real power;
it can’t make its own laws.
Rather, the power resides with the European
Commission.
They’re unelected and they can’t be removed,
and that’s how absurd the whole thing is.
Before we jump into the EU’s political system,
if “highjacked” means, they joined out
of their own will to do so because they benefit
from EU membership, I would agree, otherwise
it's just a lie really.
Here is where we get to the big one.
The EU commission and parliament.
And the commission has been a target for the
Leave campaign pretty much from the get-go
portraying it as the tool with which unelected
EU officials rule over EU citizens, who can’t
even vote them out of office.
I don’t want to get into too much detail
on how EU legislation is drafted but it is
correct that the EU commission ultimately
calls the shorts.
While laws can be requested by the parliament,
the European central & investment bank, 25%
of member states or the citizens themselves
by gathering signatures or submitting petitions,
the commission doesn’t have to comply with
that.
The parliament for instance can’t push a
law through the commission, no matter how
big the support is.
And as far as I can see this argument has
been one that convinced a lot of people that
the EU is ultimately undemocratic and strips
its member states of their sovereignty.
In my opinion that viewpoint stems from a
fundamental misunderstanding of why the commission
exists in the first place, and what might
that be.
Drumrolls please.
The EU commission exists to protect the sovereignty
of its member states.
For instance, if a couple of member states
would push for a legislation in parliament
that is to the disadvantage of another state,
that state can just veto the law via its seat
on the EU commission.
It's true that the members of the commission
aren’t elected directly, but they have about
as much democratic legitimacy as a minister
on a national level.
In addition, if the commission wants to pass
something, it has to be agreed upon by every
state representative.
In the EU parliament, it's not that way.
Germany for instance has 99 MEPs, proportional
to the number of its citizens.
A much smaller country like Estonia only has
6.
But through the commission, it could block
legislation it didn’t want to pass despite
its much smaller representation in the EU
parliament.
Further the Commission can only propose laws
in areas where the national governments have
unanimously agreed to allow it.
Put another way, the Commission can only propose
EU laws in areas where the UK government has
allowed it to do so.
And naturally the EU parliament as well as
other stakeholders also have to approve laws
put forward by the commission.
It's also not true that EU commissioners can’t
be removed.
The European Court of Justice as well as the
EU commission president can force a member
to resign and the EU parliament can even make
the entire commission resign via a vote of
no confidence.
But just so you know, that doesn’t mean
there isn't a case in reforming the system
with for instance letting the commission president
be elected directly by the people.
There is actually a lot of stuff about the
EU that sucks and I’ll talk about that a
bit later in the video but the sheer idiocy
by Farage and other Brexiteers doesn’t even
allow for that kind of nuance.
The European Parliament meets in Brussels.
At least, that’s what I thought when I was
elected there.
But once a month, do you know what happens?
They load the contents of our offices and
papers into big, plastic trunks, and they
put those trunks on lorries, and they drive
them nearly 400 miles down Europe’s motorways
to a French city called Strasbourg where,
for four days, the contents of our offices,
and our papers, are put into a new office,
and the parliament then sits there.
Twelve times a year this back-and-forth happens,
and this from an organization who say they
want to reduce their level of carbon footprint!
This, from an organization whose accounts
have not been given a clean bill of health
by the auditors for the last twenty years!
This…a parliament?
It’s more like a traveling circus.
Now, all of Europe knows that it’s costing
nearly €300 million every year to move this
back and forth from Brussels to Strasbourg.
Sorry I have to chime in here folks but with
these PragerU videos it's very hard to take
everything point by point.
What is described here as the traveling circus
is actually true.
Although the costs are closer to 114 million
euro annually according to a recent audit.
It’s a waste of money that I think should
not happen.
Funnily enough this was initially done to
save money.
Back in the fifties, there was no suitable
building available in Luxembourg, the seat
of the European coal and steel community which
was the predecessor to the EU.
So, they picked Strasbourg and were able to
use the seat of the European Council, to save
money.
Since then, a lot has happened and more and
more EU institutions have been concentrated
in Brussels but France does not want to let
go of their only major EU institution.
That said, the EU is not a monolith, most
MEPs actually oppose this and sometimes even
boycott gatherings in Strasbourg.
So, we’ll see where it goes, I guess.
But just to insert a sense of scale here.
If you take the annual costs for moving to
Strasbourg and multiply that times three,
you roughly have the estimated costs for Brexit
according to a study by the Centre for European
Reform.
Although these numbers are hard to determine,
this estimate falls in line with the ones
from officials at the bank of England and
the UBS group.
And when I say costs for Brexit, I mean costs
each week from the time of the referendum
to September 2018 resulting in roughly 20
billion euros up until that point.
That’s just the estimated loss in GDP growth
by the way, not the money the British government
spends directly.
Be that as it may, I genuinely have no idea
why they decided to include the records of
the EU’s court of auditors at that point
in the video.
This court doesn’t judge what money is being
spent for, but the reliability of the financial
records.
So this money being spend on moving to Strasbourg,
in itself has no effect on their assessment.
For the last few years, the court has judged
the records of the EU to be fair and accurate
but also found that more than 2% of payments
contain errors.
And these errors usually boil down to stuff
like EU funds not being spent according to
established guidelines like awarding a EU-funded
contract directly without holding a proper
bidding process.
And guess who is responsible for that.
It’s the member states.
In the UK’s example a 2014 public accounts
committee criticized the following:
“Over the last decade, the UK Government
has incurred at least £650 million in penalties
to the European Commission because of errors
in how UK public bodies have spent European
Union funds.
EU rules and regulations for spending EU funds
are complex, and this in itself contributes
to errors; however, UK governments have chosen
to design programmes which have added to this
complexity, driving up the risk of errors
and penalties further.
UK government departments have exhibited a
distinct lack of urgency in tackling complexity
and reducing the levels of penalties incurred.
HM Treasury has not done enough to hold departments
to account for spending EU funds, nor to encourage
learning from best practice, nor to lead by
example by improving the quality of information
available on how well EU funds are spent in
the UK”
So much for that.
Now let's listen to what Nigel Concludes from
the fact that France is able to block the
moving of parliament to Brussels entirely.
So why isn’t it reformed?
Well, the way the EU has been structured,
to change that would require changing the
treaties, and to change the treaties would
need all 28 member governments to agree not
to go to Strasbourg twelve times a year.
And do you know something?
The French are never going to agree to that,
‘cause it’s in their economic interests
for the traveling circus to go to Strasbourg.
And it shows you that a system of law-making
has been devised where not only can the voters
not change anything, but the institutions
themselves are pretty much incapable of reform.
Now if you’re like me, you might be a bit
confused by now.
Because apparently, it’s a big problem for
Nigel Farage that member states can dictate
law to other member states (which they can’t,
for the record) but it's also bad that every
country has the ability to block changes that
are not in their interest.
I’m starting to think a large portion of
EU criticism by right-wingers is just a inner
political tool and lacks any kind of substance
or consistency.
But were about to be served a real example
of supposed EU tyranny so let's listen in:
The United Kingdom is an island; it’s surrounded
by the sea, and yet, as members of the European
Union, we were only allowed to catch 20% of
the fish swimming in territorial British waters.
What that meant was tens of thousands of jobs
were lost in Britain’s coastal communities
as we effectively gave away the ability to
look after one of our greatest resources to
a bureaucracy based in Brussels.
This is the last point Nigel brings up and
it's also a very common one.
But the way this is framed should make your
ears ring from the start really.
Because if Britain was only allowed to catch
20% of the fish swimming in British waters,
implying other EU states take the other 80%
there wouldn’t be any fish left would there.
It's true however that how much fish Britain
is allowed to catch, is subject to a quota,
negotiated on an EU level.
Britain's share in this quota is about 30%
and that is because there is no such thing
as a “British fish”.
That implication is a red herring.
Fish don’t respect national boundaries and
depending on the fish and time of year they
move in and out of British waters.
In the case of North Sea herring for example,
most of the juveniles live in the south east
corner around the German bight, whereas the
adults tend to congregate around the Shetland
Isles prior to spawning at various sites along
the British coast.
This is why EU countries strike agreements
on how much each member state can catch.
It's also not like it's just 30% that Britain
gets, it depends on the fish really.
For example, the UK gets 84% of the North
Sea haddock quota, 81% of the North Sea monkfish
quota and 98% of the west of Scotland prawn
quota; but only 4% of the North Sea sprat
quota.
Adding to that, these quotas are largely based
around the agreements that existed prior to
the EU, some even date back to the middle
ages.
So leaving the EU does not mean the UK will
have more control over how much fish they
catch, they just opt-out of the existing agreement
and will ultimately have to strike another
one.
But wait, I hear you say.
Can’t the UK just say, these are our waters,
we will catch how much we please, and we don’t
care about other countries, they can just
stick to their own waters.
Theoretically speaking that’s possible but
here’s where we get to what actually destroyed
a significant part of the British fishing
industry.
It's called the “cod wars” which were
a series of disputes over fishing rights between
the UK and Iceland.
Mostly they were kicked off by Iceland going:
“See these waters over there?
Yeah that’s our fishing territory now”.
At one point it even escalated to ships intentionally
ramming in to one another, British fisher
boats requiring protection from the royal
navy and Iceland allegedly demanding the US
to send fighter jets and bomb British ships.
Isn’t history amazing.
In the end all these disputes ended in favor
of Iceland, resulting in thousands of British
fishermen becoming redundant.
Here you might be asking yourself how a nation
like Iceland, was able to force a naval super
power like Britain into submission.
It was actually pretty easy for Iceland.
They just threatened to pull out of NATO.
And since Iceland is placed in the Greenland
Iceland UK Gap which was a submarine warfare
chokepoint during the cold war, the UK had
no choice but to back down.
One more thing regarding fishing rights tough.
It's true that even after the cod wars, small
fishing business that make up the engines
of a lot of coastal communities have been
declining.
But this is much more likely down to the fact
that the splitting up of the quota, which
the UK government is responsible for, is mostly
ending in favor of large companies, rather
than small ones.
Now why am I telling you about the cod wars?
In my opinion this is the perfect showcase
why “sovereignty” is such a useless term
surrounding the Brexit discussion.
Britain isn't an empire anymore.
They will have to work with other countries
in an increasing globalized world.
Understanding that is one of the reasons the
EU exists in the first place.
Together, we have a much better chance to
make our own rules and not become prey to
other world powers imposing their will onto
us.
That's why the domino effect that Nigel Farage
predicts at the end of the video didn’t
happen.
I want good relations between all the European
nations.
I want prosperous, free, and fair trade between
those nations.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to give
up my rights as a British citizen so that
some Eurocrat can tell me how to live.
I won’t do it, and I’m certain that across
the continent, ultimately, the French and
the Italians won’t put up with it either.
I’m Nigel Farage
The leave camp seems to have miscalculated
who the dominant power in Europe really is
and that this power will do everything to
protect its member states and demonstrate
that being in the EU actually means something.
F.I. prior to the referendum when the subject
of the Irish border came up, as rarely as
that happened, prominent Brexiteers seemed
pretty confident to be able to struck a deal
with the EU, despite its red lines on the
issue.
Now, it turns out that the EU won't throw
Ireland under the bus and the UK slowly starts
to realize what being outside the club really
means.
And don’t get me wrong there are aspects
about the EU that are genuinely worth of criticism.
We see it right now with the huge opposition
to article 13.
And if you’re mad about that, here’s what
you can do.
Keep that anger inside, grow it, care for
it like some kind of rage baby and then let
it out at the ballot box during the European
elections in May.
Here’s a handy breakdown of which party
voted in favor of it.
Besides that, I would even go as far as to
say the EU project will fail if it doesn’t
find an alternative to its dysfunctional monetary
policy.
Setting up the EU like I would like to have
it would not only require changing several
treaties but also the shift away from neo-liberal
politics.
And although movements a springing up that
push for a change like this, it remains a
gigantic challenge.
But even if the UK would take a significant
swing to the left after leaving the EU, it
cannot escape the gravitational influence
of Europe.
21st century socialism requires trans-national
cooperation.
Brexit as a project of nationalist retrenchment
offers nothing to combat the effects of global
capitalism.
I always felt like I missed my chance to make
a video about Brexit since I wasn’t making
videos while the decision was made but as
seen in this video, even now the people who
pushed for Brexit deny to accept what has
become an obvious truth.
Brexit was and is a giant con.
It’s a dangerous fantasy that won’t solve
Britain's problems and will also make life
worse for the average person.
And the people who pushed for it and remain
to push for it despite this reality, deserve
to be hounded out of their political careers
for so willingly deceiving the people they
are supposed to represent.
So that was that.
What kind of put me of about making a video
on Brexit was that the timing always seemed
wrong since so much is happening and there
are new developments every day.
And with Brexit possibly being postponed now
and Labor backing a second referendum, who
knows what will happen?
Maybe there will really be a second chance
to decide.
Or perhaps I’ll have to set up some kind
of refugee commune for British left-tubers
here on the mainland.
Another thing that I couldn’t find a right
spot for in this video is that non-Brits who
oppose Brexit should keep in mind that a bunch
of people didn’t vote for Brexit or have
since changed their mind.
With Europe’s growing frustration at Brexit
I’ve repeatedly seen anger over Brexit being
expressed as sort of casual bigotry and we
shouldn’t ever let that slide.
I think that’s it for today.
If you listened to me ramble over the credits,
you’re probably extremely impressed by the
names rolling by.
Luckily you can get in on the action by becoming
a Patron via the link in the description.
My last couple of videos we’re light on
history unfortunately but I’m going to make
it up with the next one, when we’ll talk
about the Crusades.
How exciting!
Until then, let's just all try to stick it
out and I hope to see you the next time.
Have a good one.
