I CONFESS I’ve been avoiding the debate over the European Union. After the independence referendum, anything about the future constitutional framework for the UK as a whole inspires me as much as an instruction manual for a rickety old car that should have long since gone to the scrapyard.

The shinier European vehicle might look quite attractive on the surface, if you don’t look closely. But look carefully under the bonnet and there’s plenty to be worried about.

For a start, the behaviour of the EU leaders during the Greek crisis. Anyone who still believes that the institution is inspired by a vision of benevolent international cooperation must have forgotten the despicable bullying of the Greek Government, whose sin was to get itself democratically elected on an anti-austerity platform.

Then there’s the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – whose tedious title seems deliberately designed to deflect attention away from its anything but boring agenda of helping multinational big business to ruthlessly ride roughshod over workers, the environment, health and safety, and the democratic will of sovereign nation states.

And that’s before we start on the refugee crisis and the dismal failure of the continent leaders to face down their own racist element by finding ways of absorbing this great mass of human misery that the West is responsible for creating.

Or the EU’s closing of ranks behind the right-wing government in Madrid which refuses to countenance a referendum to allow Catalonia the right of self-determination.

The Byzantine bureaucracy of the EU institutions inspires me with the kind of enthusiasm I muster for getting out of bed on these dark winter mornings when my alarm goes off at six o’clock. Until yesterday morning, I really didn’t know how I would vote.

On the one hand, I’m attracted by the ideal of a cooperative, democratic Europe, forged to avoid the horrors of war and built on the principle of free movement. But that’s not what the EU seems to be all about right now. While goods and capital are allowed to move freely, people fleeing war and famine are subject to masses of restrictions and are treated as the lepers of the modern world. It is an institution whose main focus is to sustain a neo-liberal consensus on austerity.

There is, however, one thing that can be said in its favour. It’s not as bad as the United Kingdom.

The EU has given British workers more rights than they would have dreamed of over the past 30 years from Westminster. The working time directive protects us from the exploitation of excessive hours and ensures we get a minimum 28 days holiday. And the TUPE regulations protect our terms and conditions when we find ourselves shifted from one employer to another.

The Birds and Habitats directives have provided a higher level of protection for the environment and wildlife than would ever have been contemplated by Westminster. Indeed, George Osborne makes no secret of his hostility to the directives which he believes stand in the way of big businesses’ right to exploit our natural resources to their heart’s content.

And if it wasn’t for the EU, all the pensioners who’ve moved to places like Spain for a life in the sun wouldn’t be able to access public services while they were there.

But it’s not these progressive bits and pieces of EU law that have swayed me towards voting Yes. It’s Nigel Farage and Liam Fox.

Speaking at the launch of their cross-party campaign to exit the EU, they conjured up the spectre of hordes of migrant rapists, emboldened by EU citizenship, marauding from Cologne to stalk ‘our’ women. It gave us just a flavour of the xenophobic, reactionary bandwagon that is beginning to get rolling.

Context is everything. In a future independent Scotland, we may be able to have a rational debate about whether to strive to reform the EU from within, or withdraw in favour of a Norwegian-style arrangement.

But that’s not the debate we’re having right now.

Owen Jones thinks that a left exit campaign could focus on building a “new Britain’ of ‘worker’s rights”, “a genuine living wage”, “public ownership”, “industrial activism” and “tax justice”. But these policies will not be part of the main exit campaign. This vision will not be on the European referendum ballot paper.

It won’t be Owen Jones or even Jeremy Corbyn who will be dictating the terms of an exit and shaping the future of an isolationist UK. Instead, free from the shackles of EU membership, the triumphant Eurosceptic right will hurl every last progressive protection for workers, women, the vulnerable and the environment into the Thames to flow back to mainland Europe where such nonsense belongs.

And that will be accompanied, I’m afraid, by an ugly racist undercurrent, which will almost certainly usher in a new age of reaction, in which the political centre of gravity lurches decisively to the right. In contrast, I might add, to the progressive leftward momentum that would have been delivered by a Yes vote in Scotland’s 2014 referendum.

Scotland may have an escape route – but not if we vote for Brexit. The option of a new referendum to break with the Nigel Farages and Liam Foxes will only be on the table if Scotland sharply diverges from the UK on Euro Referendum Day.

So, not out of any love for the European Union as it now stands, but of fear of the alternative, I’ll be voting to stay in.


Nicola Sturgeon says second referendum 'almost inevitable' in the event of a Brexit against Scotland's wishes