Brexit would give Britain control of its borders again

Britain’s David Cameron and Boris Johnson are on opposite sides of the Brexit debate. Picture: John Stillwell

In one of his few mentions of border security in this election campaign, Malcolm Turnbull commented that it is of fundamental importance that the Australian government can control who comes into the country and how.

The Prime Minister is right on that score and his statement underlines one of the most enormous differences between Australia and Britain.

In Australia we have full self-government. Britain doesn’t.

British Prime Minister David Cameron has long had a policy goal of getting immigration into his country down into the “tens of thousands”. Indeed this objective has been a campaign promise.

Yet the latest figures show net immigration to Britain in the year just gone was more than 330,000. About 77,000 migrants came from other European Union countries, without jobs.

They are all entitled to claim British welfare payments and, if they like, they can send these welfare payments back to their countries of origin.

Britain has endured a good deal of social and political pain to bring its budget in order but it must pay that money, through its welfare system, to any of the 430 million EU citizens eligible to enter and reside there at will who choose to do so.

It must also pay an annual net subsidy to the EU of billions of pounds.

I have always believed that ­immigration benefits most countries, but not generally immigration attracted by access to welfare payments.

And here’s the rub. A sovereign national government ought to be able to choose to make policy on immigration.

Australia can. Britain can’t.

That is because Australia is a sovereign nation. Britain’s sovereignty is severely compromised by its membership of the EU.

Australians are more free, and live in a more democratic polity, than the Brits. Having pioneered democracy, the Brits have given much of it away in an apparent fit of absent-mindedness.

With all due respect to our forthcoming national election, the two most consequential votes for the entire world this year are the US presidential election in November and the British referendum on whether to leave the EU on June 23.

The latest polls have the “remain” case pulling ahead, but the polling method makes a big difference. Most Brits now expect their nation to stay in, which could suppress turnout among those who support remaining in the EU.

A fearsome and at times truly ludicrous fear campaign has been waged against the “leave” option, not least by a quite desperate Cameron — even including suggestions that leaving the EU could lead to war.

But the result is by no means a foregone conclusion. The warm weather of June will see more and more boats leaving Libya. The utter inability of the EU to cope with its migration crisis is one of many factors driving down its reputation in Britain.

A news month dominated by the people movement crisis could well swing votes back to the leave option.

Australians should hope that Britain leaves the EU. It is overwhelmingly in our national interest that this happens, though the orthodox international relations view is that it’s better for us if Britain stays.

Certainly Britain is a very good friend to Australia in the EU and sometimes counteracts dopey EU actions that could hurt us.

But there are a score of compelling reasons why a Brexit would be good news for everyone.

First, Britain will, over time, become much stronger and more powerful if unshackled from the debilitating chains of the EU.

In the late 1970s Britain faced prolonged economic crisis. It elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who implemented an extremely tough program of structural reform, tax cutting, freeing up the supply side of the economy, curbing trade union excesses and much else to make Britain a strong economic performer.

The EU makes that kind of reform extraordinarily difficult now in many ways. One, it has an entirely undemocratic power to strike many national laws out as being inconsistent with EU laws and regulations. And two, it fosters a dependence syndrome, a cargo cult mentality, in which no nation is wholly responsible for its own actions.

Europe is an engine of civilisation, culture and achievement. But the EU is not Europe. The EU is undemocratic, illiberal, centralist, vastly over-regulatory, dysfunctional and coercive.

It is a bad institution for Australia’s interests in several ways.

First, its economic model is wildly over-regulatory. This imposes vast costs on its economies and the EU then tries to make every other advanced economy pay similar costs through the international treaty process.

Second, Australian governments find it infinitely easier to deal with single national European governments than they do with the EU, where decision-making is notoriously opaque and inflexible.

Even the chronic stagnation and instability that the EU’s economic model has inflicted on most of its member economies and the roiling immigration crisis have not been enough to move the EU towards meaningful reform or economic liberalisation.

But the loss of Britain could do this. Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy, Europe’s second largest after Germany. It is one of only two significant military powers in western Europe, the other being France. British success outside the EU would spur other member nations to leave or to demand real reform.

The capacity of the gnomes of Brussels to take irrational decisions is enormous, but even they would likely see that change — deep, real change — was now their only alternative to the total collapse of the EU.

Wouldn’t the decline of the EU be a disaster, if not for Britain then for Europe?

It would only be a disaster if European policymakers consciously decided to make it a disaster. Much of the scare campaign against Brexit is entirely irrational. It is claimed that Britain would lose access to counter-terrorist intelligence. But if London and other European capitals wanted to co-operate closely on counter-terrorism, there is nothing that would stop them doing so.

All of the good things the EU achieves, such as a common market, could easily be achieved in a free-trade deal without all the toxic, debilitating, anti-democratic centralisation of decision-making and power in Brussels.

This opaque, anti-democratic power of bureaucracy and European courts is a central part of the deep crisis in democracy afflicting the entire Western world.

US President Barack Obama disgracefully added his voice to the scare campaign by telling the Brits that Washington was negotiating a free-trade deal with the EU but a Britain outside the EU would go to the back of the free-trade queue.

What utter, fanciful nonsense this was. Can anyone imagine the US congress approving a free-trade deal for continental Europeans that discriminated against Britain? The idea is a joke. There is no real danger of Britain being left out of an FTA between the US and Europe. There is, however, some danger of Europe being left out of a US-Britain FTA, which is about the only FTA you could really imagine would be likely to appeal to a contemporary US congress.

When I started systematically covering Asian affairs in the late 80s, many Southeast Asians would talk with admiration of the EU. We are only starting the journey that the Europeans are so far along, they would say.

But sometime in the 90s this sentiment reversed absolutely. Now, almost the first thing any Asian says about regional institution-building is that we will never, ever go down a road similar to the EU.

The EU has become a wholly negative model — the ideal example of what you must never do — for those designing Asian regional architecture.

Cameron played a strong hand with the EU feebly. He got almost nothing of substance from the EU, either for Britain specifically or for liberalism generally.

It is possible that he will succeed in scaring the British electorate into staying. But any result closer than 55-45 will ensure that the idea of Britain leaving the EU will remain alive and well in British politics, just as the narrow Scotland independence referendum led to a huge surge of support for those Scots supporting independence.

A narrow election victory won on fear tactics will leave many Brits feeling that once again they have been cheated by a conspiracy of EU deceivers. And the sense in Brussels that they have cowed and humiliated the Brits, given them nothing, called their bluff, brought them to heel, will increase the arrogance of Brussels and make any meaningful reform less likely.

The results of this immensely important referendum will reverberate around the world.