Eurosceptic Lite

Thanks to the tenacity of Witterings from Witney, he has managed to procure a copy of David Campbell Bannerman's IEA submission, a copy of which is available here. On his blog WfW had done a fine critique of DCB’s flawed submission, with an added piece from Richard North.

With those comprehensive critical pieces I don’t have much to add, only to express that it saddens me deeply, as someone who wrote a 20,000 word submission as part of a history degree, to read the utter poor quality of DCB’s work. This is not supposed to be a GCSE homework project, but a submission into the IEA competition, or indeed a Brexit plan in general.

WfW rightly highlights the basic errors - for example capital letters appear to have been inserted at random – and certain arguments are fundamentally incorrect for example DCB’s assertions that the four freedoms can be negotiated:

The ‘Four Freedoms’ is regarded by the EU  as a non-negotiable part of the Single Market acquis – something stated quite categorically by Viviane Reding whilst she was an EU Commissioner.

As a result one has to question the thought processes of anyone who proffers an amendment to something that cannot be amended. Another example of the poor standard of the submission can be seen below from a random couple of paragraphs:

Citizens from the original group of 15 EU member states, including Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Portugal, originally had unrestricted access to the Swiss labour market. but in May 2013the [sic] Swiss Government moved to tighten the immigration tap, extending restrictions to these older EU member states, setting a cap of 53,700 for 12 months.

But [sic] most significantly, all immigration from Romania and Bulgaria, two of the newer EU members, was severely restricted and will remain so for years. This Swiss safeguard quota model is designed to limit numbers from the .least [sic] economically developed nations - those often with one sixth of UK average wages, whilst allowing free flow from more developed nations, and EEA Lite follows this logic. .[sic]

This sort of sub-standard work, with a complete lack of proof reading, would have been chucked out of the window as a degree student. Yet DCB as a Conservative and a former UKIP MEP who has "prestige" it is taken seriously. A demonstration indeed of the failings of our so called media and establishment.

If this is the best the eurosceptic movement as a whole can accomplish then we deserve to lose any referendum. We seriously need to up our game.