In the short video below Professor Michael Dougan of the University of Liverpool, the School of Law, offers insights from his professional research on the forthcoming referendum.
This is twenty minutes of exposition truly worth listening to.
In his film Michael Dougan explains how the current, complex and historical engagement with the EU has benefited UK trade and infrastructure. How the tabloid headlines about sovereignty and the lack of democracy are simply wrong and how, in a Europe without the UK, the actual negotiation timetables and lack of formal agreements will stagger UK industrial output and threaten the welfare of workers and citizens.
Leaving the EU would, says Professor Dougan, give the government mandated power from Parliament to effect a root and branch redrawing of the legislatory landscape of our country.
With the right in ascendancy, and no ‘European’ voice of conscience to mediate legislation vested with self interest and the interests of Capital, workers rights and welfare would be under attack, we would argue.
In another moment of clarity, we hear how the Swiss negotiated their first extra-EU Trade Agreement at the start of the Seventies. Their process is still ongoing. As a counter to the ‘free of regulation, free trade’ proclaimers, in reality many years would pass before we have negotiated our new position with the EU, post leave referendum, with our potential trade partners holding off in terms of their relationship with us until clarity for their interests, not ours, emerges.
The UK EU Referendum takes place on June 23rd, 2016.
Since the end of the Second World War, Europe has been a bastion of civil society development, a cultural and social focus for the proclamation of individual nation state identity and the cauldron of co-operation that has simmered gently for decades to create the single, most powerful, market bar none on the planet. It has been a defense against militarism and a bulkwark against social injustice.
Listen to Michael Dougan’s clear and objective analysis and Vote In on Thursday.
