Rotten law

What's disturbed me most about the EU project is the replacement of functional national law with random and arbitary judgements from Luxembourg. An entirely new legal code is being developed, on the hoof, as it goes along. Ask vapers if they got a fair hearing at the appeal against the parts of the tobacco directives that regulate e-cigarette products. The plaintiffs got ten minutes against the defendants' 75 minutes because the EU justices had already made their minds up. Note that the EU has no mandate to regulate health products.

Ask Sir James Dyson if justice can be seen to be done. Dyson appealed to the EU Court of Justice because he'd created a superior product, only to see lobbyists for German industry use Brussels to hobble it. The EU's vacuum cleaner tests weren't conducted in real-world conditions, but simply sucked in clean air. Dyson argued that the EU should use global industry standards, tests that operate on scientifically repeatable real-world situations.

The ECJ summarily dismissed his complaint, saying no such tests were available. Rigged, much?

Or the quite surreal case of the "New Public" theory of copyright that just happened to fall on my patch. The ECJ denies it's created an entirely new legal theory, and denies it created it because of a translation error. The rest of the world has long based its opinions on the same words in a different order, allowing a new theory to arrive as if by magic from nowhere, and then be endlessly refined, and even inverted. There are many more notorious examples.

If there's one reason for putting a spoke in the European project's relentless expansion of its institutions, this is it. German law is better, Napoleonic law is better, and our common law is better – anything is better than this.

I may sound like an old crusty arguing that you need sensible law, but you can't really base a civilised society on anything else. When the law is random, justice itself becomes a game in which the cynical and opportunistic are rewarded. Capricious and arbitrary judgements merely punish the innocent, deterring them from pursuing their rightful claims by turning justice into a crapshoot. They give a lifeline to the guilty, who can appeal endlessly in the hope that one day, the dice will roll their way. A random supreme court really undermines the foundations of a rational society. Yes, I know it's boring – but sometimes you need to look at how the sausage is made.

It's Out, then, for me. What about you?

That's my three reasons: reboot British political culture, reboot Europe, and stop a completely avoidable self-mutilation. All seem worth a temporary period of air turbulence. The Left could return to its roots and rebuild its working class base in communities, rather than sneering at the plebs and helping grow the far right. The UK could rebuild a new, more fit-for-purpose network of European institutions.

I'm not terribly optimistic though. Why?

In one of his most famous essays, George Orwell identified "the frightful inferiority complex of the English intellectual," forever embarrassed to be British – and I think this is behind much of the desire to "be at the heart of Europe". This self-flagellation (I think it's a public school thing) permeates the Remain campaign's negativity.

Again, as the offspring of immigrants, this has always struck me as totally bizarre. We will cheer the smallest country in the world discussing self-determination (provided it's not connected to the UK) but don't permit ourselves such discussions. No other country in the world does cripples itself like this. It's no accident that our civil servants "gold plate" EU regulations while French bureaucrats ignore them, often sticking up two fingers when they don't wish to play by the rules – as they did by illegally banning UK beef.

The French retain a sense of national self-interest, while we define ourselves by throwing ours away. If the founding political goal of the European institutions was to restrain Germany, since we joined, the economic goal has been to restrain the UK's global trade advantages, of law, language and reputation – and the politicians and bureaucrats have been pretty happy to go along with it. You need to visit China to see how highly Britain is valued – they think we're almost as rational as they are.

Ultimately, I don't know if the UK will really vote to Leave. Decades of self-flagellation has done its work. But I'll cast my [futile | optimistic] vote anyway – and the show will go on. Perhaps, not for very much longer. ®

Bootnote

* There simply aren't many articulate Brexit arguments coming from the Left: this and this are probably the best. Bravely, the Guardian's finance editor is for Leave - for similar reasons to me. Kotkin's book The New Class Conflict (Amazon) is a great introduction to the US' Blob, and explains why Silicon Valley is so important to it. The argument is the same: the middle class abandoned social solidarity, and dumped on the proles.

Balance – we've heard of it

Still haven't made up your mind? Read Damon Hart-Davis' reasons for voting Remain tomorrow.