Will Hutton: People from around the world enrich our culture and economy. Without them, we face stagnation



Openness is the propellant of great civilisations. Greece and Rome could only grow as they did upon the openness of seaborne trading opportunities and interchange of peoples, uniquely enabled by the Mediterranean. From the Middle Ages onwards, European vitality fed off the open exchange of technologies, goods and ideas flowing freely across contiguous borders.

The immigrant-unleashed dynamism of the United States is tribute to the same phenomenon. Similarly, open societies, economies and cultures – above all, those embedded in networks of growing trade and exchange – will best exploit the opportunities of the decades ahead.

This openness – to trade, immigrants, the flow of ideas, new technologies – is the essence of Britishness. Britain is formed from the inflow of many peoples and cultures – Roman, Danish, Norwegian, Norman, Celt, Huguenot and, more recently, Indian, Pakistani and Caribbean. The Industrial Revolution was triggered in Britain first, explain today’s historians, because of its unique openness to the best of European ideas. Empire, driven by this melting pot people, was not just about the sometimes cruel drive for booty and land: it was driven by the appetite for trade and then allowing conquered peoples to feed their culture into the constantly mutating notion of Britishness. Trade, migration and openness were – and are – a crucial part of this open alchemy.

The proponents of Brexit, insistent that Britain regains control of its borders to control immigration, even at the price of sacrificing membership of the EU’s single market, are, in a fundamental sense, anti-British and hostile to our best interests. We live in an era of gathering closure – whether it’s Donald Trump wanting to build a wall with Mexico, levy sky-high tariffs on imports and dismantle Nato, or China’s President Xi’s nationalist campaign to reject western ideas. The Brexit invitation is to leave the world’s greatest force for openness and liberal trade – the European Union – so weakening it and us, in order to embrace the dwindling opportunities of a globe that is giving up even holding today’s line in open borders and trade.

The World Trade Organisation, upholder of the world’s open trading system and which Brexiters revere as better than the EU as a custodian of trade, has never been under more pressure from sly protectionism and breaking of its own rules. After 14 years of trying to extend trade rules that might apply to the whole world – the so-called Doha round – the WTO abandoned the attempt last December in Nairobi. The future is to be a dog-eat-dog world in which the strong can do deals as they please. The dozens of trade deals Brexiters boast will be signed to replace those with the EU will be attempted with countries whose interest in openness is declining – and certainly not with a newly weakened, isolated island. Worse, the WTO, which Brexiters expect to guarantee trade fair play, has never been weaker. You cannot protest openness when your actions promise closure.

The Brexit position sets up the immigrant as the unwelcome foreign ‘other’, against whom it is acceptable to object

The most conspicuous example is immigration. A country that is attractive to immigrants signals its health. A growing population is again good: it delivers a growing economy, vitality and demographic youthfulness. The opposite – a stagnating or declining population – is a guarantor of economic stagnation and ageing. Immigrants boost economies and enrich cultures, as proved vividly by the comparative experience of Britain today with stagnating, migrant-free Japan.

Certainly, immigration cannot be limitless. But Britain, experiencing annual net immigration of some half of 1% of its host population, is hardly experiencing that. Yes, wages of sectors exposed to the direct competition of immigrants – no more than 10% of the labour force, but significant nonetheless – are lower than they would have been. Yes, migration has created pressures in housing and public services. Both are solvable. To reap the benefits from immigration, the government must invest in housing, public services and infrastructure and support the incomes of those in sectors directly hit. It may be forced to take measures to manage the inflow, as the government does with non-EU immigrants and as it has already negotiated with the EU. But these should be pragmatic derogations from the principle of openness. It does not imply indulging cultural objections to immigrants because they were not born here, any more than we would indulge hostile feelings to gays, disabled people or the elderly as “natural”.

The Brexit position is that immigration is a problem. It sets up the immigrant as the unwelcome foreign “other”, against whom it is culturally and socially acceptable to object. There is a reluctant recognition that the country needs immigrants, with proposed derogations from Brexit’s basic principle of closure by managing immigration, say, like the unforgiving Australian points-based system. Ironically, given that non-EU immigration is running at 180,000 a year, derogations from closure mean that immigration will not stop. But it will continue in an economic and cultural climate hostile to the “other”, exacerbating costs and limiting the benefits.

Trade and exchange are about give, take and acceptance of change. Brexiters are takers, exploiting widespread unease about change in neighbourhoods most damaged by today’s trends, to try to build options for Britain in which the traffic is one way, in an international order that Britain does little to uphold but everything to exploit. We move from creators of the world system to underminers. But the world will not stay the same if we leave the EU: forces for closure worldwide will become more intense and menacing.

For what? If a bonfire of alleged EU red tape is to spark an entrepreneurial boom that the Brexiters promise, there should already be much more momentum on which to build. But Britain’s problems with investment, innovation and business building are homemade, rooted in dysfunctional ownership, financial and innovation systems and nothing to do with EU membership. But we are unambiguous beneficiaries from trade and, hold your breath, immigration. The reason almost every economist from across the spectrum of philosophies predicts slower growth and even recession as a consequence of leaving the EU is that trade will be reduced, and growth will fall.

The core of the EU remains its trade-promoting common market – incomplete, perhaps, but a hard-won and magnificent continent-wide economic reality that stands even as the world grows more nativist and protectionist. To throw our membership away in order to express our hostility to immigration is not only economically self-defeating, it is a denial of our best selves. Britain is better than this.

A queue outside an unemployment office in Madrid. Photograph: Andres Kudacki/AP

Gisela Stuart: We should vote to leave an institution that has made such a mess of adapting to change



Let’s be clear what a vote to leave actually means. On 24 June, we will still be Europeans. These islands will still be part of the European continental shelf and Eurostar trains will continue to run. The 21st century’s Holbeins and Haydns will still come to London just as our Turners and Byrons will travel across Europe. British students will take part in Erasmus programmes, just as the original Erasmus exchanged ideas with us and did not first need the EU to make it happen.

To vote to leave is to leave behind a political structure created in the last century. A project that in 1957 was noble and honourable, but is now out of date. An endeavour that succeeded in building a supranational machine and then didn’t notice that the world underneath it had changed.

The last century was the time of the big trading blocs, where Europe thought it had to respond to the rise of America and the Soviet Union. Production techniques favoured scale, which in turn favoured markets that had similar standards and tastes. The world is different now. Technology and communications have seen products diversify, consumer tastes diverge and markets become increasingly detached from geography, as commerce and relationships move online.

Change has become part of modern life and companies that do well thrive on the creative challenge, demanding more innovation and new skills. This is a modern networked world, where regulation must be agile and government must be open, flexible, inclusive and accountable. It is also one where large bureaucracies fail. Political structures such as the EU – centralised, opaque and managed by a clique of bureaucrats and elites – will never succeed.

Just as the stresses of the 1980s proved too much for the Soviet Union, the European Union is starting to lumber painfully from one mismanaged crisis to the next. The eurozone has become a disaster of quite staggering proportions, as levels of youth unemployment remain above 20%, and as high as 45% or 50% in Spain and Greece. It is all the more astonishing for being both predicted and avoidable. The EU has no solution to the migration crisis even though it was the foreseeable consequence of a free-travel area that had no protection for its external border. This old Europe has the best years behind it and hasn’t accepted that it is now creating problems rather than solving them.

The nations of Europe have to find a new way. For members of the eurozone, that alternative may lie in accelerating steps towards a common fiscal policy and a political union leading ultimately to a united states of Europe. That may well be right for them, but would not be right for us.

Britain now has a choice. We have always been an outward looking trading nation and when cultures meet, creativity, enterprise and new ideas spring forth. The British do not speak to the world just because English is a global language, but because we have shown an ability and a willingness to do so for centuries.

In or out of the EU, our future growth in trade will come from outside Europe. We are the world’s fifth largest economy, with a large deficit in trade with the EU. The single market is in long-term decline as a share of the world economy and as a share of our total exports. The former EU commission president Jacques Delors has suggested that Britain would be able to leave and reach a free trade agreement with the EU because, in his view, the UK is “strategically and economically important” to the European Union.

I was born in Germany, but I can say with confidence that I am British. Not English, or Scottish, but British. Being British is a supranational identity; one that overcomes the darker sides of narrow nationalism by embracing concepts such as the crown in parliament and the rule of law.

To be British does not mean, and never did, to be part of a blood line. Germany only changed its nationality laws in the last 20 years and it wasn’t until unification in 1989 that the notion of what it meant to be German became identified with being a citizen of the state. Nor did the British, even at the height of the might of empire, try to turn the rest of the world into “Englishmen”, an approach very different from the French.

For centuries, these isles have always been open to and benefited from migration. Today, that is being tested, both by the scale of the movement of young Europeans leaving the accession states and the failing eurozone, but also because our consent is no longer thought relevant or required.

I find it extraordinary that the left sees nothing wrong with a situation where we ask young people from other countries to come here and to take on low-paid jobs, while we neglect to create entry-level opportunities and skills training for the young people in our cities. This may suit the cosmopolitan elites and big companies, but in the long term it is bad for young British workers and bad for our economy and European economies.

The EU needs to fix the mess it has made of both the eurozone and its free-travel area and leave behind the institutions and habits of the past. Until it does so, it will remain locked in an inward-looking obsession, with ever greater union based on a model suited to an old Europe of grand schemes and committees that ended when the current century began.

We have always been and continue to be Europeans, but we understand that the political institutions of Europe are stuck in the past and beyond reform. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the first priority for those countries considered applicants to join the EU was to join Nato, then – because there was no other trading model – they applied to join the EU.

By voting leave on 23 June, and taking back control, we will lead the way in showing that there is a more empowering and entrepreneurial model of how the nations of Europe can relate to each other. Some will have a single currency and pursue deeper political integration. Others, while continuing to co-operate and trade, will maintain a democratic mandate and consent over their own laws.

I will vote to leave on 23 June because I want Britain to be a significant global player, whether in Nato, the UN or the World Trade Organisation. But I am not prepared to give a democratic endorsement to an institution that has shown itself incapable of adapting to the modern world, that is failing a generation of young people and that responds to each new crisis by doing more of the same. Vote to leave on 23 June and take back control.

Gisela Stuart is Labour MP for Birmingham Edgbaston and chair of the Vote Leave campaign