We can’t stick with the status quo on the EU – because there isn’t one

Good for David Cameron. In letting his ministers campaign for or against EU membership, he is acknowledging that the issue is above party – which is, in a sense, why we’re having a referendum in the first place. The more we recognise that sincere people can disagree, the less acrimonious the process will be.

I voted for David Cameron as Conservative leader and think that he has done a fine job as Prime Minister. The country is in a better place than it was when he took over.

I happen to disagree with him on the EU. The renegotiation was our chance to get a genuinely different deal, based on free trade rather than political merger. Never mind what I wanted, though. The PM has abandoned most of his own declared aims for the sake of rushing through a referendum this year, before the eurozone or migration crises take a turn for the worse.

He had promised to opt out of EU employment laws and social policies; to repatriate control of criminal justice; to curb the European Court; to disapply the Charter of Fundamental Rights; to recover control of who could settle in the UK. All these aims have now been dropped, and we’re hurtling towards a referendum this summer on the basis of essentially optical changes.

David Cameron is emulating Harold Wilson, and you can see why. The canny Yorkshireman was also elected promising “better terms”. He, too, ended up asking for almost nothing. Yet, in 1975, he was able to secure a two-to-one vote to remain in, based largely on people’s fear of change.

Risk-aversion is deep in our DNA. In test after test, behavioural psychologists have found that, given the chance to win a larger sum by staking a smaller one, people make the mathematically irrational decision to stick with what they have.

You can’t blame Inners for making status quo bias central to their campaign. It’s more sensible, from their point of view, than talking about the euro crisis, or the £350 million that Britain sends to Brussels each week, or the disaster of Schengen, or the fact that the UK is outvoted more often than any of the other 27 states, or the EU’s distrust of democracy.

An MP friend who is campaigning to remain in told me: “It’s like banks. Everyone moans about their bank; but they hardly ever bother to move their accounts.”

Maybe. But you’d move your account pretty sharpish if you thought the bank might fail. And, the more we see of what is taking place across the Channel, the clearer it becomes that voting to stay in would be the greater risk.

Until a couple of years ago, Eurocrats liked to boast of two great achievements: the euro and the border-free area. It is now clear that both were fair-weather schemes. The debt crisis cruelly exposed the weaknesses of the single currency, and the migration crisis brought Schengen to the point of collapse. Yet the EU’s response, in both cases, was to treat deeper union as an end in itself. The euro must be held together, even if millions were thereby condemned to poverty and emigration. The Schengen Zone had to be salvaged, however many illegal migrants were attracted to Europe in consequence.

Britain can’t inoculate itself against these crises while it remains in the EU. The migrants entering the Schengen area will eventually get EU citizenship and, with it, the right to settle in the UK. But the more urgent problem is the continuing weakness of the euro.

In 2011, David Cameron secured, in the clearest language lawyers could devise, a written guarantee that Britain wouldn’t be required to bail out the euro. He made that opt-out a plank of last year’s general election campaign. Yet, a month after the poll, he was obliged to pledge £850 million to bail out Greece. And then, three months after that, he was obliged to pay the balance of the £1.7 billion “prosperity surcharge” that he had previously described as “completely unacceptable”. How, given this record, can we trust any assurance that Britain won’t continue to be gouged?

It’s worth putting these sums in context. During the lifetime of the last Parliament, all the cuts put together saved £36 billion. Over the same period, we gave the EU £87 billion. In other words, our tribute to Brussels wiped out all our domestic austerity programme twice over.

How much worse might things get in the eurozone? Jim Mellon, arguably Britain’s most successful investor, thinks that imminent financial crises in France and Italy will make Greece look like a sideshow. The man who has made nearly a billion pounds by knowing when to buy and when to sell is now urging people to sell the EU – in other words, to leave before the breakdown.

Which brings us to the real difference between now and 1975. Then, Britain was the sick man of Europe: demoralised, tetchy, hit by constant strikes and double-digit inflation. Western Europe, by contrast, had enjoyed what looked like an economic miracle.

Not any more. According to the IMF, the EU’s share of world GDP has shrunk from 30 per cent to 17 per cent since 1980, and the decline is accelerating. While every other continent has grown healthily, the eurozone’s economy, incredibly, is the same size as it was in 2008.

Yet the EU’s leaders insist on prescribing more of the medicine that sickened the patient: political centralisation, tax harmonisation, a bigger role for the Commission. As Angela Merkel puts it: “We need a political union, which means we must gradually cede powers to Europe and give Europe control.”

That’s what we’d be voting for if we opted to stay. There is no status quo: remaining means political integration; leaving means trade instead.

Ask yourself this. If the EU can’t make meaningful concessions when its second largest economy is about to vote on withdrawal, when will it ever be amenable to change? If the UK should vote to stay in, how could it hope to be taken seriously afterwards? Having given its assent, Britain would be deemed to have agreed to the EU’s declared aim of fiscal, economic, juridical, diplomatic, political and military merger.

When you’re on a bus, heading somewhere you don’t want to go, the status quo doesn’t mean remaining in your seat. It means stepping off. You won’t get another chance.