Published on Liberal Democrat Voice By Lord William Wallace | Thu 18th December 2014 – 2:48 pm

If you’re interested in the evidence about UK interests at stake in EU membership, it’s now available: over 2000 submissions, to 32 government reports.  And the overwhelming evidence, from small business and large, from legal bodies and service providers, is that the EU serves British interests well, above all in the regulations that underpin the Single Market, but also in fighting cross-border crime and providing a multilateral framework for UK foreign policy.

Eurosceptic Conservatives hoped that this exercise would demonstrate how Brussels regulations cramped British enterprise and undermined English common law.  Four rounds of consultation over two years, on topics as diverse as fisheries policy and police and criminal justice, have concluded that the current balance fits British companies and public services well.

There are, of course, some criticisms – of the European Commission’s habit of proposing new initiatives without paying enough attention to the implementation of existing regulations, and to the European Court of Justice’s tendency to interpret the Treaties expansively.  But the Bar Council, the National Farmers’ Union, the Local Government Association, the Royal College of Midwives, the National Federation of Hairdressers, and a great many other bodies agreed that we are far better served in the EU than out.  Easyjet’s evidence began with the blunt statement that their airline would not exist without the creation of the Single Market.

So we have beaten the Eurosceptics in the battle of evidence.  It will be hard even for the most ideologically obtuse to argue that economic and social interests across the UK do not benefit from the EU framework.  So hardened Eurosceptics have attacked those engaged in this massive consultation exercise.  John Redwood denounced the whole thing as a plot led by ‘Eurofederalsit’ officials; the Daily Telegraph stated that William Hague should have stopped the reports coming out without a Eurosceptic spin.

However, one lesson of the Euro-election debates between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage is that evidence alone is not enough to sway public opinion. Clegg threw fact after fact at Farage, to see them bounce off him with his cheery scepticism unscathed.  The European argument is also about deep emotional issues: about British identity and perceived threats to it, about national self-confidence, about nostalgia for the great power status – and the manufacturing economy – we have lost.  To persuade the wider electorate we have to make the case that Britain’s past and future lie with our neighbours across the Channel.

Some Eurosceptics conjure up an English-speaking ‘Anglo-Saxon world’ as the alternative framework, looking to a white, small-government, free market USA and Canada without understanding how much those countries have been transformed by immigration and economic transformation over the past 50 years.  Others look to China and Russia as preferred partners – even supporting Putin against Ukraine, and blaming the Germans and the European Union for the Ukrainian crisis.

All across the UK, schools and local history societies are rediscovering how closely British troops fought with French and Belgian regiments, how many Belgian refugees were scattered throughout the country, and how the war represented a Europe-wide disaster fed by competing imperial and nationalist ambitions.  Britain tried to disengage after 1918, only to be drawn back in 20 years later.  Europe is our backyard, as well as our largest market.  British history has been bound up with that of France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy since Roman times.  Around two million British citizens now live and work, or have retired, to other parts of Europe, almost as many as citizens from other EU states now living here.

After 50 years of cold war confrontation, with a third of the British army stationed in Germany, we have extended democratic values successfully across Eastern Europe.  Young British people today travel without thinking to Warsaw, Prague and Bucharest.  People in Ukraine are struggling for the freedoms and prosperity we, and other Europeans, have successfully embedded in other former soviet states.  This is our neighbourhood, with open societies, clear rule of law, a market to which half our exports flow, and democratic governments with whom we cooperate.  And the Eurosceptics want to throw all this away, to draw closer to Putin’s Russia, to try on our own to persuade authoritarian China to offer us a better trade deal, and to follow wherever a right-wing Republican US Congress might want to take us.  That’s not only absurd, it’s unpatriotic, and we need to reinforce our use of evidence with gut arguments like this.

* Lord Wallace of Saltaire is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords.