EU Referendum: European Law expert compares Brexit campaigners to creationists

Professor Michael Dougan said the Leave campaign had 'degenerated into dishonesty on an industrial scale'.

A lecture by a law professor has become an unlikely internet hit after he used it to attack what he called the Leave Campaign’s “industrial scale dishonesty”.

Michael Dougan, professor of European Law at Liverpool University, said that having spent his entire career studying European constitutional law, single market law and free movement legislation, watching the Leave campaign had been: “Probably the equivalent of an evolutionary biologist listening to a bunch of creationists tell the public creation theory is right and evolution is completely wrong.”

“I have watched with increasing dismay as this referendum debate has unfolded,” he added. “Although the Remain campaign haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory at points with their use of dodgy statistics, I think the Leave campaign has degenerated into dishonesty on an industrial scale. There is no other way to put it – on an industrial scale.”

Prof Dougan’s lecture had initially been intended to be seen only by other staff members at Liverpool University, as part of a monthly series of internal talks on topics of general interest.

But so many staff members commented on how informative it had been that the university decided to make its video of the lecture public.

It has now gone viral, attracting 6 million online views and favourable comments from celebrities including the singer Lily Allen.

The lecture began with Prof Dougan saying his 20-odd years of professional experience had convinced him it was “firmly in the national interest to remain one of the leading powers within one of the most important international organisations on the planet.”

Analysing what he called “the myth of sovereignty,” he tore into the idea that “we are the pathetic victims of Brussels, as if this country were incapable of looking after itself.”

“To anyone who works in the field,” he said, “This is just absolutely bizarre.”

The UK, he said, is one of the EU’s “big three”, with France and Germany.

“Virtually nothing happens in the EU without the big three being in control,” Prof Dougan said. “We are leading players within the European Union.”

“The EU,” he added, “is not run by the unelected Eureaucrats we are hearing about all the time. It’s actually run by the 28 [elected] governments working together in the Council together with the European Parliament.”

Dismissing the notion that there are no facts by which to judge EU membership, he insisted: “There is plenty of hard, detailed evidence to show EU membership is not destroying this country like we are constantly being told it is.”

The Government’s 2012-2014 Balance of Competences Review he said, was “one of the largest research exercises undertaken by the British Civil Service in its entire history.”

It produced 32 detailed reports, he said, finding that “every major stakeholder across every major sector of our economy and society doesn’t have a problem with our EU membership. On the contrary, they say it brings real added value to our national policy making.”

Without explicitly mentioning Vote Leave’s ‘take back control’ slogan, Prof Dougan argued that Brexit could result in the Government rewriting vast chunks of UK law, without MPs in Parliament having much control over the process.

He said there would have to be “a comprehensive review of the UK legal system because for 40 years UK law has evolved in combination with EU law and the two are virtually impossible to disentangle.”

“It will have to be done very, very quickly,” Prof Dougan added. “It is simply impossible to imagine a situation in which Parliament can undertake a comprehensive review of the entire legal system. There is a pretty strong consensus that the only way this can be done is through an enormous delegation of power from Parliament to Government. Whole swathes of legislation, be it on workers or consumers or the environment, may well be deeply affected.”

Criticising the “surprisingly poorly informed” debate around future trade agreements, Professor Dougan said the real problem would not be tariffs. It would be “The Holy Grail of international trade, regulatory barriers.”

The “unique achievement” of the EU’s common market standardisation, he said, was to overcome the problem of manufacturers requiring separate production lines to comply with each country’s different packaging, environmental and consumer protection regulations: “Nothing else on the planet compares to it.”

“If the [post-EU] UK wanted to retain that level of integration with the single market,” he said, “There is no doubt whatever that we would have to go for the Norwegian option. [And] even the Norwegian government has admitted that is a thoroughly unattractive deal.

“It basically means you have to do everything the EU says, you don’t have any influence over the formation of the rules and you still have to pay a whopping membership fee for belonging to the single market.”

Prof Dougan, however, said even this deal would probably be impossible because single market membership is conditional upon accepting full free movement of people – something the Leave campaign, which has stressed the need control immigration, is unlikely to agree to.

“Kissing goodbye to the single market,” Prof Dougan said, would mean the regulatory barriers going back up.

“If there is a reason why the great majority of economists are against Brexit,” he said, “It is because everyone agrees that the trade environment would become significantly less favourable.”

As for the rest of the world, Prof Dougan said: “I am gobsmacked by the way we are told ‘We’ll be free, free to trade with whomever we please. We’ll enter into these new treaties with these other countries, just like that!’

“It is completely beyond doubt – even though I keep hearing it isn’t – that leaving the EU will also terminate all of the UK’s trade agreements with countries outside Europe because these were negotiated with and through the EU.”

It was, he said, “the official position of America, China, India to say the least,” that they would wait to see what the nature of the UK’s new relationship with the EU before entering into any trade agreement.

And if the UK was outside the single market, said Prof Dougan, it would lose its biggest bargaining chip of being able to offer EU-wide trade access: “If we are not part of the single market any more, we don’t actually have an enormous amount of bargaining power.”

“As a legal scientist,” he concluded, “My credibility rests on the fact that I have to analyse the evidence in a rigorous and credible way.

“The evidence is that our current relationship with the EU is valuable, it is largely positive.”