--- title: Brexit: Why Britain Should Vote Leave and Hasten EU's Demise description: The EU has mutated into a behemoth above democratic restraint. Today, its power is matched only by its imperviousness to public opinion canonical: https://time.com/4374905/brexit-vote-leave-european-union/ author: Kapil Komireddi article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-06-21T16:54:21.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:25.505Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Brexit: Why Britain Should Vote Leave and Hasten EU's Demise og:description: The EU has mutated into a behemoth above democratic restraint. Today, its power is matched only by its imperviousness to public opinion og:url: https://time.com/4374905/brexit-vote-leave-european-union/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7820b1c4f041313d/6988985a428a9e2d36cd315c/160622_inv_brexit.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2100 og:image:height: 1181 og:image:alt: 160622_INV_Brexit og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Brexit: Why Britain Should Vote Leave and Hasten EU's Demise twitter:description: The EU has mutated into a behemoth above democratic restraint. Today, its power is matched only by its imperviousness to public opinion twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7820b1c4f041313d/6988985a428a9e2d36cd315c/160622_inv_brexit.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Britons Must Vote to Leave the E.U., and Hasten its Demise > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Why 'Brexit' Will Be the Most Important Decision Britons Will Ever Make [Watch (HLS stream): Why 'Brexit' Will Be the Most Important Decision Britons Will Ever Make](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/IAHL35u6.m3u8) (2:26)  _Published 2016-04-15. A look at what's at stake in Britain's June 23 vote on wether to leave or remain in the European Union_ by [Kapil Komireddi](https://time.com/author/kapil-komireddi/) ## Kapil Komireddi Jun 21, 2016 4:54 PM UTC  Brexit supporters' flag during demonstration on Westminster Bridge. Brexit supporters' flag during demonstration on Westminster Bridge. AP by [Kapil Komireddi](https://time.com/author/kapil-komireddi/) ## Kapil Komireddi Jun 21, 2016 4:54 PM UTC We have seen the very worst of British politics. The debate provoked by the referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union has [grown so ugly](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/16/nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point-poster-queue-of-migrants) that many decent voters contemplating quitting the E.U. are surely considering switching their vote on Thursday to remain. This would be a terrible mistake. Britain’s future in the E.U. should be decided primarily on the basis of Britain’s experience of being in the E.U. A cause does not lose its validity because aspects of it are supported by people with a dubious reputation. The E.U., which originated as a liberal marketplace for the advanced economies of the continent, has mutated, over the decades, into a behemoth above democratic restraint. Today, its power to shape public life is matched only by its imperviousness to public opinion. Its laws and regulations, crafted by technocrats immune from electoral accountability, enjoy supremacy over legislation passed by the British parliament. It’s hard to see how parliament can credibly claim to be sovereign as long its legislative power remains inferior to the E.U.’s. The idea that the E.U. can be reformed from within is difficult to reconcile with facts. At the beginning of the year, the Prime Minister of Britain spent two arduous days pleading with Brussels for permission to alter his government’s costly welfare provisions for migrants from Europe – only to be thwarted by the representatives of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. David Cameron sought to portray the meagre concessions he obtained as a triumph of British sovereignty; his ordeal in fact revealed the extent to which foreign states are able to dictate Britain’s domestic policy. The E.U’s suffocating supranational authority cannot be resisted from within: the only way to be spared its intrusions is to leave it altogether. Any entity that makes surrender of sovereignty the condition of its cooperation should be shunned, not embraced. Many trade unionists and politicians with long records of anti-E.U. activism, anxious that a victory for Brexit might strengthen the rightwing protagonists of the Leave campaign, have become reluctant converts to Remain. Their timidity should not obscure the harm the E.U. has done to ordinary workers. The hasty manner in which former Soviet satellite states were conscripted into the E.U., partly to gain cheap labour and partly to upstage Russia, has had perverse consequences. It has depressed wages for jobs that were already low-paying, severely bruising sections of society that have long felt disempowered. The E.U. does not create opportunities for low-wage workers in Britain – it intensifies the competition for low-paid jobs. Consider a British company that sells sporting equipment to Europe. The employees who pack its products are not only among the lowest paid – they must fight for their jobs with workers from Europe. The owners of the company profit from access to the single market, while those who toil in its warehouses can only lose from the deluge of workers from the E.U. It is their grievances, neglected for so long by mainstream politicians because they are themselves powerless to tame the E.U., that have powered the rise of rightwing demagogues. The British labour force, however, is not the worst casualty of the E.U. Some of the most exploited workers in the U.K. – often overqualified and mostly underpaid – come from the E.U.’s poorer member states. If their arrival in Britain creates downward pressure on wages here, their departure from their home countries—as the economist Paul Collier has argued—can cause a debilitating brain drain over there. More troublingly, the E.U., by imposing free movement of people on its members, is helping to retard the long-term progress of Europe’s poorer states, whose leaders are able to evade the onerous task of creating the social and economic conditions in which their citizens may thrive by procuring admission for them to the prosperous nations of Western Europe. It is clear that, contrary to the lofty claims advanced by the Remainers, the E.U. is not a benign or civilising force. More often than not, it functions as a facilitator and enforcer of lending cartels. Remember Greece? A country ravaged by austerity was ordered last summer by the E.U. to impose yet more crippling austerity on its people. When the Greek government defiantly sought, and received, a fresh mandate from the voters to reject the terms—among them the privatisation of Greece’s electricity grid and ferry services, and the signing away of $50 billion to a [_private_ holding company](http://goo.gl/mMy7DF) — the E.U. and the I.M.F. effectively carried out a coup. Denying essential services to citizens in order to fill the coffers of creditors amounted, in the vocabulary of the E.U., to responsible behaviour. Greece’s finance minister at the time called it a “postmodern occupation”. But such was the terror of challenging the economic dogmas of the E.U. that European politicians refused to strike a note of dissent. An entity that trampled on the democratic will of Greek citizens and brought Greece to its knees, and that went on to strike an unconscionable deal to resettle refugees in Turkey—a state that, led by an authoritarian Islamist, is bombing the Kurdish people leading the fight against Islamic State—by bribing Ankara with [immediate visa-free travel for its 75 million citizens to much of Europe](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35854413) is not a somewhat flawed institution capable of being perfected with minor fixes: it is a sinister force that deserves immediately to be dismantled. Supporters of the E.U. can seem like believers in what the Princeton academic Atul Kohli calls a “two-track democracy” – a charade in which “common people are only needed at the time of elections, and then it is best that they all go home, forget politics and let the ‘rational’ elite quietly run a pro-business show”. The Brexit referendum, subjecting the E.U. to intense democratic scrutiny for the first time, has unsettled them. And the apparently high-minded side in this debate, unable to offer hope, has resorted to using fear: issuing apocalyptic prophecies, from the collapse of the United Kingdom to its imminent takeover by fascists. Yet, for all the hostility it has generated, the debate has shed light on the degree to which the E.U. has enabled the marginalisation and exploitation of the weakest people in Europe. The most enlightened thing that ordinary British voters can do, for themselves and for their European neighbours, is inaugurate the demise of the E.U. by voting on Thursday to leave it. ## Transcript Brex it. The biggest choice we'll face in a generation. Do we want to stay or do we want to go? We are approaching one of the biggest decisions this country will face in our lifetimes. Whether to remain in a reformed European Union, or to leave. The choice goes to the heart of the kind of country we want to be. And the future that we want for our children. If the Brits leave the European Union, they're gonna be a lot of other people that say, that looks like a good idea, that referendum, especially if it looks Muscles. Specially of their breath seems like they're advantage gone forbid as the consequence which means that the EU is really incumbent on them to make this process as painful and it's process could take a long time to actually effectuate. It's gonna be enormous ly Democratic and they're going to make it hurt. They gonna make it hurt from a financial sectors perspective. They gonna make it hurt in terms of cash and trades. Security collaboration between the Brits and the Europeans. We get weaker, not stronger. And the idea that the Brits will somehow be less vulnerable to migration and terrorism if they would leave the EU I think is wholly ludicrous. And yet, despite all of those things, A reasonably decent chance. Almost a coin flip that the Brooks will indeed on June 23rd vote to leave. The reason for that is because [ UNKNOWN ] so bad. The cabinet agreed that the government's position will be to recommend that Britain remains in a reformed European union. [ UNKNOWN ] Should not be likely. There was a study that just came out from the Confederation of British Industries, that in the incidence of [ INAUDIBLE ] we would have a direct economic consequence to the UK of about $ 140 billion dollar hit by 2020, and almost a million jobs, but not 950, 000 jobs. Everything about Europe, whether it's governance, whether it's the strength of leadership from someone like Angela Merkel, whether it's terrorist threat, if it's the refugees and the unwillingness of anyone to accept them, the ineffectualness of decision making processes in Brussels or to Brussels. All of those things are gonna look uglier in June 2013 then we are today. At the end of the day, referenda and elections are about turn out, they're about passions, and how are you gonna get people to actually say that they support, in large numbers, this unpopular Europe. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4374905/brexit-vote-leave-european-union/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4374905/brexit-vote-leave-european-union/"},"headline":"Britons Must Vote to Leave the E.U., and Hasten its Demise","datePublished":"2016-06-21T16:54:21.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:25.505Z","description":"The EU has mutated into a behemoth above democratic restraint. 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