Which EU Do Remainer MPs Want To Remain In?

Graham Charles Lear
3 min readJan 9, 2019

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There Are Five Versions

Remainer MPs and campaigners are fond of saying that people didn’t know what type of Brexit they were voting for in the 2016 Referendum. What they seem more reluctant to talk about is what type of Remain they voted for.

Remainers talk of remaining in the EU as if it were a form of ‘status quo’. In fact, there isn’t one. The truth is that The EU still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up

27 Countries, 5 Futures

Shortly before the EU’s 60th-anniversary celebrations in 2017, the EU issued its grandiosely entitled document “White Paper on the Future of Europe”. The document sets out in 30 pages a range of futures for the EU and puts them broadly into five categories.

This White Paper maps out the drivers of change in the next decade and presents a range of scenarios for how Europe could evolve by 2025.”
“The scenarios cover a range of possibilities and are illustrative in nature. They are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive.

So, not only are there five futures which are described, but there could be many more.

HOWEVER, No-One Will Know Until After The UK Has Left

Significantly, the EU will not be telling anyone which of the five futures it will be following, until after the date set for the UK’s departure.

Work will thereafter continue in earnest so that we have a plan, a vision, and a way forward to present to the people by the time we hold European Parliament elections in June 2019.

The Five Main Futures

Here is how the EU classifies the five scenarios:-

Carrying On

The EU27 focuses on delivering its positive reform agenda

Nothing but the Single Market:

The EU27 is gradually re-centered on the single market

Those Who Want More Do More:

The EU27 allows willing Member States to do more together in specific areas

Doing Less More Efficiently:

The EU27 focuses on delivering more and faster in selected policy areas while doing less elsewhere

Doing Much More Together:

Member States decide to do much more together across all policy areas

You can read the full text of the White paper here

Please put mouse on the document and scroll down.

It’s regrettable that the EU wasn’t even able to get the title of the document right, calling it the “White Paper on the Future of Europe”. It should, of course, have been called :

“White Paper on the Future of the European Union”

Europe is a continent of some 50 countries

The EU is a failing, undemocratic, political institution trying to govern 28 of those countries. What Type Of Remain Do They want?

The critical factor in all of this is of course that no Remainer can say what type of Remain they voted for,
as the EU still doesn’t know itself.

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Graham Charles Lear

What is life without a little controversy in it? Quite boring and sterile would be my answer.