So, David Cameron wants a referendum?

I believe that small is beautiful, and that the European Union system is big and fragile. I am all for free trade, freedom of movement and immigration. But as for regulatory, monetary and fiscal integration — which is the direction that Europe has taken, especially since the self-inflicted Euro crisis that grew out the fundamentally flawed Euro system — how can Europe be responsive to its citizens when they are so numerous, so diverse and so geographically and linguistically dispersed? How can it be viable to have the same regulatory and political framework for Poland, Spain, Austria, Britain, Denmark and Greece? Political and monetary frameworks that are local and decentralised are usually responsive and representative. Big bureaucratic juggernauts are very often clunky and unresponsive.

That means that I am quite open to the idea of Britain leaving the political union, so long as we retain the economic framework that Britain voted for in a referendum on joining the European Economic Community — the predecessor to the European Union — in the 1970s. Britain never voted for political union, and the British public has been shown again and again in polls to be broadly against such a thing.

But David Cameron’s plan for an In-Out referendum in 2017 — but only if the Conservatives win the 2015 election — is misguided. It will just create five years of totally unnecessary policy and regulatory uncertainty.

There is empirical evidence to suggest that policy uncertainty can be very damaging to the economy. A 2013 paper Scott Baker, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven Davis used automated text analysis techniques to count key words relevant to uncertainty in the media. They combined the news analysis with data from tax code changes, disagreement among economic forecasters, and information from equity option markets to create an “uncertainty index”:

They looked at changes to gross domestic product, private investment, industrial production and unemployment, and found that spikes in uncertainty foreshadow large and persistent declines in all four. First, GDP and private investment:

Next, industrial production and unemployment:

The last thing that Britain needs is five years of policy uncertainty. If Cameron wants to have a referendum on E.U. membership, why not do it now? 82% of the public favour such a referendum — presumably not only UKIP and Conservative voters, but also Liberal Democrats and Labour voters. If we vote to leave, then we leave, if we vote to stay, we stay. We — and the markets — will know exactly where we stand.

Frankly this strikes me as more of a political ploy. The Conservatives are haemorrhaging support to UKIP. They are roughly ten points behind Labour in the polls. This strange announcement just seems like an attempt by Cameron to claw back support and distract from the disastrous state of the economy which just entered a triple-dip recession and which has been depressed since 2008. Ironically, this announcement may actually worsen the economic woe.