The answer is blowing in the wind for the pro-EU campaigners

Parliamentary Business: The debate is so calm, I must revise my view that the referendum is creating ‘uncertainty’ for the City

When he lost his North Devon seat at the General Election, Sir Nick Harvey’s views on the European Union were fairly mainstream among Liberal Democrats, the most Europhile of the big parties. Yet in the 1990s and early 2000s, this most distinguished of MPs was an outsider in the Lib Dems because of, as the BBC put it in an article 14 years ago, his “robust Euroscepticism”.

While his views softened over the years, it was still remarkable that by the time he left Parliament, Sir Nick’s fundamental position – anti-single currency, demanding big structural reforms – was fairly centre-ground even among the still EU-friendly Lib Dems.

As Europhiles started questioning the great project, particularly when the eurozone crisis took hold in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the Eurosceptic argument had also grown more sophisticated.

In the 1990s, Euroscepticism felt borderline jingoistic and should have been described as Euro-hating. The Sun’s famous “Up Yours [Jacques] Delors!” was a fantastic tabloid headline but, as an attack on a former European Commission president, reads horribly now.

Today, Euroscepticism is an accurate description of most politicians who will vote for Brexit in the In/Out referendum: they are, largely, doubtful that the EU is good for Britain, but are not entirely antagonistic. This means they could be won over to vote for In. They don’t, for example, believe that 3 million British jobs are dependent on EU trade, but they appreciate there is a clear link.

Some will end up voting to stay, persuaded, unhappily, that remaining in the EU will be in the national interest. Equally, there are plenty of broadly pro-Europeans who could be won over by the Brexit camp, provided they are convinced that the UK would be better off forging closer ties with Commonwealth countries, Africa or Asia.

The arguments are subtler today than they were 20 years ago, and the better for it. Rarely now do we hear of the national necessity of the Queen’s head on a bank note, or the inevitability of a third pan-European war without ever-closer union.

If the current thinking about a longer referendum campaign is correct, the rival camps should have until 2017 to set out their cases. David Cameron promised this was the latest point at which he would hold the plebiscite, though it was previously thought the Prime Minister would try to get it out of the way next year.

Certainly Conservative ministers are ultra-relaxed about the possible longer timescale; this fight is not going to have the fire of the Scottish independence referendum, that’s for sure.

In fact, I think the debate – outside the handful of people leading the In and Out campaigns – has become so calm that I must revise my previous adherence in this column to the orthodox view that the looming referendum is creating “uncertainty” for the City.

This idea of uncertainty – that foreign multinational companies could delay decisions on investing in Britain for fear we might no longer be a launchpad into the EU – has been an early In campaign trump card. At a recent select committee hearing, the Eurosceptic Business Secretary Sajid Javid dismissed this claim and he’s probably right – for now.

Let me put forward an alternative business argument for the In campaign. I can reveal that the FTSE 100 energy giant SSE has been granted European Investment Bank (EIB) financing worth several hundred million pounds towards the £2bn construction of a windfarm about 14km off the Caithness coast in Scotland.

Britain benefits anyway from the self-styled “EU bank”, but what is crucial about this project is that it will be the first in Britain to benefit from what is called the “European Fund for Strategic Investments”. This is not actually a fund, but it is a new plan under which the European Commission will provide a guarantee of up to 25 per cent of EIB financing on projects that it would have previously deemed too risky to support.

Suddenly docks in the Netherlands and motorways in Slovakia – which had enough potential problems to make a case for the EIB not to fund them – are viable. The guarantee means a cautious EIB can kickstart growth in struggling EU countries.

This €21bn (£15.bn) of guarantees, it is estimated, could lead to €315bn of additional infrastructure being built by 2020.

The idea was pioneered by Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission with whom Britain has so often clashed since his appointment last year. The UK has boasted that it is the fastest-growing G7 economy, and this plan is really meant for the eurozone countries that have been battered since the 2007 credit crunch turned into a continental and global financial crisis.

Yet Britain, in the form of this SSE windfarm, known as “Beatrice”, is a big early beneficiary of the guarantee. There will, I am told by a source close to the EIB, be backing for further British projects.

SSE – alongside partners Repsol, the Spanish oil and gas group, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners – had hoped to start construction on Beatrice next year. Because of the EU, that target might be hit.

That does not mean we should stay in, but this campaign will be won, by either side, through the collective strength of many small arguments such as this one.

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