Letters to the Editor – Flawed Arguments?

Sir,

Little Englander, Xenophobia, yearning for Empire etc. or could this be said another way – Proud to be British and dubious about such strange bedfellows as de Gaulle, who in 1967 refused the UK entry to the EEC on the grounds that our economy was too weak. Only to have the same sentiments repeated in 2011 by Sarkozy, who, in umbrage about a disagreement on the new European treaty called our Prime Minister an ‘Obstinate kid’ because he had listened democratically to the reservations of our politicians’ business men and citizens.

Very non Eurocratic and this from a country which is now aided and abetted by a country which led us into two global conflicts at a cost of tens of thousands of our citizens lives both military and civilian.

Thankfully we are not in the Eurozone, although they are asking us for £25 Billion from our weak economy to help the poor Greeks, Portuguese, Italians, Spanish, Lithuanians, and Bulgarians etc. etc. Far from our economy being worse off if we left the EU, we would be considerably better off.

Please remember that ever since our involvement with the EU, Europe has got a lot more out of us then we have got out of them.

There are two main factors to consider.

First, our net contribution to the EU budget, in the 42 years we have paid into the EU we have never had more back than we put in. France contributes less per capita than the UK and gets more back particularly from the Common Agricultural policy which employs 13% of French workers.

Second, in 2005 the UK exported goods and services worth £166 billion to the EU (only 13% of our gross domestic product) in the same year the UK imported £204 billion from the EU. UK deficit, £38 Billion by 2007 the deficit had crept up to £40 billion.

Alternatively when the Eurozone finally collapses, followed by the EU, we will, as we have done so successfully in the past, turn to the emerging and unfettered economies of China, India, Brazil Australia, South Africa and the USA, Japan and Scandinavia to mention a few, while retaining much of our trade in the 27 EU countries.

If that’s not enough the British Chamber of Commerce calculates that the cost to UK business of additional EU regulation introduced between 1998 and 2010 as a staggering £60.75 billion.

Additionally, I don’t have much faith in an organisation which has not been able to get it accounts signed off by its auditors for 14 years, and then spends huge sums of our money getting the auditor dismissed and persecuted for a many years. A lot of books and reports have been written about the EC’s endemic corruption and fiscal mismanagement. They validate the auditor’s decision. You would have been sacked in industry if a company you had been running failed to get its accounts signed off once.

As a concluding thought, I don’t have to marry my neighbor to buy her car.