‘E’ The case for staying in the EU.
Surely there must be good things we get out of our EU
membership? Well, I will try to set the case
for staying in the EU, as put forward by the Government
and other Europhiles in our recent Lords debates, to which I have referred (June 27th
2003 and February 11th 2004).
Presumably it’s the best case they can make.
If you read those debates, you will see
that there isn’t really a case for the EU.
It just isn’t possible to identify any genuine benefits we have had from
our EU membership, which we couldn’t have had under simple free trade
arrangements and collaboration between Governments. But I will do my best. The
Propaganda runs as follows:
1)
‘60%
of our trade and 3 million jobs depend on our membership of the EU’.
This is designed to fool the British
people into fearing that they cannot afford to leave the EU.
[Answer to (1)]
-Not True. By the word “trade”, they actually mean “exports of manufactured
goods” which count for less than half of
total UK exports. But since Brussels’
dictates apply to and strangle 100% of our economy, the only way to understand
the effect of our EU membership is to look at the whole of our output and all
our jobs. Then we see the true picture,
which is that only about 10% of our output and jobs support our trade with the
EU, another 10% goes in trade to the rest of the world, and the remaining 80%
stays right here in the domestic market. (13) Our healthy 90% dog is being wagged by its mangy 10% tail.
Not that 10% of our output and jobs which
support our trade with the EU are unimportant.
No-one is saying that. But the obvious fact is that we would not lose that
10% of output or jobs if we left the EU and continued our trade with the Single
Market.
And there really isn’t any doubt that
this is what we would do. The EU
trades in massive surplus with the UK.
They sell us far more than we sell them. This
means that they have many more jobs dependent on their trade with us than we do
on our trade with them.
We are by far their largest client. So if we left the
EU, They would come running to us to make sure we signed a free trade agreement
with them. After all, Switzerland,
Mexico and 20 other countries already enjoy free trade agreements with the EU,
which is negotiating FTAs with a further 69 countries. (14). This makes 91
countries in all, about half the countries in the world. So if [when] we left the EU we could maintain
all our present trading arrangements, plus no doubt “free movement of persons”
and so on, which again Switzerland already enjoys. We could dictate our terms.
Even free trade with the EU is no longer such a big deal as
it used to be. The World trade Organisation has brought
the EU’s average external tariff-paid by the US and most other countries in the
world to export to the EU-down to about 1.5%. (15) Indeed, every major economic study this country agrees that
leaving the EU would be at worst neutral for our trade and jobs
[But we would be a free nation state with
return of our own law; our Fishing Industry and much much more - that we have
lost over the past 30 plus years]
The leftist and fairly Europhile National
Institute of Social and Economic Research said in March 2000. (16) The International Trade
Commission in Washington, perhaps the world’s largest and most prestigious
economic think –tank, said in a report to Congress in August 2000. (17) Our Institute of Economic Affairs said it in 1996 and again in
2002. (18) Even Neil Kinnock and the EU
trade Commissioner, Fritz Bolkestein, were forced to admit on the today
programme in February 2001. In fact,
no-one except the Europhile propagandists pretends that leaving the EU would
bring economic disadvantage to the people of Great Britain. Our
trade would continue, and so would our jobs.
Question:
2.
‘We gain influence by sharing our sovereignty. Look at NATO and the United Nations. We gave up sovereignty to join them,
Answer: Sovereignty is like virginity. You either have it or
you don’t.
Nato and the UN don’t dictate of our unwanted laws and regulations, and we
could leave them tomorrow if we felt like it.
Question.
3.
We are told that ‘the British people voted to join the EU in the
referendum of 1975’ and so that should be the end of the
matter.
Answer:
But they didn’t. They voted to stay in what they were assured was a common
Market, or free trade area.
Question:
4.
They
claim that ‘if we left the EU we would still have to obey all its rules, but
not able to participate in making those rules’.
Answer: of the world
Not So. The truth is
that those who make up the 10% of our economy which exports to the EU would of
course have to meet Brussels’s requirements, as does every other non-EU
exporter in the rest of the world, and just as it pays to put a steering wheel
on the left if you are selling a car to the US market.
But the other 90% of our
economy would no longer have to obey the dictates from Brussels. Exports to the EU
from the USA and Switzerland, who are not EU members, are going
faster than those from any of the member states. (19)
Question:
5. ‘Our membership of the EU makes us the gateway for
inward investment into Europe’.
Nonsense. Foreigners invest here because of our reliable workforce,
low tax and regulatory regime (until the EU destroys that), and because we speak English. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that inward investment
creates many jobs anyway, and 80% of it goes into oil, gas and services, which
do not supply EU markets. (20)
Question:
6.
Then
there’s the claim that our bond market, the City of London, and so on, would
all collapse if we left the EU.
Answer:
That’s what they told us would happen if
we didn’t join the Euro.
The greatest threat to the City and our bond market actually came from
the EU, with its withholding tax proposals, which even Gordon Brown threatened
to veto.
Question:
7.
5.
We
re told that if we Euro-sceptics would only shut up, the UK could take its
place at the heart of ‘Europe’ and lead it into the paths of righteousness;
that the French and the Germans would somehow abandon their ruinous social and
labour policies, instead of forcing them on the rest of us through the Single
Market.
Answer:
But how can we persuade them of our
national interest, with only 11.5 % of the votes? Why have we been unable to change even the notorious Common
Agricultural and Fisheries Policies in the 32 years of our membership?
Question:
8.
They
say ‘the EU must be good news because 10 new Eastern European nations have
voted to join it?
Answer:
The answers here are that:
First- turnout in all the referenda was very low.
Second- the people weren’t told the truth about the EU. For instance, most of them [the new 10
members] proposed new Constitution at all.
Third- the spending by the ‘Yes’ ides was massively more than the
‘NO’ sides. In Estonia, for instance,
the ‘Yes’ campaign spent 60 times what the ‘No’ campaign could raise.
But
most important of all, the key to understanding the ‘Yes’ votes is that most of
the bureaucrats and politicians who negotiated the entry of their countries
into the EU stand to get jobs in Brussels, or paid on the EU scale. The Polish ambassador has told me that 1400
Poles will now get EU jobs, at 10 times their present salaries.
Question:
9.
Were
told that the EU Project is ‘reuniting Europe’.
Answer:
But if you ask them when Europe was last
united in the way they wish to see it ‘re-united’, you get a rather
uncomfortable look. (Caesar? Napoleon?
Hitler?) [Who next]
This
leads me to perhaps the most effective piece of Europhile propaganda:
Question:
10.
That
the EU has secured the peace in Europe since 1945, and is essential to maintain
it in future.
Answer:
This is a big deception, which plays at the almost
unconscious level. It is a warm misty conviction that the
EU must be inevitably good. It does not
tolerate any rational examination of history or the facts. It’s the one, which makes those of us who
query the divinity of the EU Project into dangerous nationalists, xenophobes,
Little Englanders, or worse.
You start to be guilty of this as soon as
you dare to point out that NATO was entirely responsible for keeping the peace
in Europe until the Wall came down in 1089, or if you ask which European
country would have gone to war with another in the absence of the EU.
So
even this essential plank of Europhile propaganda is simply wishful thinking,
constantly repeated by the Eurocrats in order to justify their bloated
lifestyles and the Project in general.
Indeed, if you stand back, scratch your
head a bit, and take a calm look at the EU, you see it is a well-tried model
for discord, not peace. It
contains two of the most important ingredients for conflict.
First- It is a top-down amalgamation of different peoples, put
together without informed consent, and such arrangements usually end
in conflict. You only have to look at
Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, the Trans-Caucasus, Kashmir and most of Africa to
see that.
Second- As I have pointed out, the EU is institutionally
undemocratic. It is corrupt, which is
another ingredient for trouble. I repeat, the Project aims to replace ‘ dangerous national
democracies with a supra-national government, run by a Commission of wise and
honest technocrats. But history
shows us that on the whole democracies do not provoke war, and indeed it’s hard to think of a genuine democracy which
has declared war on another [democracy]. So Euro-sceptics believe that a free trade association
between the democracies of Europe, linked through NATO, is much less likely to
end in tears than is the emerging undemocratic mega –state.
11.
Whilst on the subject of peace, I should
mention that a new raison d’etre is coming to the surface in
Brussels. A large majority of Eurocrats and Europhiles see the EU’s
main purpose in life as being to stand up to and undermine the United States of
America. In fact, this was always part of the
Project, inspired by France’s deep psychotic need to bite the hand
that freed her from two World Wars. Luckily, there
is little prospect that the EU will be able to provide the defence budget
necessary to fulfil this ambition, but it will continue to poison the
trans-Atlantic relationship for the foreseeable future.
End
of Part ‘E’