A letter to eurofacts which was published on 20th October 2006.
Your report (eurofacts, 22nd September) on the findings of the cost-benefit analysis for Switzerland of EU membership, commissioned by the Swiss government, prompts one to wonder what if anything will induce any likely British government to do the same for Britain.
One piece of data which would, I believe, resonate well with the British public is that for the last several years the aggregate trade with the EU of the United States, Canada and Australia is broadly the same as Britain’s. If you add in Japan, the aggregate comfortably exceeds Britain’s, yet these four countries pay precisely nothing to the EU for the privilege. Their trade relations with the EU are subject only to the rules of the World Trade Organisation to which virtually all countries and organisations involved in trade, including the EU, belong.
The so-called ‘Single Market’ may or may not be an advantage for those countries selling into EU countries but it is not something countries outside the EU feel they should pay for.
When put this way, a very wide range of people would, I believe, actively question our EU membership and its colossal annual fee (£12 billion and rising), particularly when this government cannot, apparently, afford proper provision for the care of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or pay them properly.
A letter to the Spectator magazine which was published on 23rd September 2006.
Your contributor David Rennie (‘It’s funny what you can pick up in Iceland’, 16th September) greatly overcomplicates the basic issues surrounding Britain’s possible withdrawal from the EU with his talk of rejoining the European Free Trade Area (Efta). What most long-term opponents of Britain’s membership of the EU actually wish is for the UK to be in the same relationship with the EU for economic purposes as are the USA, Canada and Australia, whose aggregate trade with the EU is about the same as Britain’s, and for which they pay the EU absolutely nothing. The constant reiteration of the phrase ‘access to the Single Market’ as the benefit for which Britain pays about £10 billion gross is thus totally misleading. The EU’s external trade is regulated by its membership of the World Trade Organisation in which, after withdrawal from the EU, the UK would resume its place as a fully independent member. World trade in goods is in any case practically tariff-free, while since 1995 the WTO has systematically extended transparency to the trade in services.
From a global trade policy and regulation point of view the EU, like EFTA, is now to all intents and purposes irrelevant.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 20th March 1997.
The proposal by two Liberal Democrat MPs that the Union flag should be replaced as our national flag (report, March 19th) is typical of the many denaturalised, metro-people who gravitate to the Liberal Democrats.
With the Stars and Stripes, the Union flag is the most instantly recognised flag in the whole world.
It is universally accepted as a symbol of Britishness and as such is part of the flags of four Canadian provinces, six Australian states, the national flags of New Zealand and Australia, the Red and White Ensigns and innumerable regimental flags in all four Old Commononwealth countries.
The Union flag is above all the flag of freedom which desperate people have sheltered under and men have died for. But Lib Dems – their heads buzzing with millennial chatter – wouldn’t understand that.
