Letter to the Daily Telegraph, published on 27th January 2016

The letter from the Conservative MPs for Reform in Europe (23^rd January) implies that there is something uniquely special about UK access to a tariff-free “trading bloc of 500 million people”.

But for the UK this so-called Single market is not really tariff-free at all. In 2014 we made a net payment of £11,442 Million to the EU to allow  £147,928 Million worth of our goods to be imported by the EU from Britain. This makes an average effective tariff on our goods of 7.7%.

This needs to be compared with the EU’s average tariff applied to goods imported from countries outside the EU, including our fellow Anglophone countries in North America and Australasia, of 5.3%.

There is thus nothing especially “advantageous” for Britain’s access to the EU market as the MPs’ letter puts  it.  If the nonsensical fears that the EU would impose tariffs on British goods entering their markets were ever realised, then our payments to them would be more than compensated by the tariffs we would impose on their exports to us.

Given the enormous £77 Billion goods trade deficit we currently have with the EU we would be nearly £6 Billion better off from this source alone, plenty of scope to reduce business taxation to compensate for any tariff payments they might have to make. But it won’t happen. The Germans, especially, are not that daft!

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 Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 10th June 1996.

In his attempt to prove the impossible, namely that Britain benefits from membership of the European Union, the CBI deputy President, Sir Bryan Nicholson (Saturday), calls in aid the canard that “surveys of business opinion have consistently shown overwhelming majorities in favour”.

Actually the Federation of Small Businesses which has over 90,000 members, many more than the CBI, has voted to leave the EU.  The CBI’s poll on the currency issue, on which it bases its views about business opinion, obtained only 212 responses, less than 3% of its membership.  Of this number only 28%, i.e. 59 responses, favoured abolishing our currency.

However much its chairmen may approve of “Europe” in their off-duty lunches at the CBI, British business is investing globally.  In 1995 ICI, for instance, authorized capital expenditure of over £550 Million in Asia Pacific, three times its commitment to Continental Europe.  Membership of the EU entails costs which are certain and massive while the gains, if any, are marginal and uncertain.  No rational individual or properly managed business would arrange their affairs on such a basis.

In fact the advantages of EU membership are as illusory as the King’s new suit in the Hans Andersen fairy tale.  But for the British people, leaving the EU will bring real gains including: an end to payments to the EU of around £8 billion gross, £3.5 billion net (equivalent to 2 pence on income tax); recovery of control of 60-70% of North Sea fishing grounds; an end to agricultural quotas which reserve portions of the British market for Continental producers; recovery of our right to negotiate world-wide trading agreements; removal of the power of the EU to impose a world-wide ban on British products, or to order the British Government to pay huge sums to pregnant service women, and to remove constraints on suspected IRA terrorists, in the name of the “Single Market”.

The “Single Market” so often invoked by Europhiles as a means of assuring common standards is simply a cloak for federalist ambitions.  As a market there is nothing special about it.  The international standards system (ISO) written in English is the preferred standard for the world outside the EU with its own quaint CEN system written in French.  Japan sells its products into the EU without paying the EU £3.5 billion for the privilege. Lucas won its recent contract to supply Volkswagen with diesel injectors because it had the best product in the world, not because it was in the EU.

And that’s the real point: it’s Britain’s ability to produce world-class products which will determine its future and secure the employment of its people.  Membership of the EU simply gets in the way.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 10th August 1995.

The compulsory elimination of British weights and measures from our life and language (report, Aug 8th) is only the most blatant of the many hundreds of examples which use the Single Market concept to drum into the British that they are a subject people.

The objective of compulsory metrication is entirely political.  There is no conceivable international trading interest in the buying and selling of loose fruit and vegetables in a local market.  Nor should it matter to anyone but producer and customer that for 30 years a local firm (Lockwoods) has made a local product (mushy peas) with a harmless green dye – but it too has to be suppressed (report Aug 9th).  A real free market would actually encourage transactions in whatever form buyer and seller preferred.

That the government has chosen to make the use of British weights and measures a criminal offence is itself an example of the Vichy-like alacrity with which the Courts and Departments of State jump to carry out their Euro-orders.  Only a complete break and the formation of a new relationship with the EU on the Swiss model will preserve our freedoms and our ability to compete in the world.  Euro-scepticism is not enough.

A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 3rd December 1989.

I am not sure where Robert Jackson (Letters, Nov. 26th) gets his information about Germany, but as a recent visitor to West Germany I can say the Press and magazines are full of the prospect of reunification.

He seems shaky on the “philosophical basis” of the EEC, which was designed and still operates fundamentally as a system of war reparations by Germany to France.  Its basis is about as incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon way of government as anything could be.

The basis of the majority of the EEC’s pronouncements is the Single European Act (SEA), which is an enabling Act, a form of legislation abhorrent to our tradition, but completely in line with Continental practice.  It was after all the enabling law – Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Reich und Volk – democratically passed by the German Parliament which was the legal foundation of the Hitler regime.

It is the claim that the SEA covers transport, health, education, etc which enables the EEC Commission, in its view, to issue to our government detailed instructions on matters which in our parliamentary tradition would have to be agreed individually and separately.  The problem posed by German reunification is not our crisis but France’s, whose policy of using German economic power as a prop to its own pretensions is now in ruins.  For us, the suggestion by Mr Andriessen, the Dutch EEC commissioner, that we should resume membership of an EFTA linked to the EEC in a wider European Economic System (EES) with all the Single Market freedoms, though derided by the Foreign Office, renders us everything we could possibly want.

While Germany unifies and draws closer to Russia, and France, Italy and Spain enter some form of Latin federation, we will be free to resume our position as a founder member of the Society of English speaking nations and that expanding society of nations outside Europe who have English as their language of business, industry and technology.

We would be excluded from EEC inner councils – but so what?  We shall also be excluded from the Common Agricultural Policy, from an annual levy likely to reach £3 billion in a year or so (removing which reduces our balance of payments deficit at a stroke), from artificially high food prices, affecting particularly the poorest, from the absurd hyprocrisy of Italian commissioners complaining about our water quality, from an Irish commissioner telling us, a great nation, what we can and cannot do with our industry, and so on.

In short we shall be excluded from a nightmare and wonder why we ever endured it for so long.