A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 19th June 2007.
Michael Canton (Letters, June 15) denies that Britain’s leaving the EU would harm British industry because we would be able to join the European Economic Area.
Of course, he is right, but much better models are our fellow Anglosphere countries Australia, Canada, New Zealand and America, whose combined trade with the EU is comparable with our own but which, unlike Norway, pay absolutely nothing to the EU for the privilege of trading with it, nor do they have to accept the free movement of EU citizens in their countries.
The Anglosphere countries’ trading arrangements with the EU are secured by their membership of the World Trade organisation, as ours will be when the politicians are finally forced to accept that Britain will be massively better off outside the EU.
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.
