The EU is a protectionist cartel that makes life difficult for British exporters - Yorkshire Post Letters
From: Tony Galbraith, Hunter Road, Brough.
I read your excellent special report ‘10 years on from Brexit’ (The Yorkshire Post, June 20) with a Leaver’s eye and so would dispute some of the points made, as well as agreeing with others.
Richard Hughes of the OBR, and others, for example believes that, if only we had stayed in the EU our economy would by now be 4 per cent, or perhaps more, larger than it is. This is for the birds and is a product of gigo silicon devices which give the results the programmer wishes to receive.
In the real world meanwhile, the UK has grown more than comparable EU countries such as France, Italy and Germany since 2016. To suggest that if we had remained, we would have grown far more still than those countries, which have the alleged benefits of EU membership, is absurd.
Re-joiners make much of the difficulties for UK exporters since we left the EU. It was always going to be the case given that the EU is a protectionist cartel which openly uses every trick in the book to favour their own industries.
Never mentioned, however, is the elephant in the room which was the far higher level of imports into the UK from the EU. Our overall balance of trade deficit with the rest of the EU was about £80bn per annum even taking into account the surplus in the services sector. Brexit cannot succeed economically unless we copy the EU tactics and re-shore the production of a wide range of products.
Much is made of a supposed shift of sentiment towards re-joining the EU as evidenced by opinion polling. It is well known, however, that these are easily manipulated to obtain the desired results.
I believe that actual votes in ballot boxes are a much better guide. Take the recent by-election in Makerfield for example. There were 45,476 votes cast in total and the candidate for the ‘Re-join EU’ party attracted 35 of them.
That is the correct figure – I have not missed out any zeros. People may have a more favourable view of the EU now but not enough to vote for it in the face of the real priorities of the country.