YP Letters: Black hole of the EU's finances

I WAS delighted to read the letter from Alan Biggin FCA (The Yorkshire Post, March 12) detailing the disgraceful situation with European Union’s financial statements and the fact that, over the last 20 years, the European Court of Auditors has never been able to approve these documents.

We have no means of knowing how our significant net contributions have been spent or more likely mis-spent. Perhaps a copy of his letter could be sent to the leaders of all parties, the TUC, CBI etc.

David Cameron accuses the “Brexit” supporters of wishing to take a leap in the dark, when it is he and his predecessors over the last couple of decades who have kept us all in the dark over the machinations of EU finances and their failure to instigate a very full interrogation and report.

The real reforms we all wish to see would be a publication of audited accounts showing full details of administrative costs of the many layers of bureaucracy in Brussels and Strasbourg, the number of civil servants employed there within each salary bracket and a summary of their “perks”.

At a time when the European economy is struggling it is only reasonable that staffing levels and salaries are pruned appropriately. We need also to be forceful in regaining control over our borders and thus immigration.

Those European partners, MEPs, MPS, and FTSE 100 chiefs who insist we would be better off remaining in Europe are merely looking at what is best for them as individuals, not what is best for the UK.

While a vote to leave would involve a difficult transition period, we need to remember that we buy more from Europe than they buy from us and our country’s strength has always been through the many smaller businesses and innovators who will be freed from some of the red tape preventing them from flourishing, coupled with our strong links with Commonwealth countries and the strength of the City of London.

From: Rhona Hartley, Leeds.

WITH regard to Dorothy Fairburn’s very sensible worries about farming and the EU referendum (The Yorkshire Post, March 12), John Redwood has written a good resume on the probable results of Britain leaving. He addresses all of Ms Fairburn’s points and more on his website. Well worth reading. So full of good common sense, he could almost be a Yorkshireman!

From: Mike Dods, Leeds.

I NOTICED a plethora of pro-Brexit letters (The Yorkshire Post, March 12). Of course, there is an argument to both remaining and leaving, but please stick to facts.

Alan Knight is concerned about the EU budgets not being signed off, correct, but neither has the Department of Work and Pensions budget been signed off for years. Where is EJ Montgomery getting the impression our armed forces will be under the control of the EU? Yes we have an agreement with France, but this has nothing to do with the EU and would remain if we vote for Brexit. Is he against Nato as well? Let us have a debate on our membership of the EU, but let’s get our facts right first.

Politicians 
fail the test

From: J W Buckley,Pontefract.

IN your Editorial (The Yorkshire Post, March 11) about devolution, you concluded “the sooner the political self-interest, on both sides, ends, the greater the likelihood of an outcome which truly empowers Yorkshire once and for all”.

I started reading the following piece on “Making the Grade”. You wrote “given that local education authorities have, for years, been judged by Ministers on the exam results of schools under jurisdiction, it is perverse that this principle has not proviously been applied to...” I expected to read “Ministers and Government itself”. What a let down to read “academy chains”.

We need an Ofsted of Government. That would empower us all.

From: Bob Watson, Baildon.

IT’S a bit rich of Bradford Council’s Labour leader David Green, when commenting on the lack of a devolution deal in these parts, to blame the Tories for being more concerned about the future of their power base (The Yorkshire Post, March 11).

Well, in the eyes of many, this is exactly why Coun Green has no interest whatever in pursuing the Greater Yorkshire proposal and will only countenance the Leeds City Region plan, dominated by his fellow Labour cohorts.

We have seen here in Bradford how Coun Green’s political agenda surmounts anything else – and this is yet another example.

That he cannot consider what is best for the whole of Yorkshire certainly tells us much about this man, whose utterances are often best ignored.

Plane and simple chart

From: Michael Robinson, Berry Brow, Huddersfield.

YOUR news correspondent quoted the Yorkshire Rows skipper as saying that leading the all-female crew across the Atlantic was “plain sailing”.

What she will have said was that it was “plane” sailing. This refers to 1569 when Gerardus Mercator presented for the first time a map of the world as a flat, or plane, projection. Prior to this, navigators had to work from globes, but were then able to view charts on a much more manageable flat plane. It became “plane sailing”.