YP Letters: EU has to change to survive '“ so let's quit while we can

Prime Minister David Cameron holds a bilateral meeting with President of the European Council, Donald Tusk during the Eastern Partnership Summit in Riga, Latvia.

MOST of the unelected bureaucrats that hold power in the EU recognise that the EU cannot just drift on as it is now.

The cripplingly dire economic situation in the ‘Club Med’ countries (50 per cent youth unemployment, grinding austerity far worse than in the UK), the sick euro currency, and other problems like huge numbers of economic migrants from outside the EU, mean that power will become even more centralised if the EU is to survive at all.

Yet the EU will grow even further in the direction of an authoritarian mash-up of corporatism, managerialism, fascism and socialism.

That has never worked anywhere. So whether we leave or remain in, change is coming. Europhiles try to claim that leaving is a leap into the void, but the reality is we already know what being an independent country entails, whereas we don’t know what is coming if we remain in the EU.

The EU controls much of the behaviour of every EU country by means of directives and regulations, using each country’s civil service to do most of the work of implementation. That costs money.

Clearly free trade with the EU outside the single market (the European Economic Area, EEA) does not need such bureaucracy. So, by leaving both the EU and the EEA, we will save more than our gross contribution (not just the net, because of EU forced match spending), plus the superfluous civil service work costs, plus the business costs of EU red tape, plus the lost opportunity costs. This total exceeds £150bn every year, according to economist Tim Congdon.

Set against that, europhiles attempt to spread the fear of the loss of our exports to the EU. To put this in perspective, only around 10 per cent of our GDP is exports to the EU.

From: Nigel Boddy, Fife Road, Darlington.

DAVID Cameron is renegotiating our relationship with the EU  and is trying to win some concessions before the referendum on our continued membership of the EU.

Every month the European Parliament moves from Brussels to Strasbourg for a week and then moves back again at great public expense. Ending the farcical merry go round of the European Parliament, as a concession, will show the British people that European leaders are prepared to adopt a reform agenda and are really interested in keeping Britain in the EU.