How much will pan-European advertising cost the council?

From: Coun Matthew Robinson, Conservative, Harewood Ward, Civic Hall, Leeds.

AS the prospect of a referendum on our membership of the European Union comes ever closer thanks to the Government, I have been considering how EU legislation impacts on the Council’s coffers.

To that end, I submitted a question to the last meeting of full council seeking to set up a working group to examine how much the EU’s new rules on procurement, due to come into effect on June 2014, will cost the council to implement.

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Unfortunately, the answer rebuffed my call to establish a working group, which is a great shame. If we are to properly judge the impact that the EU and its regulations have on the UK, we need to closely look at issues such as this. The new rules aim to streamline how local authorities procure the goods and services they need to function, but are undermined by requirements such as the need to advertise contracts EU wide from a threshold of 200,000 euros – about £170,000.

Research has shown that contracts for such relatively small sums are ignored abroad; only local firms bother to bid for them. But despite this, local authorities will have to tender across the EU, putting pressure on local authority budgets.

It is burdensome regulation such as this that undermines the case for the EU. We need to examine how EU legislation affects the everyday operation of the council; it’s a shame my calls for a working group have been ignored.

From: David W Wright, Uppleby, Easingwold, North Yorkshire.

IT is painfully obvious that David Cameron, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith etc are continually making noises about repatriating decision making away from the EU back to our own Government – without success – and they have failed to accept that the only way the UK can control its own law-making and implementation is to simply withdraw from the United States of Europe/EU.

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They have failed to accept that even though the UK has made legitimate requests, the rest of the EU partners and the EU Parliament simply will not agree, for if they allow one country to renegade on the central policies then more countries will follow suit and thus create a potential break-up off the Union.

From: Nick Martinek, Briarlyn Road, Huddersfield.

I SEE that John Murray (Yorkshire Post, May 22) is still peddling the same defeatism about the British having to be propped up by the EU because he thinks we are unable to stand on our own feet. His sole “reasoning” seems to be based on epithets –“europhobic”, “extreme right”, “dogma-like obsession” etc, rather than logic or facts.

Most peculiar of all, he champions President Obama’s view that the EU is the “expression of the UK’s influence and role in the world”. In fact President Obama has neither the right nor the responsibility to speak for Britain.

The reality is that the British view is frequently, indeed normally, over-ruled in the EU; consequently the EU reduces the furtherance of British interests globally.

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Moreover UK global interests are not best served by a Prime Minister who unequivocally insists that Britain should remain shackled to the EU. It is for that reason Mr Cameron is in trouble with his party – members of which voted for a Tory PM and got an heir-to-Blair europhile instead, who has betrayed Conservative principles and the country too.