YP Letters: Counting the real cost of our decades of EU membership

From: Coun Tony Galbraith (Con), Elloughton, Brough.
Brexit continues to polarise public opinion.Brexit continues to polarise public opinion.
Brexit continues to polarise public opinion.

IN his letter, Ken Cooke (The Yorkshire Post, May 26) produces some misleading figures about the cost of the UK’s membership of the EU.

The population of the UK is about 65 million and our net contribution is about £9bn per annum.

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This amounts to about £140 per man, woman and child, or call it £500 per family per year.

It represents a free gift from the UK to the EU for them to spend on themselves as they feel fit.

The amount, however, pales into insignificance compared to the damage done to the UK economy by our membership of the EU’s single market and customs union, as they are currently set up.

Our balance of trade deficit with the rest of the EU is currently running at almost £100bn per annum.

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The cumulative loss over the 45 years since we joined the EU will add up to about £2 trillion and we will lose another £1 trillion in the next 10 years if nothing changes.

From: Howard Scaife, Backstone Way, Ilkley.

KEN Cooke writes that Leave voters were naïve and did not properly cost Brexit. He then extolls the virtues of staying in the EU without mentioning the big future increase in our payments if we did so, including the funding of an EU defence force that could send our grandchildren off to war on behalf of the EU.

Our democracy is under threat from those who are supposed to be our allies. Let us all, as an United Kingdom, defend our democracy, whatever the cost.

A free people with our own Parliament and courts, together with a free Press, is a price worth paying by us now on behalf of future generations.

From: Gordon Lawrence, Sheffield.

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GERALD Hodgson (The Yorkshire Post, May 24) praises the Lib Dems’ long tradition of loyalty to Brussels and compares this unity with the ambivalent split in opinion on Brexit in both Labour and Tory parties.

Mr Hodgson’s exhibits the typical Lib Dem holier than thou attitude that treats with nonchalance their historic acceptance of Brussels and its undemocratic march towards a unitary state, revealed in their support of Treaties like Maastricht and Lisbon that moved the bloc further and further away from the original 1973 free trade area that most Britons gullibly voted for.

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