YP Letters: What happens to nation's trade if we opt to leave the EU?

From: Mike Dods, Wensley Grove, Leeds.
What does the future hold for Britain and the EU?What does the future hold for Britain and the EU?
What does the future hold for Britain and the EU?

SO, our negotiations with the European Union are complete. But our relationship with the EU is much more than David Cameron’s tinkering around the edges.

A very important factor missing is what will our trading relations be if we vote to leave? We will still be allowed to trade with the EU, but on what conditions and tariffs? No one knows, and there is no guarantee we will get favourable treatment.

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Greenland is the only country actually to leave the EU, and they had to agree to allow European boats to fish their waters. Norway and Switzerland have favourable trading relations but at the expense of contributing towards the EU budget without any say in the regulations imposed upon them.

To quote Nikolai Astrup, Norwegian Conservative Party European spokesperson: “If you want to run the EU stay in the EU. If you want to be run by the EU , feel free to join us in the EEA.”

Let us hope the electorate sees the benefits of remaining in the EU and for the Government to play a full and effective role in the Europe of the future.

From: Geoffrey Thorpe, Lister Avenue, East Bowling, Bradford.

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I READ (The Yorkshire Post, February 18) that Bombardier rail engineers are to make 1,300 workers redundant. This is the company which lost out on a rail contract to the German manufacturer Siemens. We are told thousands of jobs will be lost if we lose the EU. In recent months, power stations, coal mines and steel plants have all closed. So as for jobs being safe stopping in Europe, that is absolute rubbish. It seems that the Government is trying to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. Nothing is safe even in Europe.

From: Mike Smith, Birkby, Huddersfield.

ANY debate on the EU needs to start by asking what it was supposed to achieve that the average voter can relate to and was not already in place before we joined. The answer to that is not a lot.

The public perception of the EU is that of a massive corrupt bureaucracy obsessed with regulation. Its multitude of directives are invariably restrictive and many pointless, or even trivial to the extent exemplified by the “straight banana” mentality.

Any reforms likely to persuade sceptics to vote in favour of continued membership will need to be far more fundamental than just tinkering with a few legal technicalities on sovereignty.