Britannia Radio

The Sun

Monday, November 09, 2009

 

Trevor Kavanagh: 

Survive? No we'd thrive outside EU

MARKS & SPARKS boss Sir Stuart Rose has explained in one word why the Tories can't call a snap referendum on Europe.

Britain, he said, is "skint". Cleaned out, shirtless.

National debt, standing at £2.3TRILLION is bigger than the country's entire earnings in one year.

In addition, we are borrowing another £200billion a year just to stop us going bankrupt.

This is an emergency - a crisis that has yet to hit home with full force.

As firms go to the wall and jobs disappear, David Cameron can't waste precious energy fighting Brussels.

But he is only putting off the inevitable.

Voters were promised a referendum on Britain's place in Europe - and they won't rest now until they get one.

Every day without a say only increases the prospect of pulling out altogether.

Jubilant Euro chiefs, celebrating the freshly ratified EU Constitution, are already cracking the whip in the drive for deeper integration.

The ink is barely dry yet we are already seeing France and Germany raising two fingers to Britain.

Chancellor Alistair Darling has been forced to find £40billion he doesn't have to split up and sell the toxic banks RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock.

This wrecks his hope of giving them enough of a breathing space to repay taxpayers' billions keeping them afloat.

Now Europe wants to make Britain even more of a bitpart player by surrendering our influential voice on the International Monetary Fund.

Brussels will speak for Europe. This is just the start. The Constitution was the last brick in a political fortress where 27 member states are held prisoner.

Demand

Britain has lost its freedom as an independent sovereign nation state.

It will soon lose its place as one of the "permanent five" members of the UN Security Council.

Its role as one of the G20 biggest nations will shrink as Europe takes the lead.

From now on, the EU is no longer a confederation of voluntarily participating nations.

It is a superstate called Europe, with its own legal personality and the right to tell us what to do. We now take our orders not from elected ministers at Westminster but from unelected and unaccountable politicians in Belgium.

That's why a showdown with Brussels has simply been postponed.

In the not-so-distant future, British voters are likely to demand a voice.

There will be only one question - IN or OUT. And if the polls are to be believed, only one answer.

If Britain decided to quit, it would shake the foundations of the European Dream and put the whole undemocratic enterprise at risk.

Brussels will make it as difficult as possible to quit. But no treaty is unbreakable.

Can we survive outside the EU? We should do better than that.

A new publication, Ten Years On - Britain Without The European Union, describes how the unshackled UK would thrive as an independent nation.

Threats of a trade boycott are just bluff. As a net importer, they need our markets just as much as we need theirs.

The book, published by The Taxpayers' Alliance, describes how our economy would be liberated from EU waste, fraud and red tape.

Potential savings are immense. For a start, we would stop subsidising the grotesque Common Agricultural Policy, which cost UK taxpayers £10billion this year.

Another £3billion is swallowed by the Common Fisheries Policy.

Europe's crazy VAT fraud carousel costs £80billion a year.

Not only would we shed these costs, we would be free to trade toe to toe in world markets without the EU wagging its finger under our noses.

The book explains how Brussels meddles in every nook and cranny of our daily lives - from our courts and prisons to health and safety, from immigration to the amount of water used to flush toilets.

Some EU states - not least Germany - are beginning to buckle under the strain of keeping this lumbering giant on its feet.

"If you trade something, make something, sell something, police something, protect something, transport something, grow something, burn something, bury something, Brussels has a say in it," says the book's author, Dr Lee Rotherham