VOTE Leave EU for a brighter future

How Long can Britain afford to remain in the EU?
Published in the Daily Echo – In My View      on 25th February 2015

For many years Great Britain has maintained an open-door Border as a member of the EUROPEAN UNION, and in the last ten years millions of migrants from EU member-states have arrived to live and work in this country, their families have enjoyed the hospitality of our Health and Housing Services and good free schools in convivial environment.

There are more than 6 countries waiting to join the EU, such as Turkey, Montenegro, etc.  With our housing, school and health services already stretched to breaking points, can Britain afford to continue her membership of a Union that is so inflexible in their rules for work, business, and benefits, and their uncontrolled immigration law has greatly impinged on our people’s rights and freedom, sometimes unlawfully by British standards.

Britain paid the EU more than £8illions every year and in 2014 our fee was increased to £11.3billion plus other penalties and levies such as the surprise extra £1.7billion, for achieving the tiniest growth in our economy.  It’s any body’s guess what we would have to pay in the future! 

This payment from our taxes partly caused the austerity faced by the poorest in our society, but kept the EU leaders at Brussels well financed.  In return they issued us over 6,300 new laws since 2010 to control our legal system, employment, environment, including no dredging of our swollen rivers, and even our politics in trading with non-EU countries and deportation of foreign criminals.

Our National debt today is a whopping £1.48 trillion (figures from the Office for National Statistics), a record 80.9% of GDP.  We owe £60,000 per household, for which we pay a £billion each day on interest.  Borrowing by this Coalition Government for the fiscal year, April to December 2014, was £86.3 billion, and the Chancellor is planning to borrow £91.3 billion this year, albeit less than the £153 billion borrowed by Labour in 2009-10.  

This Government’s austerity measures had reduced many of our essential services to dangerous levels and Britain can certainly use the money we hand over to Europe annually, for Defence, Police force, schools, A&E and Care Homes, not to mention the indescribable disruption of the bedroom tax and the desperate dependence on food banks.  It must impact on the poor to realise that the top 1% of our rich society owned nearly half the Nation’s wealth.  Would they spare a thought for this disparity?

The chaotic system of our National Health Service is lamentable with so much money spent on so-called Management Executives that the re-structuring had rendered the NHS not fit for purpose, with A&E closures and hospital bed-blocking the NHS came to a virtual stand-still, at a time of its greatest need.

This was the second re-structuring of the NHS in five years where more money ring fenced for the Health Service were squandered on useless chief executives, some on a daily rate of £1,740; others worked 11 weeks for £95,000, and most didn’t even stay the course of a year, but were paid £251,000 for five months or £185,000 for six months and £105,000 for 12 weeks.

Was there a Health Minister in charge of spending?  Our doctors, nurses and medical personnel are excellent but let down by bureaucracy, red tapes and multi-layered management that hindered their work.  Systems analysts are required to bring the NHS into streamlined uncluttered efficiency to care for the present inflated population explosion with much larger families.    

As responsible Britons, we all need to think carefully before the next General Election on May 7^th, to make sure we vote the right Party into power to secure a good future for our grandchildren.  Whilst we are still able to stop the rot, we must stop our debt from spiralling out of control.  This is our last chance to change British Politics and get our country back to basic good value.

UKIP has just pledged an extra £3 billion to NHS frontline services and we need to vote for them in May to make it happen.  UKIP’s policies have struck a chord with me.  You can study them for yourselves at: at http://www.ukip.org/policies_for_people

Peter Mahaffey derided MP Steve Baker’s comment (Sunday Telegraph)  to take Britain out of the EU if the UK is not allowed a new relationship of trade and cooperation.  Mr. Mahaffey said “In the modern world, safety in number is crucial.”  Yes he is right, why should we confine ourselves to trade with just 27 countries of the European Union when the whole world, including the Commonwealth nations, are waiting to trade with Britain?

Peter Mahaffey is probably also right about Germany being the world’s second most-powerful exporter, because EU laws are sometime biased against us, but sometime flexible in certain situations, such as the admission of Greece into EU membership without full compliance with its rules; or when Britain had to pay a fine of £15million to the EU for a shipment of garlic from China, because the EU trade agreement with China has taken 7 years and still no sign of completion. 


This also affected our steel industry as David Cameron has no power to stop China dumping cheap steel on the UK's fragile steel industry as stopping the EU’s surprise levy of £1.7 billion last year on UK’s slight improvement in our economy. He loudly protested against its payment, but paid it all the same.  The Coalition government with a Conservative majority made no protests, even when issued with over 3,600 new EU laws and directives during their five-year in office.

Laws that were not made by our own Parliament in Westminster, but were conceived by the EU Commission, drafted by bureaucrats (civil servants delegated from EU member states) of the 170 different Committees of Permanent Representatives, who then pass the summarised laws down to EU Council of Ministers for their consent when they convene, generally over a weekend, with neither the time nor the ability to wade through acres of boring legal small prints.

When these laws are sent down to the European Parliament, our elected MEPs can only vote to pass them but are powerless to reject or reform any law without a Qualifying Majority, which is a minimum of 376 MEPs out of the EU’s 751 component members as stated in Clause 7 of Article 294 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU (TFEU). These laws are proposed and drafted by unelected civil servants, passed by a handful of EU Council of Ministers and issued as fait accompli, to our elected government to execute as mandates from the EU. 


Even our Queen has no power to refute.  Steve Baker is right to campaign to exit the EU to allow Britain to trade with all countries of the world as well as Europe, as we had done before the EEC, which morphed into the federalist EU in 1993 without consultation with all nine members.

By re-joining the World Trade Organisation which we had to relinquish in 1973, we could have free trade with whomsoever we wished, without EU tariffs will, bring prices down for food grown overseas such as bananas, mangoes, lychees and other tropical fruits.  It should make no difference to our relationship with EU countries unless the EU restricts its 27 member-states from a good relation with Britain.  In which case, they would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces!  The world is our oyster!

Jean Romsey, Southampton, Hampshire.