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| Daniel Hannan, MEP. Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore |
Undecided on whether to remain in the EU? Here are seven things to bear in mind.
1. Our money, our priorities. Our annual tribute to Brussels now stands at £19 billion a year gross, 11 billion net. If we kept that money at home, we could give the entire country a two thirds cut in council tax. Or we could build and equip a state-of-the-art hospital every week. To put it another way, during the last Parliament, we saved £36 billion through the entire domestic cuts programme; yet, over the same period, we gave Brussels £85 billion. The EU, in other words, wiped out our austerity savings twice over. Even if we use the net figure, it’s still enough to have cancelled all the cuts and have had enough left over to take a penny off income tax.
2. The EU is out of date. In the digital age, we are no longer defined by our geography. We have links to other English-speaking and common law nations around the world – nations that, unlike the EU, are growing economically. In 1980, the 28 EU states accounted for 30 per cent of the world’s economy; today, it’s 17 per cent and falling. The real growth is happening across the oceans, not least in Commonwealth countries to which we are linked by language and law, habit and history.
3. Keeping Britain secure. Outside the EU, we can control our immigration policy. More passports are checked at Britain’s borders than at those of the other 27 EU states put together. The former Secretary General of Interpol, Ronald Noble, describes the Schengen Zone as ‘an international passport-free zone for terrorists to execute attacks on the Continent and make their escape’.
4. Recovering our democracy. If the EU were just about international co-operation and trade, no one would have a problem with it. The trouble is that it regulates things that have no conceivable cross-border dimension: the power of our electrical appliances, the frequency of our bin collections, the way we open a bank account, the tax on sanitary products. Our laws should have precedence on our own territory, and we should be able to hire and fire the people who pass them.
