Thursday, 3 March 2016

Dear Prime Minister

Having looked yesterday at the first - rather weak - reason for the Outies to believe we'd be better-off out of Europe, I though we might as well dwell on reason two today, it's another one you and yours aren't countering with the adequacy we the people should expect, but then we've pretty much established you're inadequate, and we're only four posts in!

Here it is…reason two for why we should slink away from Europe and hide under a rock, a BRITISH rock, craft-painted with the union flag by a member of the WI:
EU Membership contributions costs
Britain £14.5 billion a year

Added to this, the cost of EU Regulations hinder 95% of UK businesses – the top

100 EU Regulations cost the UK economy a staggering £33.3 billion a year.
 

Less than 5% of UK businesses trade directly with the

EU, but have to adhere to all EU Directives.
 

As an added incentive following Brexit, Britain would be able to

sign its own trade deals with the rest of the world.

The main point ignores the fact that we got €6.3b back in direct payments, straight away (€3.1b to farmers alone), with many more millions coming after as 'hidden' payments, where would IDS and the likes of the DWP and their private contractors be without the European Social Fund paying for training? All those courses in book-keeping, computing, remedial maths and English, food service, Health and Safety, fire safety, first aid, basic catering and care-work, introductions to marketing, telesales, using a chainsaw, a fork-lift &etc.

€1.1bn in research grants, road building, subsidised youth programmes, cultural efforts, environmental and forestry grants; all paid for by Europe, our money being redistributed to..err…us! Also the Outie website has turned the € sign to a £ sign...increasing the apparent 'bill' substantially! Why haven't the advertising standards watchdogs corrected that? The adjusted figure is less than that which you're stealing from the benefits pot and pensions!

If the austerity-cuts and associated behaviour of your government and the previous coalition are followed to their logical (ideological?) conclusions, we have to assume that if we were out of the EU, you wouldn't use that €14.5b (2013 figures - I believe), to replace the lost support provided by it, you would see the hill-farmers starve, cut the courses, tell business to find the money, give the police, armed-forces and senior civil-servants a modest salary-rise, award yourselves another 10% increase, spending the rest on tax-cuts for high-earners and subsidised fracking!

The first sub-'clause' is probably the funniest, 100% of all regulations hinder me, that's their point! If UK business is avoiding 5% they're doing well! But then they say it's just the cost that hinders? All a bit odd, if you ask me.

As the Outies haven't costed their second claim, we'll ignore it for now, I will return to it when I've dug a little deeper, but…really? A third of a trillion-squid? Per year? Why aren't you countering this crap on the front page of the Times, Prime Minister?

The next bit is a fascinating example of how to use statistics…it is said that approximately 50% of our trade - as a country - is with the EU (the BRICs taking 7%), if that is only being done by 5% of businesses, we need only worry about what those 5% think? If the letter sent to employees by BMW-Rolls Royce this week is anything to go by; staying in the EU is the way to please that 5% and one has to wonder what (the Outies want us to believe) the other 95% are complaining about.

The truth is most of them have no real thoughts on the subject, beyond the vague little-Englander stuff they get from the media - and your own stranger-danger, meddling Brussels, anti-migration, 'scrounger' rhetoric.

Some genuinely don't care - a cake shop in the Midlands supplying a small market town with err…cakes, isn't going to be remotely bothered by the EU, except in so far as EU regulations help ensure that food hygiene and workers rights are kept to moderate levels.

And that's where we get to one of the big truths behind the small-c, parochial, reactionaries who make-up the Outies, they want to be free to throw out food hygiene regulation, they want to remove safety equipment from building sites, they want to spray toxic crap on our fields until there are no birds left, they want to frack (as do you) and…they want to pay their workforce fuck-all for a 50, 60, 70 hour week, until (if the headlines of the last 48 hours are to be believed) they drop-dead at their desk/machine somewhere near their 78th birthday!

The staggering irony there - of course - is that automation is going to render half the population unemployed over the next 25 years and none of you, from any party, are daring to address that elephant in the room?

So to the last sub-clause of the Outies 2nd main point for exiting the EU: that we will return to our 'glorious past' as an independent, trading-nation, busily engaged in commerce with the rest of the world:
  • Those 5% of companies that do the 50% of the UK's trade - with Europe - would simply re-locate as much as they could TO Europe!
  • The US is doing deals with Europe; it's not going to start faffing around separately dealing with a country in turmoil, its money-markets at rock-bottom while Scotland rightly demands a second referendum in the background?
  • Canada and Australasia are lost - as major markets - to the US and Asia-Pacific, respectively.
  • China has gone on record as saying "… that Britain is not a major global power..." and that "... the UK is not a big power in the eyes of the Chinese. It is just an old European country apt for travel and study."
  • The rest of Asia and India want to sell us stuff, not buy it.
  • Brazil's economy is struggling...and in the political sphere it sides with Argentina on other matters...
  • South Africa is a mess, nearing bankruptcy, the rest of Africa...?
  • Central America, the Middle East?
  • That leaves...Russia...and North Korea!
Without Europe, we are nothing, and we only joined when we realised that. The EEC, now the EU and eventually; the 'United States of Europe' are only anthropological steps on the road to a world government, as a single species of dumb monkey slowly comes together; working either to escape to the stars from the mess it will leave behind, or to try and mend the mess it's made, before it goes extinct.

Yours etc...
 
PS - In today's papers I see; you're letting them question your figures! Inadequate cockwombles the lot of you, Innies and Outies...more on that anon...

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