On the EU, why I want out.

The reason that I don't like the EU and want to pull out is that I simply don't see any benefits for the money that we give to it, we are teh second biggest contributer afterall. There are arguements for EU membership some of which at first sight seem persuasive, but when you actually examine them they fall apart.

• The EU has stopped a major european wars in the last 60 years.
  
  This is simply bogus, NATO kept the piece. For most of the last 60 years the atomic weapons of the USA where facing the atomic weapons of the USSR in an ideological conflict known as the cold war. Had any european nation tried to go to war with it's neighbours it would have quickly reduced itself (and the rest of the world) to a radioactive rock. National leaders knew this and so did not attack each other. Since the colapse of the USSR the defensive aliances of NATO remained, along with their atomic guarantees of peace.


• We get loads of money from the EU for things like Cornwalls objective one status.
  
  We do get money back from the EU but that does not alter the fact that this country is the second largest net contributor to the EU coffers.


• The EU has forced this country to accept lots of liberal legislation protecting the rights of ordinary people that we would not have got otherwise.
  
  It is true that the EU has delivered plenty of good liberal legislation, as well as some that bad, and some that is simply stupid. This is true of all legislatures. However I would prefer that the laws that govern me where created by a democratic body. The EU parliment has no power to initialise legislation, nor can it veto legislation, and any sugestions it makes can be ignored as they where in the case of software patents recently. The parliment, the only directly democratic element is little more that a fig leaf.


• The EU is just a free trade body, and this is a trading nation.
  
  One of the EU's roles involes trade, however haft of our legislation comes from it showing that it also has a large political dimension.


• The EU is happening anyway, so we should be in to influance it.
  
  However if we are out they can do whatever they like and it will not be imposed on us (as it is at the moment). We may have to react to events in the EU, but we have to react to events in the EU and across the globe anyway so this changes nothing.


• Leaving the EU would harm the economy as we would no longer have access to the common market.
  
  There is another organisation called EFTA (European Free Trade Aggrement) that was originally set up with Britian as one of the founder members. It is purely a free trade area an it has an agreement with the EU giving access to the each others market forming the EEA (European Economic Area). We simply swap EU membership for EFTA and get out of the EU whilst keeping the market.
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• It's either the EU or become the 51st state of the United States of America
  
  No it isn't, most of the countries in the world are not in the EU or part of the USA and they work prefectly well


• If we leave the EU this size of the EU economy will leave us without any investment.
  
  Britain is the 4th largest economy in the world. We are a global trader. Saying this is the same as saying that China must give control of it's currency an politics to Japan. Which is stupid. It is the same as telling the most of east africa that it must give up control of its currency and politics to Europe, which is also stupid and should anyone sugest it would be dismissed correctly as racist colonialism.


• The EU is going to gain economies of scale that will give it massive growth boasts leaving us in the dark ages should we leave.
  
  This argument was used to argue that we must join the Euro, and therefore can be examined with emperical evidence. Since the creation of the Euro the UK has consistently grown faster than the EU average. Since the begining of the Euro the UK economy has expanded to larger than that of France going from the 5th largestt economy in the world to the 4th. The UK has under haft the unemployment of the EU average. The UK avoided recession caused by the global slowdown following the US dot com crash in 2001, the EU didn't. The evidence shows that not only is this argument wrong, the reverse is true and if we leave (maintaining the common market via EFTA) it will improve our economy.

Then there are the arguments against the EU

• It's corrupt, the buget hasn't been signed off as adding up by its auditers since 1995


• It's main policies, the common agrecultural policy (CAP) and common fisheries policy (CFP), are insane and counter productive. CAP is supposed to help small farmers. It gives huge subsidies to farmers to produce intesively, creating large surpluses. Then pays then even more to leave sections of land without anything growing on them, whilst still farming everything else as intesively as before. The amount of subsidy is based on the amount of land. This means that big farmers (who don't need the money) get paid more at the expense of the small farmers who this was suposed to help. We pay more for food than we should due to the inflated market price. We pay for it again in taxes. We impoverish the third world by pricing them out of the European food market where they could compete really well, leading to the kind of resentment that fuels terrorism.


• It's undemocratic, the laws that it creates are initialised by the unelected commision, rubberstamped by the unrepresentive parliment (which can be ignored if it doesn't give the right answer), an is then either sent to the member states to be implemented by the member state's elected parliments, without the power to make any modifications.