Letter: Time for UK citizens to vote on leaving EU
Friday 4th November 2011, 8:53AM GMT.
I totally agree with the letter by Bob Jenkins (October 27) ‘Shackled by the EU’.
I cannot for one see the ‘advantages’ of being in the EU.
It’s a bottomless money pit, bleeding the UK taxpayer dry. It buys more from us in trade terms, than it sells, it governs our laws, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Recent reports show looters from 44 different countries were locked up over the riots. How many from EU states?
What happened to the Commonwealth? A total of 54 countries with over a billion people that we turned our backs on in favour of doing ‘local trade’ with Europe. We don’t have to be in the EU to do trade with it.
It’s time the people of this country decided whether it’s a good thing or bad thing for us to be in it.
Gary B Dipper,
Leominster
Most Commented
- Clampdown on Shrewsbury chuggers
- Bishop's gay marriage views do nothing to support bible teachings
- Planners ordered to stay on Newport visit bus
- Letter: Angered by close encounter of the furred kind
- Letter: Alcohol price plans annoy me
- Shrewsbury’s broadband speed one of slowest in UK
- Letter: No sense in overseas job adverts
Shropshire Star on Twitter
Keep updated with the latest breaking news and content on our Twitter feed.
Lifestyle
Interactive Dining Out map
Hundreds of reviews by the Shropshire Star and Express & Star's teams to help you decide where to eat.
Entertainment
All the film reviews
Before you plan a trip to the pictures, get our critics' verdicts on all the latest movie releases.
OUR NEW APP
Get the new Shropshire Star app
Download the Shropshire Star’s new app to your iPad or iPhone to get one week of access to our digital newspapers absolutely FREE.
shropshirestar.com
Popular sections
Useful links
So you would leave the decision to the masses, whose chief source of detailed information on the intricacies of EU membership is the tabloid press?
Report abuse
The political elite (both our own and on the continent) simply won’t allow it.
Report abuse
Just be careful what you wish for. We joined the common market nearly forty years ago so unraveling that convoluted mess is going to take more than a knee-jerk tabloid reaction.
Over forty percent of british trade is directly associated with the EU and if we let go of that then those contracts will flow straight to the far East.
Lets not forget Spain and Portugal. If the get wind that Britain are about to pull the plug then don’t be too surprised when they send back your OAP ex pats. Then you can sit back and repent as the DWP and NHS grind to a halt within seconds.
Report abuse
80% of British trade is internal if 40% of the 20% left is with the EU that is 8% of British trade with the EU not 40%, if you are going to talk about misinformation try to get your own facts right so you are not guilty of spreading your own misinformation. I actually think it is a little more than 8%
We do not have to be in the EU to trade with the EU, we also do not actually trade with EU states but companies within EU states. If the EU were to try to impose import duties on our goods we would impose import duty on theirs, the added bonus of that would come because we buy a lot more more from EU states than we sell to EU states, thus we would be the winners and they would suffer more than us.
If we left the EU we would not ignore the EU but we would make what agreements we wanted for the benefit of this country, if Spain and Portugal made British ex pats return home and I don`t see they would, the other side of that coin would be several hundred thousand EU citizenry leaving the country, perhaps the NHS would then find itself in a much better position.
Report abuse
Try studying the ONS occasionally instead of the red tops. I bet more than 80% of the goods in your home are not British made and if that computer you’re using is British then I can only assume that Charles Babbage designed it and it runs on vacuum tubes with a solid Oak keyboard, and unless you are driving a hand made high performance boutique car from north Oxfordshire then the chances are it arrived in Britain in kit form to be clipped together by monkeys.
If you wish to cut yourself off from the EU you go for it, my tongue requires a little more sophistication than potatoes and mead.
Report abuse
Your trade scaremongering arguments as weak as they are, justifiably form part of a referendum debate, they are not a factor in deciding whether we hold a referendum.
Nobody is talking about fortress Britain! To suggest that is contemptible. Britain has always been a trading nation and will continue to be such, and freed from the shackles imposed by the EU we would be doing so much better.
The fact is we would not loose trade if we we left the EU – WE DO NOT HAVE TO BE IN THE EU TO TRADE WITH THE EU – Countries as diverse as Mexico, Chile, South Africa, China, Switzerland Norway and the USA have a tariff free agreement with the EU.
As we import a lot more than from the EU than we export, any attempt to impose tariffs would hurt the EU more than us: for instance German cars would become more expensive, that would not help the German car industry and would not help the EU. It is in nobodies interest to start a trade war.
Britain is also a member of the European Economic Area (EEA) this guarantees the free moment of goods, services, capital and people, leaving the EU will not affect that!
Your figure of 40% of our trade refers to EXTERNAL trade only and is therefore monumentally misleading.
The only thing you are right about is the mess will take time to unravel, but that is no reason to stay locked into a failing political union which is increasing our taxes, costing us jobs, reducing our standards of living, ruining democracy and destroying all our national services. It is time to take back control of our country from the corrupt, unaccountable, undemocratic and incompetent Brussels Bureaucracy.
Report abuse
Jake, dont be ridiculous!
The great british public would do exactly what they are told… unfortunately the one doing the telling will be mr cowell :(
Report abuse
How nice to see letter writers concentrating on the most important issues of the day, like the economy, schools, hospitals and transportation.
Report abuse
And of course none of these things have anything whatever to do with the EU do they.
How much are we potentially going to be paying to prop up the Euro was it 45 billion.
Report abuse
We voted for a ‘common market’ and not a federal Europe, The Heath government got us into this quagmire by lies of omission, not telling the electorate the full implications. The whole business of us being tied in with this nest of vipers stunk from the start. I’m deeply saddened that Greece will NOT be having a referendum because many other nations would perhaps have followed, us included. I doubt that this membership issue will ever go away there are far too many of the electorate unhappy with it. If the UK ‘goes down the tubes’ I’d far rather we did it by ourselves and not be dragged down by other countries that are in denial of the reality of economics.
Report abuse
Most of those countries you refer to Ken have vast resources and cheap labour. All we have left after the1980s are the rather dubious financial services industry on the Isle Of Dogs and it wont take a logistics team and a fleet of removal vans to shift that out of here.
Trade is reciprocal and if we have nothing to offer then don’t be too surprised when lucrative trade contracts end up in the hands of emerging economies.
1/We don’t have a special relationship with the US. That was based on a lie due to the fact that we borrowed $50 billion from them to put an end to the war as Britain was flat broke by then, and we only finished paying that off ten years ago.
2/We don’t have a democratically elected government by majority, we have a cobbled together coalition made from the scraps of a hung parliament.
3/The Welsh don’t like you, the Irish don’t like you and the Scots are rapidly heading for complete autonomy from Westminster. The french don’t like you, the entire Islamic world hate you and China will soon economically remind you of your vicious Opium wars.
Good luck trying to trade with worthless government bonds and dodgy insurance policies on your soggy little outpost. I am going to roll a large one, lie on the beach well away from it all and do my best not to think about your stupid blinkered short sightedness.
Report abuse
The “United States of Europe” gets more like a dictatorship every day. When France and Germany gang up on Greece – whose problems are entirely of their own making – to PREVENT the Greeks holding a referendum, that’s just dictatorship.
The promise on a UK referendum on ‘staying in or getting out’ is, again, conveniently forgotten once the politicians come to power. Like many others I would like to see cogent arguments for both sides of the debate, aired nationally, with correct analyses of what happens if we leave the EU.
Those in favour of a referendum should just keep creating petition after petition until the woodentops in Downing Street get the idea.
But it’s the old story for the politicians, isn’t it? “If you think you might not like the answer … don’t ask the question.”
Report abuse
Some of these points are reasonable. However, could you tell us which of the main parties offered a UK referendum on ‘staying in or getting out’?
The Conservatives would have been most likely but here’s their pre-election position on Europe, as quoted by the Daily Telegraph :
‘The Conservative party supports “an open, flexible Europe”
Specific European Union policies include:
A full opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights
Greater protection against EU encroachment
Restoring national control over social and employment legislation’
No promises there on a ‘getting out or staying in referendum’. They’re a dishonourable bunch, The Tories, but I’d say that by agreeing to the petition’s demands and debating the referendum question, they’ve actually exceeded their promises, if anything.
Report abuse
All parties promised a referendum on the EU at the election before last, in order to remove any debate about the EU during that election because James Goldsmiths forced the issue. The Labour party won and then reneged on that promise. Cameron gave a Cast Iron Guarantee of a referendum on any treaty emerging from the EU Constitution debate but withdrew it later. At the last election the LibDems promised a referendum.
I would not say the Tory party had in anyway met the commitments you mentioned, they were quite specific.
A full opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights = Nothing happening at all on that front!
Greater protection against EU encroachment = we have “The Referendum Lock” but that has not prevented 17 new separate powers being passed to the EU in the past year!
Restoring national control over social and employment legislation’ = Nothing at all happening! except in the opposite direction.
A good question might be why do the main parties keep making eurosceptic promises when they obviously have no intention of ever meeting them, either that or they simply do not understand the EU! But a much better question is why do we keep voting for them.
Report abuse
‘All parties promised a referendum on the EU at the election before last’ I’m asking if they promised one on whether we stay in or get out, not on the Constitution/Lisbon Treaty. If you can point me to places where they made a specific in/out of the EU referendum promise, I’ll very happily stand corrected.
‘I would not say the Tory party had in anyway met the commitments you mentioned, they were quite specific.’
I wasn’t talking about the three areas highlighted in the Telegraph, I was talking about agreeing to hold a debate following the online petition. Of the commitments the Telegraph highlights, only the first is truly specific. The vagueness of the others allows you to fudge/spin/con/flip-flop your way out of them – and the Tories are good at that!
Report abuse
Sorry James I was reacting to your Telegraph cut – I agree going into the last election neither the Tories were or Labour were offering a referendum.
The first is specific as is the last, “Restoring national control over social and employment legislation” is quite clear I think.
Funny that the only one which as you say is capable of “interpretation” is the only one where they can claim to have done something. And that something is a piece of legalisation that allows the minister to make the choice of offering a referendum about power being passed to the EU in a treaty change. When power is being passed to the EU without changing the treaties that is meaningless as has been evident this past year.
And yes the Tories a very good at flip flopping and pretending to be anti- EU when it suits them.
Report abuse
Also point taken as far as I know the only party to even suggest an in or out referndum at any time has been the LibDems.
Report abuse
These calls for a referendum are now pretty pointless since MPs recently voted decisively against it and would again if called to redebate the issue. It’s also worth remebering that those same MPs were elected under a system which was itself decisively endorsed in a referendum only 6 months ago.
The Eurosceptic position has its strengths yet is so often made to look ridiculous ; in the case of this letter by statements like this :
‘Recent reports show looters from 44 different countries were locked up over the riots. How many from EU states?’
It’s another symptom of the tendency to blame absolutely any ill on some perceived ‘other’, thus saving a society the trouble of looking critically at itself. In any case, you could turn the question round and ask the authorities in cities like Bratislava, Tallin and Riga how many of their public order problems are caused by drunk, aggressive,disrespectful British stag-weekenders. The answer would probably be quite a lot. Yet in my experience, this doesn’t lead to much lazy anti-British stereotyping in these places.
Report abuse
One could say that the EU does not take that view of democratic results, if they do not like the answer they ask the question again.
Report abuse
The Project has always been to create a single state fashioned in the same way as the the USA, in many ways the EU is today even more centralised than the USA and of course in many way much less so, but the direction is clear.
Because political union is being created over the heads of the voters, it must needs be antidemocratic, during the construction period. Because it is being crated without a public mandate, in Britain our political leaders have consistently lied to us about the aim of the Project and what they intend to do about it. It is against this background that both sides of the low level EU debate are actually missing the point and neither are actually talking about things that matter.
I would agree with James that the EUsceptic cause is not being helped by misinformation, whether it is deliberate or misinformed there is a lot of it about, but then on the other side there is a determination to mislead coming right from the political top. So much so that I often wonder if these people actually understand the EU at all, but then reading government papers released under the 30 year rule is is quite clear they know exactly what they are doing and quite clear they intend to mislead us.
The question we should be asking ourselves and the only question that matters is do we want to exchange our “loyalty” from this country to a new EU state. That is not as insane as many would have you believe, as such terms were used in the preamble to the original EU Constitution which transformed into the Lisbon Treaty.
We need to understand the reality of such a move and need to understand that Britain as a sovereign nation state will cease to exist.
We should if we do choose this path accept that none of our national institutions will survive, they will all be replaced by EU equivalents. We might not have a NHS but we will have a health service, it might even be cheaper and more efficient than our present system it might even still be called a NHS but it will not be, we will not have a British Army but the EU area and the EU borders will be protected ect. We can already see that we are part way down the road towards this eventuality: transport, postal service higher education, ect. EU rules dictate what our government may do and confines it to working only within those rules.
Of course our governments do have a voice in those rules, but they are made for the benefit of the EU and its integration and not for the benefit of Britain, and each subsequent government is bound by the rules agreed by its predecessors.
The problem we have is nobody is being open about it and our political leaders seem to think that there is a point of so far and no further. There is not, we will at every point be faced with a choice further integration or exit, and at some point even that final option will be unobtainable by legal means.
All this was foreseen as far back as 1971
FCO paper 1971 This is a far distant prospect
SOVEREIGNTY AND THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
FCO 30/1048 – 1971
The ability and the ultimate political right in the last resort to withdraw will remain for a very considerable time though it may come to have mainly theoretical significance. In that last resort the ultimate sovereignty of the State will surely remain unchallenged for this century at least. Meanwhile it will continue to be important to stress the potential gains in real international influence (albeit indirect) through participation in the Community’s policies and to contrast this with the highly formal and technical nature of the “sovereignty” that will be eroded.
Report abuse
That’s well said. I’m still on the other side from you and there are obviously things I would say differently but I do agree that these are the terms on which the debate should be held (should have been held, more to the point) and that people have been misled.
The pro-EU side need to make their case not only along trade lines (a part of that position would undoubtedly be that, in the days of globalisation and the multinational, nation states are less significant anyway)but along cultural, political, foreign policy and, yes, integrationist lines too. William Hague did tentatively begin to elaborate some of this a month or so back, otherwise the Tory position has been extremely dishonest.
One problem the pros have, and a significant reason for a lot of the ‘in the EU but fighting for Britain’s interests’ rhetoric and other misinformation is that peoples’ national loyalties are invariably stronger than international ones – for better or worse. But the pros need to be more honest and start dealing with that problem properly, rather than pretending that EU membership is like being at the Woolworths Pick n Mix counter.
Report abuse
Why is it that those who favour the Union always belittle those who express concern about it? And if it is everything they claim, why are they so reluctant to debate it? If they believe that democracy is about ignoring the wishes of the majority, then they’re well represented by all 3 main parties.
Report abuse
This has officially become the most boring comments section on the Shropshire Star web site.
Report abuse
Well Jake you do have a point, the complexity of EU governance is boring.
Perhaps that is why the media concentrates on the sensationalist aspects, how much better for a headline to say EU wants to ban Bendy Bananas or EU want to ban National flags and force us to fly the Ring of Stars (not true although this was in the papers last week) than to actually ask how much our local government is spending by sending representatives, to what is nothing more than an EU propaganda meeting, set up to discus ways the EU can be made seemingly relevant right down to the lowest level of local government, who went to the meeting and who authorised payment.
Report abuse
And the Katie Price thread must still have a day or two to run….
Report abuse
Ken Adams. As a 70 year old that has, if you like, been in the EU since the very start, you are correct in everything you have said. I could write a full page on what we were promised if we joined, “higher wages, more holidays, just like the Germans” is one that comes to mind. What a monumental mistake it has turned out to be. We are now prisoners in our own Country.
Report abuse
A Prisoner !! really
A prisoner, also commonly called an inmate, is anyone who is deprived of liberty against their will. This can be by confinement, captivity, or by forcible restraint. The term applies particularly to those on trial or serving a prison sentence.
You are free to travel, free to post drivel on a newpaper site such as this, to express your thoughts etc,,, far from being a prisoner.
Report abuse
Thank you, Try doing many things in this country and you will be quickly told that “You cant do that as it might upset others.” Just like prisoners.
Report abuse
Can you give an example and proof of said practice’s i think you will make claims but have nothing to back it up.
Just as the Mail did with the Christmas remaned to Winterval only to offer an apology as it was untrue but plenty of people jumped on it as such.
Report abuse
Ron, happy to;
1) Man in van with cross told to remove it, has now been sacked, taking it to an industrial tribunal.
2) B.A. worker with her cross,
3) Health worker, for saying a prayer.
4) The couple took to court because they would not allow a gay couple to share a double bed in their house [ appeal in court this week]
Ron open your eyes before it is to late, the likes of you are giving this Country away.The above are just few, Add to this the illegal immigrants that have committed murder and we can’t deport them, then you have the picture.
Report abuse
Come on Ron, I’m not allowed to burp, I’m not allowed to f..t, they’ll be telling me I’m not allowed to smoke my father’s cigars in the pub next.
Report abuse
Another view on Europe, our country is no longer Great we no longer have any value political wise or economical wise.
Yes – We shouldnt be in Europe, we have nothing in common with the French, Germans or Italians.
However we do have a lot in common with the USA.
1) We both speak English
2) Historically the USA was a part of our long lost Empire.
3) American culture is everywhere in the UK from films, musical artists, TV shows, you name it.
As such we should be looking to break all ties with Europe and ask permission to become the newest state of the USA.
That would mean getting rid of the Royal family (No bad thing) however we would have the protection of the greatest country in the free world today (The USA).
Report abuse
My personal opinion is that is a big NO!
I see no reason to leave the EU only to take up a similar position with the USA. I can see no difference between say; the EU arrest warrant and the arrangement made by Blair concerning extradition. In both cases our governments are reneging on their duty to protect their own citizens by allowing a foreign power to have us extradited without trying the evidence in British courts. And why turn our back on our nearest trading partners, whether in or out we will still want to have a good relationship with EU states.
Our problems are not actually with the EU but with our own governments, it follows that leaving the EU will not solve our problems.
We need to reintroduce democracy into this country by making our governments accountable to the voters because at the moment we live under a system of elected dictatorship.
Perhaps we should concentrate on changing our system of government by removing the power from political parties to set the agenda, there is only one legal way to do this and that is to remove the only authority they have and that is the authority WE give them at the ballot box.
We made a good start at the last election by refusing to elect a government, essentially the British people voted for none of the above, that is not a vote for a coalition but a vote of mistrust of all parties, a vote of mistrust for the political system that makes David Cameron, Gordon Brown or Tony Blair and their chosen set of advisor’s sovereign.
The government we have at the moment has no legal authority and no public mandate, what they claim as a mandate they decided after the election behind closed doors. They then changed the rules to make this a 5 year parliament, so it is obvious that none of those in power or likely to be in power are going to freely return power to the people, although the Tories talk a lot about it, that is in the same manner as the EU talking a lot about democracy, words have changed their meaning.
Report abuse