Letter: Apocalypse no! Life outside EU might not be all doom
Some Shropshire Star readers will no doubt be stunned by the shock and awe prophesied by our leading "Remain" politicians should a majority of us be presumptuous enough to vote to leave the EU.
Not only will the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse be let loose to ravage the land, but we will barely have time to flee them before the third world war will break out.
Most of your readers whose IQ is larger than their shoe size will take this with a pinch of salt, but many may feel unsettled by some of the very conjectural economic forecasts being made by the same people.
Whatever happens, we shall never know if any aspect of these forecasts was right because we can never know what would have happened if the alternative outcome had resulted from the referendum. Believe it or not, there are still prominent members of the two (former) main parties who are convinced that it is a thousand pities that we did not scrap sterling and join the Euro.
Suppose one of these predictions proved right and the British economy grew by 10 per cent more as a result of our remaining. With immigration unrestricted this would soon be swallowed up by an increased workforce, and the need to accommodate them would inflate house prices and rents by a lot more than 10 per cent during the same period. Taken to its logical conclusion we could see a situation in 30 years' time where only the very rich could hope for self-contained accommodation. This leaves aside the strategic dangers of covering food-producing farmland in concrete in a desperate attempt to provide extra housing.
The problem can be traced back over the last 40 years to a complacent political elite who found it much more diverting to concentrate on privatising the railways or invading Iraq than to addressing the real problem facing this country: the effective education and training of teaching, health and trades specialists.
We produce some of the best merchant bankers, commercial lawyers and hedge-fund managers in the world, but this won't help us if we don't train enough doctors, nurses, teachers. engineers, plumbers, bricklayers, IT specialists and catering staff, and assume that we can always poach them from abroad, whilst our own youth are unemployed or stacking supermarket shelves. We can only put this right outside the EU.
David Burton, Wellington
