As we enter the final few days of the EU Referendum campaign, Stephen Hill outlines why Brexit is the way forward.
Yes, it’s the last three days of campaigning, with Brexit aiming to recover the surge they were enjoying before the weekend’s horrible news from Birkstall. The positions of the rival contenders are quite clear.
Bremain offers no change, and fails to state the risks inherent in staying in the EU, of being in Tier 2 of a German-led Europe that is hell-bent on fiscal and political union; and of being a democracy that is based on no taxation without representation. The risks, however, are everywhere except in Bremain’s prospectus: increasing encroachment on the City with FTT and higher VAT, the deepening of the banking union, the probability of more bank and country bailouts – the UK was marked down with £600 million for Greece bailout III, already uncollectable – and more regulation too, MiFID II now and MiFID III in 2017, which will make line-management of each risk a straitjacket of rigid nons all the way down the line.
Then there is the threat of the Eurozone being extended to shoehorn us in, then the enlargement with more Balkan States joining, and even Turkey down the road. Next, the hoovering up of our armed forces, as Lord Guthrie, a former Chief of Defence Staff has just realised, which will damage NATO and our own security, let alone recruitment into the new EU Army.
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The Brexit campaign on the other hand offers change, and avoids the risks of staying in – it prefers to take the risks outside the EU instead, from where it can at least manage events in the national Interest as a sovereign nation state once again. Brexit will galvanise UK trade deals with other trading blocs and nations; free up our SMEs to engage with the EU and globally; and remove countless bureaucratic rules which are so costly and achieve so little. And the money saved can be put to better use at home.
More than that, we can sort out our own agriculture and its subsidies and trade with the Commonwealth once again, and reduce our food prices; we can revive our fishing industry and its attendant suppliers; and we can manage our own grants to students and charities. We can cancel HS2 – a quite absurd and unnecessary EU initiative – and spend the money on a new runway in the South-East, and a new northern cross-country railway line from Newcastle to Grimsby, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and on down to Wales. Above all, Britain will look outwards to the world, while managing its own foreign policy and implementing a points-based immigration policy with border controls.
Yes, Great Britain could be back in business next week: the choice is yours. Or just ‘Carry On up the Rhine’ on the promised EU golden rainbow trip to Erewhon, with more immigration back home and the continuing loss of our country, bureaucratic drip by bureaucratic drip, and with no power to throw out the unelected government of the day. Let’s just trust that for the majority it’s a no-brainer.
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