Why Britain needs to leave the EU

As I’m sure many of you are aware I am not exactly the biggest fan of the EU. In fact I feel that it is one of the biggest problems facing the UK at this moment in time. I am often asked why I believe this and therefore decided to write this blog about it.

By,

Ian Waller

The first, and main, problem that I have with the EU is that as well as allowing free trade it also allows free movement of population, leading to uncontrolled immigration. Now this is a problem for several reasons. Firstly, it encourages people from lesser developed EU member states to come to the UK to benefit from the free healthcare that we provide through the NHS. These ‘health tourists’, to quote Nigel Farage, have never contributed to the British economy and therefore have never paid any tax of NI contributions, and yet can come to the country and be treated for any illness that they may have potentially costing the NHS thousands of pounds each. This will result in millions if not billions of pounds being spent on these undeserving immigrants. I realise that calling them undeserving may seem harsh at first but just think about it this way, if you went around giving a chocolate bar to everyone who paid you a percentage of what they earned, and someone who was not paying you came up to you and took a chocolate bar, would you say ‘well he’s human therefore he deserves that chocolate bar’? NO. You would chase after him and get that chocolate bar back because the person who took it does not deserve it.

The second problem I have with the unrestricted immigration is that ultimately we are only a small island nation, and yet more and more people are coming to live here. Now let me be clear, I do not have a problem with immigration as long as the UK benefits from it. However the UK is in no way benefitting from unrestricted immigration, as it just results in the government paying out millions of pounds in housing and unemployment benefits (something else I have a problem with, but I’ll leave that for another time) to immigrants who have come to the UK only to find that they cannot get a job or find a place to live. In addition to this it also results in more homeless people on the streets of Britain, something that surely no one wants. Of course it also results in British people being ‘unable to find jobs because they have all been taken by immigrants’ however this is an argument that I do not buy into, as I feel that there will always be jobs available, you just have to look for them. However the point does stand that if there are more people looking for jobs, it will be harder to find a job that you want to do.

Another problem I have with the EU is that they impose countless restrictions on British businesses, despite the fact that 90% of British businesses are not involved in trade with the EU. For example one restriction I will always remember hearing is that the EU  were going to limit the hours that taxi drivers could work in order to prevent the drivers being overworked by their employers. Now this may seem like a good thing at first until you realise that these taxi drivers were in fact SELF-EMPLOYED! The EU was worrying that the drivers may force THEMSELVES to work too hard. It’s utterly ridiculous. The EU is also the cause of the ridiculous increase in ‘health & safety’ we have seen over recent years. The prime minister's business taskforce recently said that relaxing the rules on health and safety compliance alone may save £2bn. In addition to this, this abundance of imposed regulations also limits the power of the British government who would have no way to remove such restrictions if the other member states were all in favour of them. Therefore leaving the EU would not only help British businesses but would also help to restore power to the British parliament.

One final point I would like to make is that even if we did leave the EU, the UK would almost certainly still benefit from free/easy trade between the other European countries. Switzerland and Norway, for example, both have free trade agreements with the EU and yet neither of them are member states. The UK imports more from the EU than it exports to it, meaning that if the EU did not agree to keep a free trade agreement between us and them, they would be harming their economy more than ours. In addition to this, even if we were not able to trade with the EU, it would not by any means be the end of the world for the UK. The UK’s single biggest trading partner is the USA and these trade links would obviously remain. Britain should also be focussing less on keeping good relations with the EU and instead focus on developing trade relations between the up and coming BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). These are the countries that are experiencing the best economic growth at the moment and therefore will soon be, and in some cases already are, the new economic superpowers of the world.

I’m sure that many of you out there, for some strange reason, still feel that Britain should remain in the EU, and I would be very interested to find out why this is, so please feel free to leave a comment or write a response article.

Ian Waller