Thursday, January 26, 2012

PM Cameron presents unarguable case for Britain's EU withdrawal!

The speech at Davos left no room for misunderstanding nor indeed for argument, let alone further dithering and prevarication. The best course for Britain is to remove itself from the EU as presently undemocratically and economically constructed!

The following paragraphs, taken directly from the speech highlight that point:

While China grows at 8%, India at 7% and Africa at 5.5%, the European Commission forecasts the EU will grow by just 0.6 per cent in the whole of 2012 – and even that is assuming the problems in the Eurozone get better not worse.
Yesterday in Britain we had the official figures for the final quarter of last year – and they were negative.
Other large economies of Europe are forecast to have a similar outcome.
In just four years Government debt per EU citizen has risen by 4,500 euros. Foreign direct investment has fallen by around two-thirds.
And in more than half of EU Member States, a fifth of all young people are now out of work. So this is not a moment to try and pretend there isn’t a problem.
Nor is it a moment to allow the fear of failure to hold us back. This is a time to show the leadership our people are demanding.
Tinkering here and there and hoping we’ll drift to a solution simply won’t cut it any more. This is a time for boldness not caution.

The entire speech is linked here. The speech later continued after some mention of Britain:

Europe’s lack of competitiveness remains its Achilles Heel.
For all the talk, the Lisbon Strategy has failed to deliver the structural reforms we need.
The statistics are staggering. As measured by the World Economic Forum, more than half of EU Member States are now less competitive than they were this time last year while five EU Member States are now less competitive than even sclerotic Iran.
For every Euro invested in venture capital in the EU, five times as much is being invested in the US.
The Single Market remains incomplete. And there are still a colossal 4,700 professions across the EU to which access is regulated by government.
And that’s not all. In spite of the economic challenge, we are still doing things to make life even harder.
In the name of social protection, the EU has promoted unnecessary measures that impose burdens on businesses and governments, and can destroy jobs.
The Agency Workers Directive, the Pregnant Workers Directive, the Working Time Directive.
The list goes on and on. And then there’s the proposal for a Financial Transactions Tax.

Of course it’s right that the financial sector should pay their share. In the UK we are doing exactly that through our bank levies and stamp duty on shares. And these are options which other countries can adopt.
But look at the European Commission’s own original analysis.
That showed a Financial Transactions Tax could reduce the GDP of the EU by 200 billion euros cost nearly 500 thousand jobs and force as much as 90 per cent of some markets away from the EU.

Even to be considering this at a time when we are struggling to get our economies growing is quite simply madness.
We can’t go on like this

And eventually concluded:

But there a number of features common to all successful currency unions.

A central bank that can comprehensively stand behind the currency and financial system.

The deepest possible economic integration with the flexibility to deal with economic shocks.

And a system of fiscal transfers and collective debt issuance that can deal with the tensions and imbalances between different countries and regions within the union.

Currently it’s not that the Eurozone doesn’t have all of these it’s that it doesn’t really have any of these.

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