Costs Incurred By Membership Of The EU.

By: Professor Tim Congdon.

Full economic and political integration of their continent – culminating in a federal ‘United States of Europe’ – has been a dream of many European politicians and opinion-formers since the early 1950s. Much has changed in Europe over the last 60 years, reflecting the integrationist process under the European Steel and Coal Community from 1952, the European Economic Community from 1957, and the European Union from 1993. Many of the changes have been for the better, including the achievement of industrial free trade and free, non-discriminatory, cross-border payments within the EU. However, the EU member nations have been reluctant to hand over fiscal powers (i.e., the powers to tax, above all) to central EU institutions. The EU is quite unlike the United States of America, which from its inception had a federal government with fiscal powers. (The powers were used largely to finance military expenditure against the USA’s main enemy at the time, which was the United Kingdom of Great Britain [and from 1801 the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland]!)

 Because the EU institutions, particularly the European Commission, have been thwarted on the fiscal front, they have tried to make ‘European government’ a reality by expanding a body of European ‘law’. The Commission has therefore secured the passage into law of thousands of ‘directives’ and ‘regulations’, by a process which is not only massively interventionist, but also undemocratic. The result has been a heavy burden of regulation which has checked economic growth across the EU. The following analysis is chapter 2 in the 2013 edition of my publication, How much does the European Union cost Britain?, for the UK Independence Party. My estimate is that the plethora of directives and regulations in the so-called acquis communautaire has reduced our national output by over 5%.

The regulatory burden of the acquis is the most important single cost to Britain of our EU membership.