Letters – The public need honesty from
politicans, not scaremongering and spin.
Dear Editor,
The Labour Party has been scaremongering about UKIP since before the last
European Election, so Ed Balls’ latest is hardly news. From false claims that
UKIP wishes to privatise the NHS to false suggestions we wish to scrap maternity
leave, there is hardly a vicious attack to which they aren’t prepared to
stoop.
He suggests EU exit would be ‘deeply destabilising’ and the biggest risk
to British firms this decade. Hardly so, when outside the EU we would be
guaranteed a free trade deal with them. We are their best customer, and they
would hardly wish to stop trading with us.
But outside the EU, Switzerland thrives: it has more free trade deals
than we do, despite our membership of this economy-inhibiting bloc much touted
by europhiles. The other European countries outside the EU thrive too. Outside
the EU we could have the best of both worlds: free trade with our neighbours but
freedom from overregulation and the ability to negotiate our own deals with
developing economies.
Ed Balls repeats the mantra that we must seek to ‘reform’ the EU.
Conservatives and Labour have had 40 years of attempted reform; it is worse now
than when they started. But whenever the UK attempts reform, we fail. Cameron
has had 4½ years of attempted reform and not one single stroke of a pen has been
removed from a single EU law.
UKIP’s vision is not of isolationism, but of a dynamic trading nation
looking beyond the shores of Europe to the whole globe.
Jonathan Arnott MEP
UKIP, North East
.jpeg)