The first decade of EEC
membership
At the start of 1973 employment was 24.9 million. If
Common Market membership were positive for jobs, the employment total ought to
have been higher five and ten years later. What do the official figures show? In
the first quarter of 1978 employment was lower, although not by much, a mere
40,000 or so. But by the first quarter of 1983 it had dropped to under 23.7
million. So the first full decade of Common Market membership saw a decline in
employment – and, in that sense, a destruction of jobs – of over one million. On
this basis the assertion that EEC/EU membership created jobs is false.
Of course a more careful analysis is needed to establish the underlying causes of changes in employment, since many variables in addition to the effects of Common Market membership were at work. According to the government’s statement, the EU is meant to confer on our country the advantage of trade expansion. This hints that the much-vaunted creation of jobs is to be explained by a boost to the growth rate of exports. Accordingly officialdom might argue that the 1.2 million fall in UK employment in the first decade of Common Market membership should be blamed on a host of other influences, while EU-related export dynamism by itself was good for jobs.
We have then to check whether exports were particularly buoyant in the ten years from 1973. Estimates for the UK’s exports of goods and services are prepared as part of national income accounting. They show that in the ten years from 1963 the average annual growth rate of the UK’s exports of goods and services in volume terms was 5.5 per cent, whereas in the ten years that followed accession to the EEC it was 3.9 per cent. Trade expansion was therefore weaker after we joined the Common Market than before. Again a key plank in the official platform for EU membership falls away. The government cannot say that particularly strong export growth from 1973 ought to have led to job creation, because – quite simply – export growth was not particularly strong.
