Jonathan Arnott, UKIP MEP for the North East, has written this exclusive
article for Get Britain Out:
Like the magician’s illusion through sleight of hand, distraction, a
little theatre and smoke and mirrors, the European Union subtly convinces its
audience that preposterous claims are true.
The bigger the claim, the less scrutiny it seems to receive. I’ll touch
on just a few of many examples in this article. From rewriting of history to
hand the EU credit for NATO’s role in keeping the peace in Europe, to odd claims
about ‘giving us rights’, I can praise the European Union for one thing: it
certainly has an effective propaganda machine. It should have. Taxpayers are
paying good money for EU propaganda through ‘information budgets’, the
behind-schedule ‘European House of History’ and so on.
They tell us how desperately we need EU funding. It’s painfully obvious
such funding can hardly be an argument for EU membership. I describe it by
asking the question “Would you spend £20 to buy a £10 Marks & Spencers’
voucher?” The analogy captures not only poor value for money, but also that the
money comes with strings attached – it can’t be spent wherever and however we
want. The EU goes one further: it expects us to be grateful for the voucher, and
to put up signs saying how wonderful the overpriced voucher
is.
The media loudly reports on the European Union saving us from mobile
phone roaming charges, in a spectacular misunderstanding of the role of the free
market. I have no roaming charges – for calls or data – on my mobile phone
network from a variety of countries. It’s totally free for me to call home or
browse the web from a long list of countries including the USA, Switzerland,
Australia and Sri Lanka. There are more non-EU countries on the list than EU
ones, so EU apologists can’t claim that the companies have done it in
contemplation of the forthcoming legislation. No, they’ve done it because their
business model allows them to do it without losing money. They’ve done it
because they know which way consumer demand is going.
When the European Union forces them to unprofitably offer free calls from
Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria or Finland, there will be a cost attached. How naïve
is it possible to be, to fail to understand that private enterprise, faced with
such legislation, will claw back the money in the only way they can? Higher
monthly charges for everyone – regardless of whether they’re a regular visitor
to Finland or not – will undoubtedly follow.
The free market already gives me genuinely free roaming from many
countries. It favours popular tourist destinations like France, Spain, Italy and
Switzerland for the benefit of consumers. I’m a strong supporter of the free
market, except for those rare cases where the free market seriously breaks down.
The European Union pays little to no regard to the benefits which a free market
can bring.
What about the ‘rights’ the EU supposedly gives us? Maternity rights,
equal pay for men and women, holiday pay, anti-discrimination legislation and so
on. We didn’t have to have such legislation as EU members – we had an opt-out
from the social chapter which Tony Blair removed. But when you scratch the
surface the truth emerges. Didn’t we have the Equal Pay Act all the way back in
1970, long before the EU legislated? Weren’t we already moving towards paid
holidays with the 1938 Holidays With Pay Act? Didn’t Race Relations Acts in
1965, 1968 and 1976 legislate against race discrimination? The European Union
finally got around to it in a Directive in 2000, namely 2000/43/EC. Don’t we
have stronger maternity rights today than required by EU law? You see, the
British government was already moving in the same direction on this – providing
rights for our citizens. Tony Blair chose, rather than doing it himself, to
allow the EU rather than himself to incur any wrath from business. But is anyone
seriously, with a straight face, claiming that a Labour government from
1997-2010 wouldn’t have introduced those measures themselves if we weren’t in
the EU?
Particularly on the social chapter and mobile phone roaming charges,
eurosceptics seem rather too eager to concede ground to the opposition. Rarely
have I seen us take pro-EU politicians and campaigners to task on this, but we
shouldn’t allow them an open goal. It’s a simple enough argument. When the EU
‘gives’ you something, ask yourself two simple questions:
1. Is there a hidden cost attached to what we’re
getting?
2. Is the EU legislating on something which our Westminster Parliament
can do at least as well, acting alone?
The answer is almost always ‘Yes’ to one or both of these questions. This
is where the ‘magic trick’ lies – in hiding such basic points. I watch in the
European Parliament with amazement as it constantly votes for legislation in 28
countries to solve a problem which exists in only one. I am yet to see a problem
for which their solution is not ‘more Europe’, even when the problem itself is
the European Union. But unlike the magician, sadly the European Union’s
conjuring trick is deadly serious.
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