Total cost of the EU to UK households, includes but is not limited to, annually :
Membership (UK ‘net contribution’) : £11.3 billion (2013)
– up from £2.7 in 2008, current best prediction for 2014: £13 billion
(includes ‘extra £1.7 billion’, half now delayed until 2015, half deducted from rebate)
EU Common Agricultural policy (CAP) : £10.3 billion
– £398 per household, adding around £7.65 per week to family food bills,
– the ‘CAP’ is generally estimated to increase UK food prices by 17%
– UK tax payers subsidise continued torture of Spanish bulls (£13.5 million annually)
EU Common Fisheries policy (CFP) : £4.7 billion
– the ‘CFP’ adds an extra £200 a year on average household food bills
– has already also cost thousands of UK coastal jobs (estimated up to 115,000)
– results in at least 880,000 tonnes of dead fish dumped back in the sea/wasted
(having ‘fished-out’ North Sea, EU trawlers are now busy ‘emptying’ African waters)
EU-inspired/required ‘Green’ Taxes : £43 billion
– £1,629 for every household, up from £1,564 in 2012,
– green taxes add 15% directly to total household energy bills
Regulations/bureaucracy : £5.9 billion
– UK Government’s own highest estimates suggest the final cost to UK firms of laws
directly linked to the Lisbon Treaty will come to £93.5 billion net,
– any cost to UK businesses will inevitably be passed on to customers/consumers
(Independent estimates vary widely, some put the annual cost as high as £100bn)
VAT : £316 million
– EU takes 0.3% of UK annual VAT income, which for 2013/2014 was £105.3 billion
– EU proposals to ‘increase their take’ to 1.3% would cost UK an extra billion per year
A few EU facts, most of which are rarely if ever reported:
i) Despite supporters claims to the contrary, the UK in reality has very little influence, if any, on the workings of the European Union
– the clearest and best evidence of this is the 55 times that the UK has attempted to block a proposal being agreed by the EU Council in the last 20 years,
– every single one of these failed, each proposal has progressed to become EU Law
(UK now has less than 10% of MEPs in the Parliament, down from 20% in 1996,
and only one Commissioner out of a total of 28, compared to two of 15 in 1996)
ii) ‘UCL’, which frequently produce reports on how beneficial EU immigration is to the UK …has received €276 million from Brussels since 2007
– and one of the author’s of the above much trumpeted (particularly by BBC) report
also predicted that ‘no more than 13,000 Poles would come to the UK’ when free access was granted to the UK in 2004
(estimates of how many actually migrated here range from 600,000, to over a million)
iii) All EU law is framed by unelected bureaucrats, MEPs simply ‘approve them’
iv) More than 10,000 European Union officials are paid more than UK Prime Minister
v) The BBC receives millions in grants from the EU and councils
(helps explain why it appears to ‘love’ the EU so much, and consequently is often clearly biased in its reporting)
vi) The ‘staunchly pro-EU’ CBI has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the EU Commission
Very large businesses, as represented by the CBI, are heavily involved in formation of EU laws, and have teams of people who can deal with all the red tape & bureaucracy:
– small to medium sized businesses have no say in the creation of new laws, and often struggle to cope with the mountains of EU-generated red tape associated,
– very large businesses tend to be ‘Pro-EU’, and small to medium sized do not.
Naturally the BBC devotes the vast majority of its air time to views of the CEOs of major corporates, largely ignores those of SMEs (Small to Medium-sized Enterprises)
vii) In order to try to make good promises made when they took power, the Coalition government has introduced extremely tough measures to limit immigration to the UK from ‘non-EU’ countries (India, Pakistan, China etc),
– whilst at the same time migration from all EU countries to the UK has continued in a completely unrestricted and uncontrolled fashion.
An obvious consequence of this has been to deprive the UK of badly needed highly skilled workers from non-EU countries,
– whilst low and unskilled workers continue to arrive in high numbers from the EU.
This clearly stupid approach, was driven by a stupid promise (recently downgraded to a ‘comment’) …that UK net immigration would be below 100,000 by May 2015,
– a promise which it was obvious at the time under EU law could never realistically be kept, and unquestionably now will not be.
The placing of a strict ‘Cap’ on the number of highly skilled non-EU workers entering the UK has severely impacted, and continues to severely impact the nation’s ability to become a wealthy and prosperous nation again.
UKIP believes that the UK should be non-discriminatory and treat all migrants wishing to come here equally and fairly, irrespective of the country they happen to originate from.
UKIP will adopt an ‘Australian-style’ points system which will be operated in exactly this way.
All figures and facts are the latest available, and sourced from the following national newspapers:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/oct/31/conservatives-eu-bill-pressure-contributions
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/6198708/EU-costs-Britain-118bn-a-year.html
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/02/eu-fishing-west-africa-mauritania
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/530706/UK-firms-pay-18billion-bill-EU-red-tape-last-five-years
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/economics/article4262740.ece
Other sources:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/cap.pdf
http://www.dluk.info/european-union-eu-bureaucracy-kills-uk-business.html
Click to access Bruges_Group_SingleMarketAndWithdrawal.pdf
Pete Durnell 