PRESS RELEASE – December 2018
Ref: Seua19.2
Britain is heading into uncertainty and a bleak future says the Suffolk E.U. Alliance (SEUA), a cross-party organisation that is doing all it can to increase public awareness of the wealth of benefits that will be lost through Brexit, irrespective of its configuration.
Chair, Julia Ewart: “There’s been a complete absence of evidence-based research from the so-called European Research Group. This might have demonstrated how UK industry and commerce can remain intact between its severance from the EU and the building of new trade relations. For international commerce to survive the intervening years nothing short of absolute state support – communism, basically – would be needed, and who wants that?”
“The alternative is to base our decision on the evidence that we do have. This evidence is unambiguous and unanimous. It screams: Don’t do it!”
It also demonstrates that all evidence indicates that all Brexit configurations will make Britain poorer economically. It won’t stop there either, the alliance says, there will be public disillusion and unrest in its wake; as well as a massive loss of benefits that come through membership, benefits that we have taken for granted.
Ewart: “What the Prime Minister has negotiated is clearly inferior to the current deal the UK enjoys with the EU, a deal in which we have full membership of a union of independent nations. Our current agreement with the EU is already special because we have more opt outs and unique exclusions than any other member state. We are at the top of the table, so to speak.”
What we’re discarding:
On trade the UK has seventy-eight trade agreements in place through EU membership; we are able to influence and change laws, policies and practices. Indeed we have written and established many of them; we have a host of ‘opt out’ clauses that specifically protect our national interests; we have retained our own currency, and this is protected. We have a rebate that claws back almost 30% of the financial contributions we make to the EU.
On security the UK has its border controls in other EU countries enabling us to stop illegal, dangerous or criminal individuals before they travel to the UK;
On fishing the UK is a member of a Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) that has resulted in rebuilding cod stocks in the North Sea, and has saved many species from extinction. Under EU guidance we have de-polluted our fishing grounds – the Thames estuary notably – and increased its yield markedly. The CFP also gives our fishermen access to healthy fish stocks in Scandinavian, Dutch, Belgian, French, Portuguese and Spanish waters. It enables us to sell our fish throughout the EU.
On agriculture, the best way to destroy the UK’s livestock and agriculture industries is to cut a Free Trade Deal with Mr Trump, the USA being a country with huge surpluses of beef, pork, turkey, chicken, cereals, corn, cane sugar and citrus fruits. It is only the EU tariffs and the CAP that is stopping these surpluses being dumped into the EU and the UK, the consequence of which would be the decimation of UK agriculture and its associated treasured landscape.
On labour force, EU membership gives us access to a local European work force, members of which share our culture and most of whom have learnt our language. These hard-working people man our farms, market gardens, our NHS, care homes and building sites. Our membership also enables the British to live, work and retire unencumbered anywhere within the EU.
We have free and open access to vital foodstuffs, commodities, medicines, vaccines, raw materials, manufacturing components and a host of other essential needs. We have joint manufacturing and joint development and research projects with our partners in the Union, often funded by the EU.
Meanwhile, travellers and holiday-makers will be aware that we have access to health care in 27 other countries as well as standardised mobile phone charges across those same countries.
As things stand, since we have been allowed only one vote at the outset – and this being before it was explained how leaving the EU would impact on our lives – we are now on track to lose all of this and more.
The cost of membership:
We are misled into believing the mantra: ‘We give vast sums to the EU’. The SEUA thinks this statement is intentionally misleading.
Our cost of membership amounts to no more than the cost of a medium size cup of coffee per person per week, £2.46. That the UK’s net 2016 contribution of £8.6bn a year divided by the population of 67m, then divided by 52 weeks in the year.
An informed 2nd referendum:
The dark side of the Brexit debate claims that it is undemocratic to re-visit Brexit when we finally know what it entails. The SEUA disagrees with this authoritarianism. If, in 2016, the referendum had offered us the following three deals might we not have made a different, informed, choice?
1) No deal, losing all of the above;
2) Mrs May’s deal, in which we would lose much of the above; or
3) The current membership deal where we keep all of the above – AND we retain the influence, the power and the chance to improve the organisation and reform it,
SEUA chair Julia Ewart: “We now need a People’s Vote in which a much better-informed electorate can compare the fantasies offered by the leave campaign in 2016 with the stark reality of the ‘here and now’, that being leaving the EU and shuffling off into what all research indicates will be an uncomfortable and a bleak future.”
For that to happen, she added, our political body need to junk all-pervading elements of populism and find a measure of our historic statesmanship.
(Ends)
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Further information: Julia Ewart email: suffolkeu@gmail.com
Press relations contact: Richard Hare c/o suffolkeu@gmail.com