Quote:
Originally Posted by HBG View Post
Answer it yourself, Dick, it's easy.

Do we need the Eurozone more than it needs us?

To elaborate, they're doing nicely without us - yet without them, we'd be totally ****ed,

Take, for example, the argument about the European Economic Area. We’re all familiar with the traditional integrationist rebuttal: if Britain went for an Iceland-style market-only deal, we’re told, we’d have to apply lots of directives over whose drafting we had had no say.

How many directives? Here the Euro-grandees tend to become a bit vague. Fortunately, the Icelandic Foreign Ministry has run the numbers, and discovered that 93.5 per cent of EU legal acts don’t apply to Iceland. (The Norwegian Parliament, using a different methodology, came up with the figure of 91.2 per cent, reflecting Norway’s relative eagerness to opt in to common policies not required by the EEA Treaty.) British Euro-enthusiasts are forever telling us about the 2,500 – 2,500! – EU laws that Norway has had to adopt since 1992. For some reason, they rarely mention the nearly 30,000 that Britain has had to assimilate over the same period.

Here’s the kicker: Norway sells two-and-a-half times as much per head to the EU as Britain does. Switzerland, which isn’t in the EEA but instead relies on a series of sectoral free trade deals, sells four-and-a-half times as much. So much for the risible notion that three million British jobs ‘depend on the EU’. (I write this with conviction, as one of the tiny handful of Britons whose job genuinely does depend on the EU: no one looks forward more eagerly to his redundancy.)