LETTER: Big business and the EU

On 14th April, Jeremy Corbyn, flanked by Labour establishment heavies, endorsed the EU through gritted teeth as he reiterated official Labour policy of remaining in the EU.

Actually, he knows better than that, hence his deafening silence since that day. Mr Corbyn to his credit has publicly opposed the EU and our membership of it since we joined. He knows the leftist mantra extolling the EU’s benefits on the livelihoods of working people is just so much drivel.

Labour only dropped its Eurosceptic stance during the Blair years to cosy up to Big Business, and now seems unable to rise to the intellectual challenge of admitting its mistake.

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Big Business loves the EU. Its policies and tariff structures encourage wage deflating immigration. Its bureaucracy ties up smaller and otherwise nimbler competition in costs and red tape. Big Business’s financiers and bankers love the EU for the same reason, as does the legal profession.

The catastrophe that is the single currency has made Big Business, centred largely in Germany, much more powerful, while pauperising Greece and the poorer Southern margins of Europe.

It isn’t only Europe that suffers this effect. The common agricultural policy, originally a sop to the French pastoralists to allow Germans to sell tariff-free steel, is still in place, largely unreformed, and putting up the price of food for its citizens so that it can dump the excess on poorer nations at knockdown prices, depressing the developing world’s agricultural industry, thereby creating unemployment there, and encouraging economic migration into Europe itself. No wonder Big Business wants us to remain!

There is all manner of obstacles for the would be exporter in the developing world to the EU to leap over, for instance tariffs on processed foodstuffs.

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Cocoa beans have no tariff applied. But go to the YOU.GOV website and see how tariffs mount up on part processed cocoa products the closer to chocolate they become. Do the same for coffee, or any other commodity that cannot be easily grown in the EU. We are happy to take the unrefined produce at the cheapest possible global price, but as soon as an indigenous manufacturer tries to add value by processing, he’s priced out by EU tariffs. No wonder Big Business wants us to remain!

No self-respecting socialist should be bamboozled by the official Labour stance.

Pre-leadership Corbyn was close to the mark in his assessment of what the EU is really about.

There is every good reason why Britons across the political spectrum should be voting to leave the EU on June 23rd. What Big Business and its chums want us to do isn’t one of them.

Steve Haynes

Goodwood Gardens

Runcton