This is a transcript taken from the public meeting held in Strood on 4th November. The panel consisted of Nigel Farage, Mark Reckless and Chris Irvine. Quite often people will say that leaving the EU will be bad for UK business and trade. Read what Nigel and Mark had to say on the subject. [Question from lady in the audience] I have friends, very good friends, who are staunch Conservative supporters. We try not to argue at dinner parties. The guy especially is a very clever businessman and they tell me that if we come out of Europe we are going to face all sorts of financial penalties for trading with Europe. Can you tell me how I should answer them? [Nigel Farage] Its actually desperately simple, its called Economic Logic. The United Kingdom is now the Eurozones biggest export market in the world by an absolute country mile. And yes whilst its true that some of the cars manufactured in Britain are sold into the European market, quite right, you may have noticed that there are one or two German cars on our roads, in fact they sell us a million cars a year more than we sell them. Similarly, whilst there are one or two sparkling wines, sparkling wines being produced on the South Downs and elsewhere you might have noticed we buy a bit more wine from France than we sell to France. In fact the figures are astonishing. Were trading with Europe at a deficit of between 40 and 50 billion pounds a year and so the answer is that they need us economically, particularly given the trouble the Eurozones in, they need us far more than we need them, and anyway, were not living back in the 1950s were living in a modern global economy and nowhere else in the world do people pretend that you have to be members of a political union, adopt a new flag, a new anthem, a president whose name no one knows, no where in the world do you have to have those conditions to buy and sell goods and services from each other. It is a hopelessly outdated concept, and as I say Digby Jones who was the president of the CBI said last year we will be able to get a sensible free trade deal rather like the common market idea that people thought they were buying into, Digby Jones said we could do it within 24 hours because the German car industry would demand nothing less. And this is just one of those scare stories, one of those scare stories that get put about, even David Cameron was putting this scare story out a couple of years ago when he was against a referendum on any terms. They think this is their trump card but I can tell you earlier this year I was very very lucky, somebody decided to give my career a boost, and UKIP a boost, his name is Nick Clegg and Im profoundly grateful to him for giving me those two debates and he basically put very much the same argument you put which I argued back in the same terms and he had nowhere to go. He had nowhere to go. There is nothing to fear well go on doing business with Europe but well be free to do more business with the rest of the world and as Ive suggested to you I think having a deal with the Commonwealth will be a very good and positive place to start. [Mark Reckless] Can I just add something to what Nigel said. We will get a free trade deal if we leave the European Union, Article 50 of the European Treaty obliges them to negotiate a free trade agreement within two years with any member state who leaves. But thats the worse case scenario, even if that were not to happen we would be subject to the Common External Tariff. What that would mean, it would mean that exporters from the UK to the European Union in some areas would have to pay a tariff. The total amount of that tariff would add up to about £5 billion. The amount we contributed to the EU last year, net, was over £12 billion. When ever you, any lady out there, whenever you buy a new bra almost all of them are imported, hardly any of them imported from the European Union. But because a few bras are made in Italy they insisted on having a tariff placed on all bras imported from China. Every time you buy a new bra youre probably paying at least £1 to the European Union and every time you fill up your shopping basket with food, were having to buy food that is over-priced from within the European Union rather than from the United States or our Commonwealth partners in Canada and Australia, so we would make massive savings there as well in opening up our agricultural market to those counties will allow us to prize open many of their markets to our high value added services. It really is a win win if we leave the European Union in terms of the trade deals we can negotiate. It will be massively positive for the future of our country. This is the link to a video of the session filmed by Jeff Taylor https://youtube/watch?v=56Rbx47g3GA
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 10:32:17 +0000
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