Satisfaction after 47 years

I was furious for two reasons when Britain joined the the European Economic Community in 1973.

The first was the return of the Corn Laws, 127 years after they had been repealed in 1846, after many decades of hard campaigning by people like David Ricardo and William Cobbett, a campaign punctuated by events such as the Peterloo Massacre and the Swing Riots. The result was that cheap food from Commonwealth countries and a few other traditional suppliers was locked out of the the country, leading to a chain of events including a round of strikes for more pay to keep up with the higher cost of living, the Three Day Week, the Winter of Discontent, the election of Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War; the latter would obviously not have happened as long as Britain was one of Argentina’s biggest customers.

The second was the replacement of Purchase Tax, a bad tax but we could live with it, by the infinitely worse EuroTax, VAT, which fails all four of Smith’s Canons of Taxation – a considerable achievement, but it was invented by a German who was obviously unfamiliar with Smith. It was sold on the myth that it is neutral and non-distorting, which is like saying that putting sand in your car’s lubrication system will not damage any particular component more than any other. A more harmful and inefficient tax would be difficult to devise.

The difficulty now is that the EU mantra that “our farmers” need protection is embedded and will be difficult to shift, while for decades, Tory governments have pushed up the rates of VAT so as to reduce the headline rates of income tax, which looks good in election manifestos, and the public is fooled. So undoing the damage will not be so easy and take more than just Brexit.

It is a myth that the EU led to a renewal of prosperity in Britain. The prosperity never extended far beyond the motorway corridors a couple of hours drive away from London. The EU regional development grants led to little or now trickle-down. Personally, the EU gave me an opportunity to go and live in another country at a time when Britain was going through a bad phase in the middle of the 2000s, but the problems – primarily due to the decisions resulting from long-term misgovernment – have caught up and overtaken me in the country to which I have moved. Hopefully, change will come here after Brexit as the forces that lead to these political shifts are not confined within national borders.

The EU has evolved from what is sometimes described as a “noble concept” into a sprawling monster with a remarkable ability to mess up, consistently, almost every policy area it gets involved in. Britain is well out of this failing enterprise.