During a debate on European Scrutiny Priorities in the Assembly today TUV leader Jim Allister was the only MLA to make the case for UK withdrawal from the European Union.
Mr Allister said:
“This is a very un-EU report, because it dares to say in four pages what could be said in 400. It really does not shadow at all the European way of being as protracted in saying very little as you possibly can be. It is a report, though, which — as has been suggested by another, from a totally different perspective — avoids the elephant in the room. Particularly at this time of general election, the elephant in the room is whether or not the United Kingdom is going to come to the point of being able to liberate itself from the EU and whether all this moribund regulation and diktat from Brussels is ever going to be lifted from us.
“Reading down this report, I see the 10 priorities of the Commission. You could have read those 10 priorities 15 years ago in the Lisbon agenda. That was what they were going to do then, and they are still doing it — or still promising to do it — and failing to do it. Of course, in the interim, we have had the catastrophic collapse of the euro and much of the European economy.
“The unvarnished truth is that the EU as an institution is being passed by. It is now a declining economic power in the world situation, and it now has an ever-reducing percentage of the world’s GDP. For us in the United Kingdom, it is therefore no surprise that, as a trading nation, our exports to the EU have been falling year-on-year as we build our exports to where the growth is, which is outside the EU to other parts of the world. We have now arrived at the situation where our trade deficit with the rest of the EU is £30 billion a day. Yet there are those who, indeed, used to eschew the very idea of the EU but who today are its cheerleaders. I refer to Sinn Féin. In the first European election that I fought, Bairbre de Brún was campaigning to take us back to having the punt reintroduced. Now people in that party are Euro-fanatics who are campaigning on even denying the right of the people of the United Kingdom to dare to have their democratic say on whether we should be within the EU.
“When I represented the DUP in the European Parliament, it was unmistakably and unequivocally an anti-EU, Eurosceptic party. I do not think that one could say the same today. It is now more in the reformist mould of the Conservative Party in its attitude to the EU. It is equivocal on all those things, having gone somewhat native.
“If we are an area and a nation that is dependent on trade for our economic success and growth, why would we want to be part of an institution that, as a term of membership, denies any individual member state the right to even make a trade agreement of its own with anyone? Under the EU, trade agreements can be made only by Brussels. So here we are, the United Kingdom, which is a prime trading nation across the world, and we have to go cap in hand to Brussels to see whether, in the legions of time that it takes it, it would ever consider a trade agreement with, say, the United States of America. How many decades have we been waiting for that? A trading nation needs to be liberated from the constraints of the EU and to be able to stand on its own feet, make its own decisions and spend its own money. There is all this talk about the largesse of Brussels, but never let it be forgotten that the money that we get back is some of our own. It is only some, because we are net beneficiaries to the tune of £26 million a day. Over £1 million an hour is the financial cost of belonging to the EU never mind the cost of being hamstrung as a trading nation in the trading world.”