My current thoughts on leaving the EU

Like the weather, the EU is such a complex (if not chaotic) system that it is not feasible to predict with any certainty what will happen if we get out. I therefore discount all financial predictions. If the government could predict the effect of EU membership on UK GDP in 5 years time, then it would have predicted the 2008 economic crash in 2003. It didn’t. Nor did the OECD or all the other luminaries now predicting our fate outside the EU.

I accept that if we leave the EU, there will be a period of economic and social change. What will happen? We will simply adapt - as we have done so many times in the past. Evolution is driven by random events. Sometimes you make a decision that doesn’t turn out the way you expect. We should not be staying in the EU simply because it will be be less disruptive in the short-term than pulling out - which appears to be the only viable argument I have heard so far.

When I voted to join the EEC, I voted to join an economic union with 6 countries. Nobody has since asked me if I want political union with 27 countries. If I did want political union - and I can see certain advantages to that - then we would need to be in the Euro, which apparently we shall never be. I am not clear what it is we are being asked to stay in.

I generally don’t favour large organisations. Efficiencies of scale are mostly lost by extreme waste of resource, glacially slow decision making, and the over-remuneration and over-empowerment of a tiny minority (mostly unelected) that have risen to their level of incompetence. Europe is no different than any other large organisation in this respect and it is why I choose not to work for one.

I am not left-wing, right-wing or anything in between. I run a business that at present relies mainly on trade with Europe. I am a free thinker and generally make the best decisions I can based on the best evidence available to me at the time. So all in all I am more in favour of leaving than staying. The available evidence may change before I need to vote.