Campaign for an Independent Britain

Britain pays direct ‘membership’ costs of £17.4bn, which equate to an annual net contribution of £6.7bn and dramatically rising owing to Tony Blair’s surrender of a sizeable part of the British rebate. Sums spent on regional aid have to be ‘matched’ by funds from the British taxpayer but are designed to satisfy EU agendas.

This net contribution of £6.7bn p.a. could be spent for example, on:

-44 new hospitals a year (@ £150m each)
-268 new schools per year (@ £25m each)
-62 new by-passes per year (@ £108m each)
-A new high speed railway line network every 5 years (HS2 full proposal £32bn)
-172, 520 more police officers (@ £38,836 average salary)
-248,148 more nurses (@ £27,000 average salary)
-Income tax cuts of 1p or a VAT cut of 1% per year
-Halving the budget deficit within 2 parliaments

Britain is also at risk of being required to fund “bailouts” of Eurozone nations, which we are liable for through the EU despite not even being in the Euro. We are still be liable for 4.5% of any bailout offered by the IMF. By May 2011, the UK’s total commitment had risen to £12.5bn for aid to Ireland, Greece and Portugal but this amount will increase as a result of the second Greek bailout agreed in July 2011.

There are also many hidden subsides to the EU. For example, not included in the UK’s membership contribution are the costs of subsidising EU students at British universities – where EU students are forbidden under EU laws from being charged international rates for tuition fees, which non-EU international students must pay.

Indirectly, we would benefit from scrapping or revising a mass of excessive or wasteful red tape generated by EU laws.