Ian Begg
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2013
last heard May 2013
Ian Begg’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, the budgetary cost is, in principle, the simplest.
And yet, even if you look at the budgetary cost, how much it costs the Chancellor of the Exchequer every year for us to be part of the European Union, even there, there are different ways of interpreting it.
As an order of magnitude, it's an average of about six or seven billion pounds per year in net terms.
And net terms in this context means that we pay in more, but we receive from it.
So you look at the balance between the two, and that's the figure that comes out.
Well, various people over the years have made attempts to measure the net cost to the UK or net benefit to the UK of being part of the European Union.
My view on this is that it's a methodologically almost impossible task because you have to make a huge range of assumptions and each of your assumptions will tilt the final calculation one way or another.
So it's no surprise that if you look at people who are pro-Europe, they tend to find a positive figure.
Look at those who are anti-Europe, they all tend to find a negative figure.
The reason for this is that you have to make assumptions about what would happen in the absence of being part of the European Union.
So to take one example, we trade heavily with the European Union.
Roughly half of British exports go to other EU countries.
If these other countries were to impose some kind of barrier, then we would presumably export a bit less to them and that would be bad news for the workers of Sunderland who make Nissan cars or the workers of Derby who make Toyota cars.
What we don't know is in the absence of the EU exactly what the trade regime would be.
So you're making an assumption about what the alternative position is.
And I could go on with example after example of this sort, which demonstrates just how difficult it is to arrive at a correct cost-benefit analysis.
Does this actually matter?
Are there costs, but we just don't know what they are?
Well, there will be costs, because there are some things that are great in Britain.
The famous Working Time Directive tells the workers of Britain that they should not normally work more than a 48-hour week.
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