The North Will Be Stronger if We Take Back Control

Responding to claims by Gordon Brown and Lord Kinnock that the North of England would be damaged if we took back control, Vote Leave Chief Executive Matthew Elliott said:

‘These are desperate times for the IN campaign – recycling a declaration of support that was first made in February and then repeated again in April.

‘The truth is that the UK’s cities have prospered in spite of our EU membership, not because of it.

‘Every week we send £350 million to the EU, enough to build a fully staffed NHS hospital. Our cities would benefit hugely if took back control of this money and spent it on our priorities – such as public services and infrastructure – instead. The only way to do this is to Vote Leave on 23 June.’

Gordon Brown and Lord Kinnock will today claim that the North could be turned into ‘wastelands’ if we take back control.

• Leading members of the IN campaign have already accepted we will strike a free trade agreement, so manufacturing industry in the North would not be affected.

• If we take back control, we could strike new trade deals with major economies, boosting jobs in the North.

• Leading employers, including Nissan, Hitachi, Bentley, Vauxhall Motors and Unilever, have made clear a leave vote will not affect their investments in the North.

• Current EU funding will be guaranteed until 2020 if we Vote Leave.

• There is no guarantee of EU funding past 2020 and it has been heavily cut back in recent years.

• Gordon Brown has previously accepted that the EU costs consumers as much as 7% of GDP, or £4,639 per household.

Leading members of the IN campaign have already accepted we will strike a free trade agreement, so manufacturing industry in the North would not be affected.

David Cameron has admitted: ‘If we were outside the EU altogether, we’d still be trading with all these European countries, of course we would … Of course the trading would go on … There’s a lot of scaremongering on all sides of this debate. Of course the trading would go on’.

Philip Hammond has admitted that a free trade agreement in goods ‘would be relatively simple to negotiate’.

The UK’s former Ambassador to the EU and leading supporter of the IN campaign, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, has admitted: ‘there is no doubt that the UK could secure a free trade agreement with the EU. That is not an issue’.

Even the pro-EU CBI has said: ‘the UK is highly likely to secure a Free Trade Agreement with the EU, and such an agreement would be likely to be negotiated at an extremely high level of ambition relative to other FTAs.

The pro-EU Centre for European Reform has accepted that, ‘given the importance of the UK market to the eurozone, the UK would probably have little difficulty in negotiating an FTA’.

If we take back control, we could strike new trade deals with major economies, boosting jobs in the North.

The EU’s failure to conclude just five trade agreements with the United States, Japan, ASEAN, India and Mercosur has, according to the European Commission’s own figures, cost the UK 284,341 jobs.

The UK will be able to strike more valuable free trade deals than the EU has done to date. The aggregate GDP of all the countries with which the EU had a trade agreement in force in January 2014 was $7.7 trillion. By contrast, the aggregate GDP of all countries with which Chile had trade agreements was $58.3 trillion. The figure for South Korea was $40.8 trillion and that for Switzerland was $39.8 trillion.

The EU has, for example, failed to negotiate a free trade agreement with China. By contrast, both Iceland (which has a population of less than half a million) and Switzerland have negotiated free trade agreements with China.

Leading employers, including Nissan, Hitachi, Bentley, Vauxhall Motors and Unilever, have made clear a leave vote will not affect their investments in the North.

Kevin Rose, Board Member at Bentley, has said: ‘We made our plans, we’ve announced the investments … and they were in full knowledge that there was a referendum so we believe in the UK … Regardless [of the outcome], we think that the UK is a good place for investment’.

Carlos Ghosn, the Chief Executive of Renault-Nissan has said: ‘Whatever is the decision of the UK we will adapt to it. I don’t think there is a reason to worry. We knew for many years that [an exit] was possible. So we’ll deal with it’. Trevor Mann, Chief Performance Officer at Nissan has said: ‘If there was a future trade agreement between the UK and EU then it wouldn’t make a lot of difference’

The Chairman of Hitachi, Hiroaki Nakanishi, has said that ‘we cannot say Brexit is the wrong way’ and that ‘we have a long history in the UK. From the Japanese side, the UK is more accessible from the viewpoint of the language and the long history between Britain and Japan. We have to find excellent leaders for each business we operate, so in that sense, the long history with the UK can help us to find good leaders’.

Tim Tozer, Chairman and Managing Director of Vauxhall Motors, has said: ‘If this country would vote to leave the EU, would that trouble or concern us? There my answer is no because I don’t think that in that event there would not be a trade agreement with what was left of the EU’.

Paul Polman, Chief Executive Officer of Unilever, has said: ‘The effectiveness of my research centre is the quality of the people I have there and the ideas coming out in terms of the innovations that we produce. We don’t make a decision on moving research centres around depending on if you are in the EU or not… I am in every country basically, in any trading zone, in the EU, out of the EU. People need to buy shampoo, people need to eat their Knorr or Cup-a-soup, and they want to buy their Coleman’s and they want to buy their Magnum ice cream. They are not going to say that is function of if I am in the EU or if I am not in the EU’.

EU funding will be guaranteed if we Vote Leave.

Ministers supporting Vote Leave have explicitly committed to maintain funding. They have stated: ‘There is more than enough money to ensure that those who now get funding from the EU – including universities, scientists, family farmers, regional funds, cultural organisations and others – will continue to do so while also ensuring that we save money that can be spent on our priorities. If the public votes to leave on 23 June, we will continue to fund EU programmes in the UK until 2020, or up to the date when the EU is due to conclude individual programmes if that is earlier than 2020. We will also be able to spend the money much more effectively. For example, some of the bureaucracy around payments to farmers is very damaging and can be scrapped once we take back control’.

There is no guarantee of EU funding past 2020 and it has been heavily cut back in recent years.

There is no guarantee of EU funding after 2020. The EU’s Seven Year Budget, the Multi-Annual Financial Framework, expires in 2020. As the pro-EU Northern Ireland Minister, Ben Wallace, has admitted ‘I cannot guarantee that [EU funding] past 2021’.

CAP spending is being cut. Figures from HM Treasury show that CAP spending on market support in the UK has fallen from £3.9 billion in 2011-2012 to £2.7 billion in 2014-2015.

Structural funds have been slashed in areas of the North. Structural funds are being cut, with some areas in England (such as South Yorkshire and Merseyside) receiving 61% cuts from the 2007-2013 period to the 2014-2020 period (R (Rotherham MBC) v Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Support could be made more efficient if we Vote Leave. A Government review in 2013 found that the majority of stakeholders considered that ‘CAP remains misdirected, cumbersome, costly and bureaucratic’ while the National Farmers’ Union said that EU arrangements were ‘close to impossible’. Similar complaints about EU science funding have been raised. Sir Andre Geim, 2010 Nobel Prize winner for physics has said: ‘I can offer no nice words for the EU framework programmes which… can be praised only by Europhobes for discrediting the whole idea of an effectively working Europe’.

Gordon Brown has previously accepted that the EU costs consumers as much as 7% of GDP, or £4,639 per household.

In 2005, Gordon Brown admitted that: ‘although Europe’s founders aimed to remove barriers and reap the benefits of expanded markets internally, they also sought protection and special treatment for particular aspects of their economies such as agriculture. This has brought costs: expensive subsidies still remain in some sectors and it is estimated that barriers to external trade and investment – such as tariffs, quotas and unjustifiably restrictive standards – could cost Europe’s consumers up to 7 per cent of EU GDP’.

This is the equivalent of £125.233 billion per year in today’s prices. It amounts to £4,639 per household or £23,236 per company per year.