The economy will take a big hit if we stay in the EU
THOSE campaigning to keep Britain inside the European Union have spent a lot of time cooking up warnings about what they claim could happen to our economy if we leave.
If only they had taken a more serious look at the economic terrain they would surely have come to appreciate that they have missed an obvious and genuinely worrying truth.
It is this: by far the biggest economic risk to Britain is being trapped inside the EU with no way out when the eurozone next hits major trouble.
And be in no doubt that such a moment is coming down the tracks. When it arrives, we will be on the hook potentially for tens of billions of pounds in financial support and face a big new wave of migration if we have not decided to take back control of our destiny.
It is taken as read that Greece will soon return with demands for yet another bailout. But the dismal fate of the poor Greeks may well soon look like a mere sideshow.
The danger is that one of the eurozone’s major economies – Italy or even France – will run out of capacity to keep paying the bills of economic failure. Italy has youth unemployment of 40 per cent and its economy has barely grown since it has been locked in the euro.
FRANCE has a youth unemployment rate of around 25 per cent and it is becoming more obvious all the time that being in a common currency with Germany is throttling its economy.
Were one of these economies to need bailing out, there simply would not be enough money to go around within the eurozone itself.
So suppose that Britain votes to remain in the EU. And then imagine what a new euro crisis will do to us. Britain would be hit in four main ways – let us call them the four horsemen of the euro apocalypse.
As a nation that had voted to remain and thus given the EU cause to claim democratic legitimacy over our affiliation, we would be told to show “solidarity” with the club.
So horseman number one is this: as the second largest economy in the EU we would surely be expected to be a major contributor to an enormous bailout fund.
Horseman number two is