Let’s show the EU – by turning our backs on their imports

UNLIKE Mike Baldwin (The Yorkshire Post, March 17), I welcome the reduction in our trade with the EU on the basis that if something is damaging you, stop doing it.

The damage before Brexit was in the form of a balance of trade loss of about £90bn per year, which equates to a loss of £250m each and every single day.

Why were we making such a massive loss? I believe it is because we stupidly allowed massive penetration of the UK market by products from the EU which we used to make for ourselves.

I came across another example when I recently bought a carton of a leading brand of liver salts, which has been available to us for many decades.

It retains its traditional English name, but I was surprised to see it is now manufactured in Spain.

My purchase therefore supported employment and prosperity in Spain. I would not object to that if there were an approximate balance of trade, but that is clearly not the case currently. What should we do about it?

I suggest we take a leaf out of the EU’s own book and use every trick in the book to minimise imports from them.

No doubt that would invite further retaliation from the EU, but we have the comfort of knowing there is nothing we currently import from them that we cannot either produce ourselves or obtain elsewhere in the world – liver salts and all.

AS a confirmed Brexiteer, the debacle in the EU and their total incompetence in getting their people safely vaccinated against this terrible pandemic reminds me of the reason for quitting that “vale of tears”.

For the French, German and Scandinavian governments to stop vaccinating their people on some totally unreliable statistics tells me their behaviour is irresponsible in the extreme.

I wonder how many lives this suspension of vaccinations has cost our European cousins – Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel will be eventually called to account for this, I hope.

Did the French and German dislike of this particular vaccine occur because British scientists were largely responsible for its development? If so, the phrase cutting one’s nose off to spite your face comes to mind.

I am so glad we have left all that EU bureaucratic nonsense behind and have cast their rules and laws into the dustbin of history, where they truly belong.