Blaming EU for our ills doesn’t stack up
YOUR correspondent Judith Petchey ( WDP, January 10th) is one of a number in recent months who seem inclined to view the UK’s past through rose-tinted glasses and seek to blame the EU for our problems.
Vince Cable was once criticised for stating that the vote to leave was, in part, brought about by nostalgia. He seems to have had a point. While it is natural, as one gets older, to look at the past in a more favourable light, there is a risk of creating myths. Mrs Petchey recalls our industrial past, but the collapse of much of our heavy industry was of our own making – caused in large measure by industrial strife and poor productivity.
It led to the UK being dubbed
“the sick man of Europe” throughout the late 1960s and the 1970s and to our humiliation in having to accept a bail out from the International Monetary Fund in 1976. We joined the then Common Market in 1973, while we were in the midst of our economic doldrums, and the EU was not created until 1993. It is difficult to see, therefore, how either the Common Market or the EU can be held responsible for our economic failure. Mrs Petchey notes that the police are struggling to cope with increasing lawlessness but how is that the fault of the EU? Perhaps austerity cuts have something to do with it. She states that EU laws have forced the police to accept situations that they would once have dealt with, but how is that so?
Human Rights law often gets the blame, but the European Convention on Human Rights is an instrument of the Council of Europe, which the UK is not leaving. Mrs Petchey complains that our licensing laws are ridiculous, with alcohol being served throughout the night, but, again, how can this domestic policy issue be the responsibility of the EU?
Finally Mrs Petchey invokes the war and criticises the attitude of the French, Belgian and Dutch governments. While they no doubt acknowledge, appreciate and respect what was done by the Allies in the 1940s, we cannot expect them to remain in a state of perpetual gratitude for our role in a war which ended more than seven decades ago.
And why would anyone believe that the EU was going to make it easy for us to leave? To my mind, blaming the EU for all our ills in an attempt to justify Brexit simply doesn’t stand scrutiny.