Socialist Quotes for Snday Reflection pt 87

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(Not that we endorse the social democrat trots, but a fair point nonetheless)

We're told leaving the EU will cost jobs –The Impact analysis on joining the European project were all wrong. Joining turned out to be a disaster.

 The Labour Party's Tony Benn, explaining how it turned a trade surplus with the bloc into a deficit and destroyed 500,000 jobs.
The UK have run a deficit with the EU ever since the Tories took us into the EEC/EU

The Bankers love the EU.That's why they fight so hard for remain. Its all services.

The share of UK exports accounted for by the EU has generally fallen over time from 55% in 2006 to 44% in 2016, though this increased slightly to 45% in 2018.

The share of UK imports accounted for by the EU fell from 58% in 2002 to 51% in 2010, though this has now been at 53% since 2014.

The UK had an overall trade deficit of -£66 billion with the EU in 2018. A surplus of £28 billion on trade in services was outweighed by a deficit of -£94 billion on trade in goods.

The UK had a trade surplus of £29 billion with non-EU countries. A surplus of £77 billion on trade in services outweighed a deficit of -£48 billion on trade in goods.

Services accounted for 41% of the UK’s exports to the EU in 2018. Financial services and other business services (a category which includes legal, accounting, advertising, research and development, architectural, engineering and other professional and technical services) are important categories of services exports to the EU – in 2018 these two service categories made up just over half of of UK service exports to the EU.

The EU is not a democracy. When Jeremy Corbyn voted against the Maastricht treaty in 1993, he declared it was because the EU had handed control to “an unelected set of bankers”. More recently the Labour leader has said the EU has “always suffered from a serious democratic deficit”.

 #Brexit Lexit - the Left Leave Campaign
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Interesting to read what I wrote about the forthcoming EU vote a month or so before it happened. I still stand by every word two and a half years later.

"For me it's not about economics at all, it's about do we want to see the survival of distinctive national and local communities, or do we wish to live in a globalised, corporate world where nobody really belongs anywhere and rooted citizenship is consigned to history. I'll never understand why 'socialists' and 'communists' support the latter, as without real communities of people with a shared history and culture the system they/I fight for becomes impossible. I'm all for fraternal, fair trade and the exchange of labour and skills between independent nations, but that is not what the EU is about at all. It is about the domination of big business and the destruction of resistance to that domination through the physical destruction of community, both as an idea and as a physical entity. Vote LEAVE on June 23."

 - Tony Green

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