The EU: Will they never learn?

Last night I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 Ten O’Clock News, when I heard a contribution from Don Foster MP.  Now I am not particularly familiar with Mr. Foster, and I assumed he might be a Conservative (he was up against Nigel Farage).  I was alarmed by his comments on Britain’s EU membership.  And I was only partly mollified later to find that he is in fact the Lib-Dem Member for Bath.  In the context, he was speaking (or would be taken to be speaking) for the Coalition, and therefore, by extension, for me.
 
He asserted that the net cost of Britain’s EU membership is “only” around £4 billion, and that this “was good value for all we get in exchange”.  This is just plain wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to know where to start.
 
For a start, even our net contribution to the EU budget is well over £4 billion, and set to increase rapidly as a result of Tony Blair’s ill-advised deal on the rebate.  Secondly, as my colleague Dan Hannan has cogently argued, we don’t think of our income tax in net terms (after all the benefits we get back from government) — we think of what we have to pay.  The funds we get back from the EU are hedged about with restrictions, often require matched funding, and are often spent inefficiently on things we might not have chosen to do.  The EU gives us back a little of our own money, they tell us what to do with it, and they expect us to be grateful.  On a gross basis our contribution is around £13 billion, and rapidly escalating.
 
But the direct contributions to the EU Budget are not the half of it.  The greatest cost by far of our EU membership is the huge and unsustainable burden of regulation, which is strangling our economy, and (despite assurances to the contrary) getting worse by the day.  Various analyses of regulatory costs have been prepared, not least by Commissioner Verheugen, who estimated the cost of regulation at around 5.5% of GDP (compared to the benefits of trade in the Single Market, estimated at 1.8%).  The British Chambers of Commerce have done extensive analyses.  One of the most credible estimates of the total net costs of Britain’s EU membership, from the Taxpayers’ Alliance, puts it at well over £100 billion a year.
 
Then Mr. Foster talks of “the benefits of EU membership”, which we get in exchange for this vast expenditure.  I’ve said it so many times before, but it can’t be said too often: There are no benefits of EU membership that could not be obtained through a simple Free Trade Agreement.  We could have the benefits without the huge costs to our economy and our democracy and independence.
 
No doubt Mr. Foster will disagree with me, but in that case I hope that he will at least support the demand, from myself and others, for a White Paper on Costs “benefits” of Britain’s EU membership.  Previous governments have refused on the grounds that “the benefits are self-evident”.  Yet when the Swiss government undertook a very thorough and professional analysis of the costs and benefits of Switzerland’s proposed membership of the EU, the answer was that the costs overwhelmingly outweighed the benefits.  Switzerland concluded that it was Better Off Out.  And so should we be.