Why I will be campaigning to leave the EU

Imagine what we could do if we stopped sending £350million to Brussels every week.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan says the UK sends £350million to the EU every week.Anne-Marie Trevelyan says the UK sends £350million to the EU every week.
Anne-Marie Trevelyan says the UK sends £350million to the EU every week.

That’s enough to build a new hospital every week. It’s 60 times what we spend on the NHS Cancer Drugs Fund.

If we vote to leave the European Union, we can spend our money on our priorities.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

So many of our laws are decided without any accountability to the British people. We can take back control of our future if we vote to leave the EU.

There is a lot of talk about us being ‘safer’ in the EU. I disagree.

The most important element in preventing terrorist attacks is intelligence. Intelligence must be handled carefully, which is why the sharing of intelligence is bilateral between individual states. It is not done through the EU.

These critical bilateral relationships are in everyone’s interests and would continue regardless of being in or out of the EU. Our closest intelligence relationship by far is not with any EU member state, but with the United States.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

We have lost control of who comes into our country and on what terms. We have lost control of who we can deport.

Colonel Richard Kemp, former head of Government anti-terrorism, says this is a huge threat to our security: “Many are experienced killers. While we remain in the EU these terrorists have the right to come freely into our country. None of this was envisaged when we joined the EU. By leaving we will again be able to determine who does and does not enter the UK. Failure to do so significantly increases the terrorist threat here.”

We will be more secure after we vote leave and take back control.

A lot of the scaremongering arguments made by those who would prefer us to remain within the EU centre around trade and our potential to do business outside the EU’s political system.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It is nonsense to suggest that if we left the political constraints of the EU and the red tape of Brussels we would stop trading with other EU nations.

For starters, the UK is the EU’s biggest market for exports. It relies heavily on trading with us. It would be nonsensical and costly to the EU to cut off trading relationships.

The UK is the world’s fifth largest economy. We are perfectly capable of negotiating our own trade deals with EU nations, and the wider world.

In fact, leaving the EU would give us much greater freedom to draw up favourable trade deals with non-EU nations.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

This non-EU trade is more important than ever – since 2010, every region of the world has experienced significant economic growth, except Europe.

We are going to hear a lot of scaremongering in the coming months about how Britain is dependent on the EU’s political institutions and cannot manage without them. I think that’s absurd.

We are, and always have been, a strong, outward-facing nation, perfectly capable of striking trade deals, doing business and working together with the rest of Europe and the world, without needing EU politicians to tell us to.

Without the constraints of EU red tape, and without having to funnel huge sums of money through Brussels, we will have the capacity and resources to ensure our farmers are better supported, work up more favourable trade deals, and decide our own migration policy, which would enable us to welcome the brightest and best from Europe and the wider world.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The safest option is to vote to leave the EU’s political institutions, and to move forwards without their additional bureaucracy holding us back.

So many of our laws are decided without any accountability to the British people.

We can take back control of our future if we vote to leave the EU.

A future beyond the limitations of the EU’s political systems holds so much promise for a strong nation such as ours, and I look forward to campaigning for it in the coming months.