back to news page

Peter Bone, MP for Wellingborough, explains why he is publicly supporting the Better Off Out campaign.

When I voted to join the European Economic Community I, and millions of other Britons, thought we were voting to create a large European free trade area. As free trade has always benefited mankind and boosted the economic wellbeing of millions and millions of people it appeared to be the right thing to do.

Recently I asked my six year old son Thomas “what do you call something that has a flag, has a president, has a parliament, has its own currency, has its own courts, makes laws and raises billions of pounds through taxation?” Thomas’s reply was “daddy that’s easy! It’s called a country”.

The European Union is, without doubt, a superstate. It makes laws which are imposed on British subjects which can not be altered by parliament, it takes billions of pounds each year from British tax payers and redistributes it to continental Europe, and it allows hundreds of thousands of European citizens to come into our country without any regard to the interests of the United Kingdom. At no time have the British people been asked whether they want such a superstate.

The Labour government, despite their election pledge, will not even have a referendum on the European Treaty, which is merely the European Constitution re-spun.

It is my view that being in the European Union is no longer in the interests of the British people. I say that for three reasons.

First, since Labour came to power in 1997 British taxpayers have paid over a hundred billion pounds in taxation to this superstate some of which has been returned to this country through public expenditure projects decided upon by unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels. The sum of money taken is so large it is almost beyond the comprehension of most people. However, if that money had been left, either in tax payers pockets or spent on public services in this country, decided upon by elected British politicians, or a combination of the two there is no question that the British people would be better off.

Secondly, when the government was asked how many migrants from Eastern Europe would come to this country from the new EU accession countries they said 13,000, the actual figure was over 600,000. Many of those eastern European immigrants are coming to Northamptonshire, including my constituency Wellingborough. Our local public services can not cope with this flood of migration.

Our hospitals, schools, doctor’s surgeries, dentists, police and roads are under enormous pressure at present. However, the government is planning to impose 52,000 additional houses in north Northamptonshire over the next few years, up to a third of these are going to be for migrants from the European Union. The infrastructure of Northamptonshire will not be able to cope. If we were out of the European Union a third of these homes would not need to be built.

Thirdly, over the last hundred years so many British people have lost their lives defending this country against foreign invasion. They were fighting to maintain the freedom we have in this country to rule ourselves, they were fighting for democracy.

Yet over the last few years, step-by-step, we have been ceding to the European Union the powers to govern ourselves. It is fundamentally wrong that another state can impose laws on this country. The Westminster parliament should be sovereign and this will not and can not happen whilst we are part of the European Union.

I have no doubt that we will be better off out of the European Union.