Letter: There Is a Lot of Misunderstanding About the EU

Published on: 26 Feb, 2019
Updated on: 26 Feb, 2019

Cly Wallace Aramian

A late thank you to Robert Park for this comment about EU decision-making in response to the article Guildford Contingent Takes Part in Pro-EU London March from March 2017.

I’m a Guildford resident and business person who has worked in and on the EU. The extent of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the EU legislative process is shocking. I’ve recently joined the Brexit discussion, mostly on Twitter, and I find myself reciting these facts a lot.

Some broad underlying principles also seem hard to convey in this environment. Sovereignty is not one thing; exactly as Robert Park says, all the EU’s member states have given up a bit of it in prescribed areas because they believe it’s in their and everyone’s best interests.

In the same way, on the roads, we all give up parts of our driving “sovereignty” for collective safety. And it’s a shame how the narrative of “taking back control” is so powerful, and the argument that the UK needs collaboration within an EU of 500 million people to thrive in the world is considered by many to be unpatriotic. Indeed, what on earth is so dreadful about this idea that we would wilfully wreck our economy and threaten peace on these islands?

But there are of course reasons. Britain has never felt entirely part of Europe. UK politicians have consistently used the EU as a whipping boy. And the EU could have done more to make itself real to ordinary member state citizens.

Finally, I think the EU is also partly a victim of its own success. The aim was peace through economic entanglement. 60-70 years after World War 2 and the ECSC/EEC founding, the arcane rules of entanglement are, understandably, difficult to understand, and we have, perhaps naturally, if unfortunately, come to take the peace and the prosperity for granted.

Responses to Letter: There Is a Lot of Misunderstanding About the EU

John Perkins Reply

February 27, 2019 at 10:27 am

No evidence is offered for the claims “needs collaboration”, “wreck our economy” or “threaten peace”. The author presumably imagines we’re all a bit too thick to understand it anyway.

Many would be prepared to give up some or even all sovereignty for something better, but the EU doesn’t come close.
John Armstrong Reply

February 28, 2019 at 2:02 pm

Cly Wallace Aramian claims in her letter that the EU has actually been good for us and that we just misunderstand it. Apparently, we have enjoyed prosperity. I don’t think it feels much like it though to those millions on in work benefits or those made redundant after one foundry after another closed or the working poor and those who have to use food banks, the homeless and the rough sleepers.

When it comes to the EU. Who benefits? It’s certainly not the working people of Britain, nor Italy, nor Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus etc. Nor is it business, most of which do not trade with the EU, but they still have to abide by onerous EU compliance rules, or at least by the International Standards Institute rules which are more or less the same thing and which is responsible for those ridiculous car headlight clusters which render the indicators invisible when the lights are on; but they’re cheaper to produce.

We blame the EU for much that is inflicted by our own politicians; our own poor for instance. Think what we could have done with this money: https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/964141/germany-germans-reparations-brexit-war-cash-marshall-plan-daniel-kawczynski

And they are still falling over themselves to give them another £39bn.

Misunderstanding? I don’t think so.