Economically and financially the EU has been a disaster for its citizens. The union has consistently underperformed against the rest of the world despite having excellent education, infrastructure, natural resources, capital assets, intellectual capital and commercial heritage. What has gone so badly wrong?

1. Far too much government. Government is there to provide citizens with services they cannot provide for themselves. Law and order and national security for instance. The problem is that government, once in power, grabs more and more power. So we end up with a situation where the free market is generating wealth which the government then steals and squanders. Other countries with far less government, eg China, Hong Kong and Singapore, have prospered far more than the EU. In the UK we have Parish Councils, administrative “districts”, administrative “counties” and the Westminster Parliament. Four levels of government, all spending taxpayer’s money. The regions also have their assemblies. Then add in the EU Parliament, Commission and Council of Ministers and you can see that the ordinary working man is paying for an awful lot of unnecessary fat cats. It is indisputable that all this government is unnecessary and does far more harm than good.
2. Restrictions on free trade. It is ironic that the EU as a “free trade” area is so massively repressive against global free trade. This is enormously damaging as it is the free market that drives economic efficiency and generates wealth. For instance it costs twice as much to produce sugar from beet as it does from cane. So the EU uses vast amounts of our taxes to subsidise beet growing (though the land could grow other crops) whilst heavily taxing cane sugar imports. All this does is to stop the third world sugar cane countries from developing (Jamaica is in real trouble as a result) whilst at the same time making retail food prices higher. We pay twice, in taxes and then at the shops, for the EUs stupidity.
3. Corruption. The EU is incredibly corrupt, especially the Club Med countries. Greek taxi drivers collecting blindness disability benefits, Spanish mayors upgrading rural roads and taking huge backhanders from the contractors, Italian official only spending public money in ways that benefit their families. It is invidious and all pervasive, the EU is seen only as a source of self enrichment. Hard working British taxpayers finance this. And it is money that could be used far better by either being left in the pockets of the taxpayers or spent on genuine infrastructure.
4. Socialism. It has been proven beyond all doubt, for 4,000 years, that the best way to generate wealth in society and to provide efficient, meaningful employment is the free market. Harm is caused when governments think they know better than the free market, which they are arrogant enough do a lot, especially in the name of socialist dogma. This has been consistently making billions of people a lot poorer for nearly a century now. The EU contains many countries that are far more socialist than the UK is. So socialism dominates EU policies and actions, which only causes harm.
5. Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the Euro. The EU nations have widely disparate economies, partly as a result of history, partly as a result of geography and natural resources. The socialists within the EU don’t like this and want to force us into being one homogeneous economic entity. Which anyone who actually thinks about it can see is impossible. So they take vast sums of money from successful countries, such as Germany and the UK, and they give it to less successful countries, such as Bulgaria and Greece, where is just disappears in corruption and mismanagement. The figures involved are eye watering and the main result is to make the ruling classes in the recipient countries very rich indeed.  Also EMU prevents government from taking the best course of action to look after their own economies. And the Euro is a unsustainable idiocy, it just acts as an economic pump, shifting huge amounts of wealth away from the Club Med countries and distributing it in the Northern manufacturing countries, principally Germany.
6. The superstate project. The main intellectual driving force behind the EU and all its official is “wider and deeper” union. The original pretext of the Common Market as a free trade area has been hijacked by extremist federalists. The deeper union means the EU having ever more power over us and therefore our national governments being increasingly sidelined. Just go and look at the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties on Wikipedia to see this process, but thousands of other decisions by the Commission and Council of Ministers continuously drive us in the direction of subsumed nationality.  Wider union means ensuring that every country that can possibly be within the EU is a member, whether this makes sense or not. So we have the destruction of democracy in Hungary and institutionalised theft by the ruling class in Greece and it is OK for them to be inside one big happy country with the rest of us. Now Turkey is in the fast lane to join, despite being mostly not in Europe. It is ridiculous that we should be giving this Islamist, corrupt, undemocratic dictatorship the time of day.
7. Directives and regulation on businesses. A successful economy needs it to be very easy to start a new business and then to administer it. The EU does the exact opposite, it forces businesses to comply with ever more rules, most of which are not needed and all of which cost businesses money. The result is fewer jobs, more expensive goods and services and the economic effect of handing competitive advantage to businesses outside the EU. This is not just “red tape”, it is a genuine restraint on businesses, the markets and the generation of wealth in our society. One ticking time bomb is the proposed European Union financial transaction tax (EU FTT) which is making its way towards implementation. This is a tax on financial transactions between financial institutions. We would have to implement it, under Qualified Majority Voting we can’t stop it. And mostly it is targeted at the City of London where it would cause immense harm. And the money raised from Great Britain in this way would just be squandered by the EU in corruption and cronyism.

Add this lot together and you can see that the EU has made the British people a massive amount poorer. It is not just our huge annual payments to the EU, it is also the way it stops our economy from working efficiently. Britain is a natural entrepreneurial trading nation with huge historic and geographic economic advantages, we should and could very easily be the world’s most dynamic economy. Instead we go into the world with our wrists and ankles tied together because of the immense burden the EU imposes on us. We would not just be better off outside the EU, we would thrive and prosper like never before if we got rid of them.