Courtesy of Mish.
UK prime minister David Cameron has promised to renegotiate terms of its membership in the EU and put the measure to a popular referendum.
In response, Business leaders warn UK’s David Cameron that leaving the EU would be bad for economy.
Top business executives have warned U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron that he could damage Britain’s economy if he seeks to renegotiate the terms of its membership in the 27-country European Union.
In a letter published in the Financial Times on Wednesday, Virgin Group’s Richard Branson, London Stock Exchange head Chris Gibson-Smith and eight other business leaders challenged Cameron’s plan to renegotiate the U.K.’s EU membership terms and put the matter to a referendum.
However, popular distrust of the EU has grown in Britain — one of the 10 countries in the region that doesn’t use the euro. The British public shows no interest in the EU’s plans to move closer together. Most can’t even seem to stomach the current level of power of the EU, which many Britons see as meddlesome and inefficient.
Though the business leaders urged EU reform in their letter, they argued “we must be very careful not to call for a wholesale renegotiation of our EU membership, which would almost certainly be rejected.”
“To call for such a move in these circumstances would be to put our membership of the EU at risk and create damaging uncertainty for British business, which are the last things the prime minister would want to do,” they said.
But while Cameron wants Britain to remain in the EU and to retain influence in the body, he is also resisting a push by many member states, like France and Germany, to grant central authorities in Brussels greater powers over financial and legal affairs for the whole of the EU.
In the long run, many EU countries want to turn the bloc into a United States of Europe, an idea British politicians, particularly among Cameron’s Conservatives, abhor.
We Want Our Cake And Eat It Too
Note that it is not just UK businesses that want their cake and eat it too. So does Cameron.
The irony is that everyone is tired of the nonsensical nannycrat rules of the EU, and those rules will only get worse as time goes on.
For example, the nannycrats in Brussels are hell-bent on financial transaction taxes, high VATs, and onerous corporate income taxes. The bureaucrats also have gone along with absurd crop subsidies demanded by France. The result is everyone in Europe overpays for food (and nearly everything else) on account of tariffs that have not saved a single job. …
