What this entry highlights is that it is obviously crazy to talk (as is the norm in UK politics) about whether you are “pro” or “anti” the EU. It is this sort of simplistic debate that means are politicians can act without accountability in Brussels.

No-one actually knows, reports in different counties give wildly different conclusions. I suspect Hannan’s figure is too high, but your ‘expose’ of 9% is equally misleading.

Besides, the percentage is irrelevant – until an EU Government can be voted in or out by me directly, then the percentage should be 0%.

Point #1 by Daniel Hannan (henceforth DH) shows no knowledge of how trade figures are constituted. Whilst Britain has been running a consistent trade deficit on its current account, it has been running a consistent surplus on its Capital and Financial accounts. What’s the difference? The Current account represents trade in goods and services, the capital account and financial account represent trade in financial transactions. All this shows is that Britain is better at Banking than Manufacturing.

Also, correlation without causation? Just because we joined the EU doesn’t mean to say it’s the cause of our trade deficit. Not that the trade deficit is a problem anyway.

On point #3, I think this is completely mangled, although I have no evidence to contradict DH’s point. What I do have is a report by the British Chambers of Commerce, that puts the cost of all EU regulation to British companies at 0.1% of total regulatory costs. The other 99.9% is attributable to Whitehall.
http://www.britishchambers.org.uk/6798219243077818908/BCC_report_Worlds_Apart.pdf

Also 600 to 180 billion seems to be a substantially large margin of error.

Point #6 is silly. This figure was derived by calculating the ratio of German Laws to EU laws. Because there were 19,000 EU regulations passed in the period 1998-2004 compared to 3,500 German laws, this makes a ratio of roughly 85:15 EU to German laws. But you could just make more German laws and this would change the ratio. It doesn’t reflect the impact or importance of the German laws or EU laws.
Read: http://www.jcm.org.uk/blog/?p=2230

Point #7 assumes the UK government/British people want more liberal trade policies.

I don’t even see how Point #8 is a criticism of the EU. So Norway and Switzerland are different to the UK. You don’t need a degree in Politics to work that one out. Just look at a map.

Point #9 assumes that the UK, 60 million people – large and complex and diverse economy, can be turned into a version of the Cayman Islands (population 56,000).

Point #10 (in response to Mark M’s comment): I sure did enjoy voting for the Queen, and an unelected House of Lords. Oh, and an undemocratic system of appointing judges. And we still haven’t had a referendum on the magna carta.

4 – renegotiate the CAP from within? Ok great, and how’s that going so far? Why do europhiles always say “we’d be better renegotiating from within”. In case you haven’t noticed, we ARE within, and we CAN’T renegotiate. That is WHY people want out. If we COULD renegotiate, we WOULD.

5 – Do the fish know that Britain is in the EU? Would they swim away the instant we left? No, of course not. The fish stay where they are because there are nutrients to sustain them. They don’t suddenly move on because some country they don’t know about has left a union they don’t know about.

6 – if the number of laws coming from the EU is 84% of German laws, and 9.1% of UK laws then it implies that we introduce 9 times more ‘homegrown’ laws than Germany. Given our government’s record that the answer to any problem is a new law, this wouldn’t surprise me. Thus both figures could we be accurate.

7 – if the EU imposes tariffs on the UK then we can just trade with other countries. There’s a whole African continent just begging for someone to trade with them on a non-tariff basis. Inside the EU there are 26 countries we can trade tariff-free with – outside the EU there are hundreds. Also, as a net importer of EU goods one supposes that EU countries might want to give us special rates as the standard tariffs could mean a huge loss of trade for those remaining 26.

8 – again, this strange idea that somehow Britain has a major say in how EU market laws are shaped. Norway essentially gets a best of both – benefits of the single market without the single state politics.

9 – free marketeer v socialist argument – rebuttal has little to do with the EU and more to do with political disagreement

10 – You’re right – I sure did enjoy voting for Mr van Rompuy, Baroness Ashton and the rest of the European Commissioners. That was a good election.

Oh please, can I comment on this? I agree with Dan Hannan on this. The European Parliament uses the truely appalling D’Hondt electoral system. This is the party list system where citizens vote for a party and then get allocated a number of MEPs depending on the electoral support and the party decides who will represents you. As a voter you do not decide who your MEP will be. Horrible, isn’t it? The Irish (both North and South) have an opt out and use the Single Transferable Vote system.

So why am I mentioning this? Well Dan Hannan benefits from this horrible system. If he was truly concerned about democracy he would resign as an MEP and stand as a Westminster MP. But he doesn’t because he is scared.

This is a wonderful piece of nonsense and it is brought up time and time again by Eurosceptics. For a start, why was the German Justice Ministry interested in how many laws that affected Britain were made by the EU? Oh, so their figure was about Germany and is irrelevant? Thanks for the clarification, Mr Hannan. But J Clive Matthews explains it better at LiberalConspiracy:

This would suggest that something in the region of 10-20% would be a fair guess for the UK as well (a range that has the added benefit of being backed up by the British Chambers of Commerce’s recent study of regulations).

(the post at LC is well worth a read, by the way)

OK, so let’s just take a step into Hannan’s drea,land (shudder) and imagine that 84% of laws are made by the EU (so Westminster only makes 16% of our laws). If we withdrew from the EU would that mean that government would have to expand by eight times>/b> to take up the slack? Gosh, I thought that the Tories were in favour of shrinking the state, not increasing it!

http://www.openeurope.org.uk/research/outofcontrol.pdf

So almost 72 percent of all rules governing the UK is coming from the EU… Try to defend that.

On the other figures:

http://openeuropeblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-many-of-our-laws-are-made-in.html