Leaving the EU will cost us, not give us back £350m

Boris Johnson, our nation’s court jester, has scuppered the plans for the Prime Minister’s much-hyped speech in Florence later this week.

He has reiterated his claim that the supposed £350 million we send to the EU can be sent to the NHS instead—to the consternation of the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority Sir David Norgrove and immediate public protests from others.

So many—including arch Brexiteer Nigel Farage—rowed back on that claim immediately after the EU referendum because our net contribution to the EU is, in fact, barely half that number—£156 million—owing to the rebates we receive from the EU.

Which means that our net contribution to the EU is around £8 billion a year, just one per cent of Britain’s annual Government spending.

The NHS has an annual budget of over £110 billion, with an estimated annual budget shortfall of up to £30 billion by 2020; £8 billion a year is not going to save the NHS.

Boris and those who have voiced support for this ‘Brexit blueprint’, including Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove, are therefore completely misleading to reiterate what was on the Brexit battle bus: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.”

Boris Johnson’s 4,000-word diatribe in the Daily Telegraph gives the impression that he is optimistic about our country’s future, painting a picture of Britain flourishing only if Brexit can take place. As a businessman, I am rather stunned by this.

In the time that we have been part of the EU, our nation’s capabilities have vastly improved. In fact, since the EU was formed, it is Britain that has had the highest cumulative GDP growth of 62 per cent—with Germany way behind at 35 per cent.

I find it shocking that Rees-Mogg can describe Britain’s past decades as a stage of “managed decline.”

I founded the UK-India Business Council in 2007 to promote trade, business and investment between Britain and India and I was proud that in doing so I could sing from the rooftops about Britain’s economy: the fastest-growing economy in the Western world, and the fifth-largest economy in the world.

That includes global trade. Even if it is declining, the EU accounts for around half of our trade. Add in free trade agreements that Britain has secured through the EU, and we have trade agreements in place to cover countries representing virtually 70 per cent of our trade—including Canada and, soon, Japan, which has just secured a mammoth free trade deal with the EU.

The Brexiteers want us to “go global”—to secure trade deals with the countries which currently represent just 30 per cent of the total value of our global trade. This could jeopardise the trade deals we already have with trading partners representing approximately 70 per cent of the total—and is sheer madness.

The wretched referendum has now greatly diminished our global standing. We are a member of the G7, G8 and G20 and a permanent member of the UN Security Council but we are no longer at the top table of the EU—let alone the top table of the world.

Britain was flying before Brexit but, quite apart from what Boris Johnson was saying, it is Brexit which has stalled Britain in its tracks and it is Brexit that has hugely damaged Britain’s influence in the world. And for what? Certainly not to save our NHS.

Britain’s court jester really is whistling in the wind.