Quote:
Originally Posted by RizzyKing
I am in the get out soon as camp there may be benefits to being in the the eu but there are also large downsides that might get a lot worse in time to come. Damien you continue to raise the 50% trade argument but as Chris said that figure is diminishing and has been for quite a few years. Trade is the biggest argument to stay in the eu but here's the thing are we better staying in the eu with that trade or breaking away now and developing more longterm lucrative trade with the wider and larger global market. I think the uk's future lies in the wider global market then the eu market.
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And I haven't even started on the "Rotterdam Effect" yet. Hands up who's aware that when compiling export statistics, goods are counted as having been exported to whichever country has the 'port of first discharge'.
A lot of our worldwide exports go to Rotterdam (Netherlands) or Antwerp (Belgium) because these ports have excellent onward connections for places we sell goods to - anywhere else in the world you could name. But because our goods are counted as having been exported to the Netherlands or Belgium, rather than, say, Singapore or India, the result is to inflate our apparent trade with those countries at the expense of our trade figures with the rest of the world. And because both the Netherlands and Belgium are in the EU, the end result is to tip our export figure towards the EU and away from the rest of the world.
The truth is, nobody knows exactly what the real figures are. However, when you look at the amount we export to the other major economies of the EU you can do a little extrapolation. Our apparent exports to Belgium and the Netherlands, per capita, are 3-4 times higher than those to France and Germany (which don't host major international ports through which British exporters habitually send their goods). Reverse the percentages and it's reasonable to postulate that our exports to the EU, far from being somewhere around 47%, are actually nearer 37%.
In short, even if there were any substance to the scare-story that leaving the EU would shut our exporters out of the continent, the impact would be far, far lower than claimed.