Andrew Bridgen is MP for Leicester North West. To describe him as not the sharpest knife in the drawer would be an insult to spoons. He is a total idiot. In an interview with the Daily Express (HERE), he is reported with some absolutely jaw droppingly stupid comments.
First of all, he confuses the EU with the ECB:
“The EU need our money - the £39 billion. They can borrow money to bail out Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Republic of Ireland, but they cannot borrow money for their EU budgets".
The bail outs don't come from the EU's budget but from the European Central Bank. The £39 billion is money we pay to the EU, not the ECB. The two things are completely separate. The EU budget incidentally is about 1% of EU GDP, of which our contribution is about 15% - so in total we pay about 0.15% of total EU output. A fleabite.
He thinks the EU will go bust if we don't pay the £39 billion:
“They need that £39 billion to keep their programmes on track. The House of Lords has already said that we don’t legally owe them anything – we could leave paying them no payment".
Nobody ever went bust for 0.15% of their total wealth. As for leaving without paying the £39 billion there would be no trade deal, no flights, no imports, food shortages - within a week £39 billion would look like small change.
He thinks we have to make threats to get a trade deal that the EU are quite willing to provide:
“We don’t want to throw the European Union as we leave into economic meltdown. But we need some goodwill to come back on the other side and I am yet to see any demonstration of that. I think we are going to have to threaten them with all those things [no payment, economic meltdown, etc] to get the free trade deal that they should give the UK.”
The EU have already offered us a free trade deal - this is absolutely plain and clear. There is not the slightest doubt we can have a CETA type deal very easily without needing to issue any threats whatsoever. The problem is we don't want it because of the damage it would do to our economy. Mr Bridge obviously doesn't read the newspaper. As for US leaving THEM in economic meltdown - words fail me. It's just nonsense.
And finally, leaving the best till last, he thinks (or the Express do if it's a misprint) that we take 70% of EU exports. The Eurostat website (HERE) said in 2017 they exported about £1.6 Trillion in total in goods. Goods imports into the UK from the EU in 2017 was £341 billion or 53% of all our imports, according to the HoC Library (HERE). In other words, it wasn't 70% but 21% - still a large figure - but 70%?, nowhere near. We would be their largest trading partner but not far ahead of the USA. They would also be our largest trading partner.
These are the kind of people that we have to select our leaders from. Not very reassuring is it?
