Open border
Under EU rules Britain must open borders next year to Bulgarian and Romanian citizens. The Labour government did so for Polish and other eastern European immigrants in 2004, predicting that a few thousand would arrive; the eventual total was over 400,000.
Would new migrants have jobs to come to? No, many will end up on benefits or begging or both. There are already 2.3 million EU nationals living here, 551,000 of whom are unemployed or economically inactive.
Mass immigration is not to meet our economic or social needs, but to obey the EU’s imposition of free movement of labour. Immigration is an economic issue. A greater supply of labour forces wages down further and puts more strain on our housing, healthcare and education.
The government says it cannot go against the EU; instead it will tighten benefit rules – no doubt hitting British workers again in the process. Only by leaving the EU this year could we stop a repeat of what happened after 2004.
The slump zone
Eurozone unemployment hit a record high of 11.8 per cent in November 2012; that’s some 18.8 million people, with youth unemployment a record 24.4 per cent. Unemployment in the whole of the European Union climbed to 26 million, at 10.7 per cent.
Trade figures also suggested that economic growth in the eurozone was very limited towards the end of 2012. In November German exports showed their sharpest drop in over a year, down 3.4 per cent.
Spanish practices
The Spanish government has been quietly tapping the country’s Social Security Reserve Fund. The fund is meant to guarantee the future payments of pensions but is being used as a buyer of last resort for government bonds.
‘Insanity’ of fiscal union
Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell – who is considered to be the intellectual “father of the euro” – has warned against a fiscal union in the eurozone, arguing, “It would be insane to have a central European authority which controls all taxes and expenses of states ... in the union.” ■