19/09/2012
The House of Commons foreign affairs committee
interviews "one of the most prominent economists advocating Britain's withdrawal from the EU". This is professor Patrick Minford CBE, Professor of Applied Economics, Cardiff Business School, contributing to an inquiry on: "The future of the European Union: UK Government policy".
The egregious professor then regales the
LSE blog with his arguments as to why the UK must leave the EU. "The institutional evolution triggered by the euro crisis", he says, "threatens to make the economic costs of EU membership higher than ever, in a highly visible way. The case for leaving the EU has become overwhelming".
Sadly, in his oral evidence to the HoC committee, Minford argues that we should engineer a unilateral departure, whence we could then ask the "colleagues" to sit down and negotiate with us. And, if they don't, then we can compensate our industries (such as the car industry) for their losses. The man does not seem to have heard of Article 50.
Listening to all this, one again gets the sense of a debate that
has not developed. Prof. Minford seems to have very little new to say, with a very limited idea of how regulation is made, and its sources. The world has moved on but, it seems, Minford, hasn't.
