LETTER: Countries do not pay into budget

By The Newsroom
Published 28th Oct 2016, 12:56 BST
Updated 31st Oct 2016, 09:51 BST
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Oh dear! David Daniels CBE owes me an apology! Had he carried out the most basic homework by consulting the official EU, EFTA-EEA, Switzerland websites (rather than remain propaganda) he would find my statement that non-EEA Switzerland and Norway do not pay into the 28-nation EU Budget is factually correct (21/10/16).

These official websites make very clear that Switzerland and Norway do not pay into the distinct 28-nation ‘EU Budget’ but - importantly - their contributions are received by the EU ‘in addition to’ that budget primarily to fund EU programmes, as I have long explained.

They (and other non-EEA contributors) thus receive EU funds in return. Norway pays an equivalent to the EU for those specific EU-benefits they ‘enjoy’ as members of the EEA: their annual EU payment is roughly Britain’s gross weekly liability to the EU Budget.

Norway also voluntarily funds poorer EEA states.

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If these elementary, well-proven facts and subtle semantics are still too complicated for remoaners to comprehend, is it any wonder they lost?!

As to his lengthy economic lecture (some of which I agree), yo-yoing comparative economic indices such as ‘industrial output per man-hour’ are of academic interest only to economists and desperate politicians. Indeed, ask two credible economists the same question and you’ll get three different, ever-changing, credible but opposing answers.