Often Europe is compared with the USA. However there is one big difference. The US constitution dictates that individual states make their own laws and rule themselves as far as possible.

The central only gets involved only when necessary for big things like defence and security, leaving management of the states to the politicians in the individual states. The USA constitution’s Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from exercising any power not delegated to it by the States in the Constitution; as a result, states handle the majority of issues most relevant to individuals within their jurisdiction. More information can be found at Wikipedia Local Government of the United States

Compare this with Europe. We contribute £350 million every week to Europe, receiving approx. half of this back from Europe. Europe is run centrally from unelected politicians in the European parliament, who may have never been to Britain, certainly not to the area they may be making decisions about. They try to control from the centre with many irrelevant rules that affect all member countries whether the countries national or local governments like it or not.

More information about this can be found at Briefing paper from parliament.uk (requires Acrobat reader). There are a lot of facts and figures in this document. I’m not sure about them to be honest. If we leave the EU I think the majority of trade will carry on as normal. The best thing the UK could do is reduce levels of tax for companies to encourage more companies to come here and employ people. Instead they are raising taxes. I heard yesterday that they can’t even reduce the tax for the steel industry to try to save it because of EU rules.

There have been three big wars to my knowledge. These wars were the Napoleon wars around 1800, World War 1 and World War 2, with World War 2 killing 60 million people. So Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Adolf Hitler all attempted to run Europe from the centre. All failed at massive loss of life.

I would argue that Europe’s geography, and people are too diverse to be ruled centrally. We don’t even speak all the same language. We certainly don’t have a lot in common culturally, and this is a good thing. How can we be ruled by a politician who hasn’t even been to the United Kingdom?

I would go further and say that not only does the UK need to take control of its own budget, and its own decisions, the local county councils need more local control, not be overridden by national government (that just thinks about London) or Europe (that just thinks about itself). Witness the rise of the Scottish Nationalist party and the welsh assembly. I might not be a politician but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who has these views.