Sir – There are lies, damn lies and statistics, said Mark Twain, so when Jason Smith starts bandying figures about to make some point about the EU, then you need to look carefully at his calculations.
He claims (Letters, November 16) that the EU has cost Britain £80 billion over the last five years – roughly equivalent to current Government spending cuts.
Not so! According to National Statistics, the EU has cost us roughly £4.7 billion annually over the last four years, making a total £25 billion if you add on the £6.2 billion for the current year.
That is a whopping great miscalculation on Jason’s part.
Dig a little deeper and you will find that membership of the EU generates in excess of £10 billion a month in exports for UK companies (about £120 billion a year).
And yet UKIP wants to hobble our exporters by taking us out of the marketplace, forcing companies to compete for orders from behind a set of tariff barriers.
It’s totally bonkers!
Stuart Baker, Markham Croft, Leeds
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