'Success for Euro cash campaign' said your headline last week. Of course, it's nice to get £100-odd million for various local projects — in fact we should grab every last penny we can from Europe. Let's face the facts.
At present the United Kingdom contributes approximately 20 billion pounds per year to Europe. If we then go cap in hand and grovel to Brussels in the approved way we may be given grants to help carry out certain projects approved of by the impenetrable political and administrative bureaucracy in Brussels (not, note, necessarily the projects we regard as the most pressing, but the ones Brussels sees as politically expedient).
If we can then match the grant on a pound-for-pound basis, and can produce a certificate of completion (having had to borrow the value of the prospective grant as well as find at least half the cost), we have to ask for the promised grant to be paid over, theoretically extinguishing the loan we have incurred, though not necessarily the interest thereon.
The sum total of grants made to us from our own money in this tortuous way currently stands at approximately £1.5 billion — some seven and a half per cent of our contribution — and this is after the reduction in our contribution insisted on by Mrs Thatcher. The rest is lost in supporting a profligate, incompetent, and frequently fraudulent system which serves no useful purpose to our country — in fact, often the opposite.
Take the money by all means, but do not rejoice. Weep, rather, at what we might have done with what has been taken from us.
Geoffrey M Stowell
The Down
Bere Alston