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		"No trade benefit from Single Market" - it's official! Lincolnshire Echo - August 3 2004 Regular readers of this column will know that I often make strong criticisms of the European Union. Occasionally, I am challenged by readers who say "OK, we know what you DON'T like about the EU. But what about the benefits? There must be something good about it?". And I used to have a ready answer. Of course free trade in the Single Market is a good thing. That's obvious, isn't it? It's what the government calls "the self-evident benefit" of EU membership. So I was as surprised as anyone to find a report from the German Bundesbank (Monthly Foreign Trade Report October 2003) saying "it could find no evidence" that the Single Market had helped German trade. Apparently the fiendishly complex paperwork and bureaucracy required for intra-EU trading outweighs any trade benefit of a tariff-free Single Market. Now if this finding came from some obscure, euro-sceptic think-tank, we might be able to ignore it. But the Bundesbank is arguably the most respected financial institution in the EU. When it speaks, we ought to listen. Even so, exceptional claims require exceptional levels of proof. Is there any other evidence that the Single Market is failing to deliver? Well yes, actually. Rather a lot. In 2002 the pro-EU Single Market News, polling members in the UK for its Internal Market Scoreboard, found only around a quarter - 26% -- who believed that the impact of the Single Market had been positive. 17% actually believed it had been negative. No big gains there, then. And trade statistics tell much the same story. Trade between the EU and third countries is growing more quickly than intra-EU trade. Exports from several larger non-EU countries to the EU are growing faster than intra-EU exports. Reports from a number of international organisations, including the EU Commission itself, project a long-term decline in the EU's share of global trade. But if the benefits of the EU are difficult to find, the costs are all too clear. EU regulation is a huge burden on the UK economy, costing growth and jobs and prosperity. And the bitter irony is that although exports to the EU account for only around 10% of the UK's GDP, the regulations apply to 100% of our economy. There is a good source of data on the costs of regulation, and it comes from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). While not quite the Bundesbank, the BCC is a highly respected business organisation, certainly not regarded as a euro-sceptic axe-grinder. Its analysis is carried out jointly by the London and Manchester business schools, using the government's own Regulatory Impact Assessments (RIAs), which began in 1999. Their work shows an annual cost of EU-initiated legislation of around £7 billion a year. Making a very conservative but broad-brush estimate for the years 1973 - 99 (when we were in the EU but no RIAs were prepared), the current cost would be £13 billion, rising to £19 billion (or around 2% of GDP) by 2009. As it happens, the Dutch government estimates the cost of EU regulation in their country as 2% of GDP, so we seem to be in the right ball-park. And the costs go on. Tony Blair says the CAP is "a manifest absurdity", while Gordon Brown calls it "a scandal". It costs the UK around £15 billion a year in taxes, direct contributions and higher food prices. The cost of the CFP - the Common Fisheries Policy - defies estimation. Our North Sea fisheries, a priceless national asset, have been given away to the EU, and the EU has destroyed them. Huge numbers of jobs, and a major industry, have been decimated. Against these vast costs, the direct payments we make to the EU, around £4 billion a year net, are mere chicken-feed. A new paper from the think-tank Civitas, "A Cost Too Far?", by Ian Milne, pulls together all these strands, and more beside. He summarises a number of authoritative cost-benefit analyses of British EU membership, all of which tend to show that we should be no worse off, and probably better off, out. His best estimate of the total annual cost of membership is a staggering £40 billion a year. For comparison, that's about the same as the total duty raised on all alcohol and tobacco sold in the UK. And the scandal is, that it is difficult to identify any benefit, at all, that we get for our money.