Businesses urge Cameron to tame Euroscepticism

Why aren't british main buisness lobbies seizing their opportunity to trade alone across oceans with other integrating continents rather than with Britain's own one, 20 miles away which happens to be the first market in the world?

Hard-working etc... Given that the disindustialised UK has the worse trade deficit, the problem for the british economy outside of the Single market won't be about going on exporting the few things it still manages to produce and sell to Europe (between 4% and 6% of imports in each european countries come from the UK) but rather to import at a reasonable price (since over 50% of the UK's purchasing needs coming from the EU). How would even Benelux be replaced, since it already is a bigger trading partner than the US for Britain, with a population alltogether 10 times smaller?

The world is a big place, true, and as you may have noticed in your experience, it is increasingly integrating into protectionist continental blocs (North/South America, China, India, Russia, Africa, South-Asia-Pacific), hard negociating at the WTO within 6 or 7 markets each with a population of in between 500/1500 milions. Of these markets the EU not only is the strongest and happens to be lying 20 miles away from the british coasts, it is the most or the only liberal bloc, partly thanks to british input, advocating for free trade allowing your products to fairly competete with others worldwide. Are you saying the UK should leave the EU to in fact sign up the same agreements with it as it use to enjoy in (why is that all for then?) and at the end of the day defend the same positions abroad, just with a market 10 times smaller as a bargaining argument?

Does this idea seem to you such a wise plan, as a traditionaly reasonable and realistic trading buisnesssman?

Hard-working, ...except that historically everyone in the Commonwealth divorced the UK before Britain eventually married with the EU. Americans, Indians and Africans haven't so far seemed to be regreting Britain and the UK happens to be the only nostalgic one of previous marriages. The countries having divorced you before you joined the EU aren't anyway ready to offer you the same access to their markets, as you enjoy in the single market, and even if they would want to, you'd have difficulties finding such a rich and develloped market, with qualified workforce and infrastructure, as well as democratic standards as in the EU, which accounts by itself for over 20% of the world's economy. Your senario of former colonies which couldn't wait for Britain to leave the EU is unrealistic as they would probably think you are just being economically mad! They may recall from the colonial times a different story, as what you call a long british "tradition of trade in the world".

Your new Commonwealth strategy of reconquest would require decades and decades of readapting for the british economy in order to fit a hypothetical bloc at the other side of the planet Britain would instead be integrating, instead of the already powerful EU next door. Honestly a bit like Berlin with the USSR, you'd have to transform at least the whole of Ireland to make it an enormous airport fitting your new economical needs being sieged in Europe?) doesn't look like you are in charge of a lot of money indeed in your export buisnesses. You may not have up-dated your datas since the USSR.

Let me tell you that if the EU was economically "dying" as you say, Britain would be one of the most hit country as the UKs economy and the City are much more dependant on the EU than many other EU countries.

To Hard-working stand-up guy:

"Europe is drowning itself in EU regulation."

Without regulation the common market could not work. Creating the ground rules in Europe is what allowed nation states to trust each other, lowering national tariffs, cutting protectionist national regulation and opening up their economies, creating the world's largest and most successful free Trade area. It didn't happen by accident. Where else in the world have previously warring nation states shown this level of commitment and compromise?

As you say, businesses in Britain, a leading member of the EU, continue to trade wherever there is an opportunity, both in Europe and accross the world. It's a win win situation for any trading nation. Countries such as Germany, Holland, Sweden are strong exporters and job creaters, the rules and regulations you talk of are not holding them back.

Why the panic? Is British culture being swamped by Czech, German, Spanish, Belgium or Finnish culture? When you walk down a British high street, do you see signs of an invasion?

And how could leaving the EU insulate Britain from what is happening on the continent? Britain would still be signing up to everything Brussels throws at them, just without a seat at the decision making table.

What is wrong with you people? All I have said is that "in my personal experience", as a business owner, membership of the EU is more of a hindrance than a help. I offer nothing more than another perspective, based on actual every day experience.

In my opinion, another bloated bureaucracy (to add to the one we already have to suffer), additional layers of cost and tax burden foisted on me by the EU do nothing to help me export to the rest of the World. Question : how much do you export? Where is your productivity? where is your intellectual input into the World - or are you just empty words on a digital page in the ether?

Again, my personal view is that the EU is a bust organisation. When in it's history did it's auditors give it's accounts a clean bill of health? Where else could you get away with that? Only in a banana republic or dictatorship. No, wait a minute, the EU is a dictatorship - silly me - it's the dictatorship of the unelected and unaccountable. In whose reality, in these straightened times, it is a good idea to spend how many millions of [my] tax money building a vanity project like the laudable Museum of European History? Ye God's, it's bad enough with our own crop of career politicians, without adding more - particularly the more prevalent socialist and often former communist versions found in Brussels! I am sure with a little research I could go on ad nauseam, but I'm also sure I would lose the will to live if I did!

Get a life - try earning a living by getting out there and hustling, and when you have, contact me again and we will compare experiences. In the meantime, as I said before, I have a living to earn.

@Hard-working poster
Try trading from outside the Common External Tariff wall. I guarantee that you'll find it a lot tougher.

As for the old budget canard, the accounts for the EU institutions are internally and externally audited and have been signed off for the past 15+ years. They are all published on the web.

The accounts for EU cash spent by the Member States haven't however been signed off as there's something like a 3% rate of anomalies. Interestingly enough, Britain is one of the serial budget offenders in terms of non-compliance.