WHEN WILL REMOANERS
RECOGNISE REALITY?
25 YEARS OF A SHRINKING EU
How the EU’s share of the world economy
has shrunk by over 1/3rd in 25 years
A BREXIT FACTS4EU.ORG SUMMARY
                            Chart © Brexit Facts4EU.Org 2017
25 YEARS SINCE MAASTRICHT TREATY WAS SIGNED
A year ago, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker visited a small Dutch border town called Maastricht. He did so because it was there, 25 years earlier, that a Treaty was first drafted which defined the direction of the EU.
At Maastricht, it was decided that the EEC (European Economic Community) would become the European Union. They changed from pretending to be a trading bloc to being what they were always intended to be by their founders: a political project to subsume all European countries into one giant superstate.
So it was that a year ago Jean-Claude Juncker decided to revisit Maastricht, in homage to the place where the Maastricht Treaty was drafted which would enable the European Union to come into being nearly two years later, on 1st November 1993.
THE SPEECH
In a typically rambling and unstructured speech, Mr Juncker made some astonishing admissions :-

"We cannot explain the European Union through the past but only through what it can bring for the future" @JunckerEU #EuropeCalling pic.twitter.com/RfOFdOIupW

— European Commission (@EU_Commission) 9 December 2016
In fact Juncker got his facts wrong, as usual. At the time he made his speech, the EU28 (including the UK) represented 21.8% not 25% of world GDP. It was even less, at 16.9%, if using the PPP method of calculating this.
In our graph above we have excluded the UK from the EU figures, because we’re looking at the picture as if the UK were on the outside. The GDP figures are from the IMF’s official WEO database and were calculated using current value data.
OBSERVATIONS
IT’S A DATE?
Have you ever noticed how the EU seems able to celebrate the same thing about three times on three different anniversary dates? This is because of the cumbersome decision-making structure of the EU, and also because the EU likes to keep celebrating things it thinks people approve of.
In the case of the Maastricht Treaty, once again the EU has three dates to celebrate. There is the date of the EU Council meeting at which the first drafts were undertaken: 10th December 1991. This is the date which Juncker decided to commemorate with his ‘25th anniversary speech’. Then there is the date that the Maastricht Treaty was signed: 7th February 1992. And then there is the date it came into force: 1st November 1993.
CARROT AND STICK
In that speech a year ago, President Juncker was still reeling from the UK’s Referendum result and was doing everything possible to keep ‘the project’ on track. This has always comprised a carrot and stick approach.
The carrot is “Just look at this progress. Everything in the garden is lovely.” This explains the constant propaganda the EU produces which is normally either wrong or wildly distorted. It is this which we have to combat on a weekly basis.
The stick is “Ooh look, it’s a cold hard world out there. Your country is puny and you must accept being swallowed into the much more powerful EU or you’ll be in big trouble.”
Part of the ‘stick’ approach is sometimes to state how even when inside the EU, things will be tough. This is the approach Juncker used a year ago. He wanted to scare everyone that individual member states simply can’t survive on their own in the future.
REMOANERS NEED TO RECOGNISE REALITY
Remoaners continue to fight the Referendum as if they hadn’t already lost it. Worse still, they continue to trot out the same tired and inaccurate information that they did during the campaign last year. (That’s a polite way of saying they’re still lying.)
We’re never going to get the worst culprits to admit they’re wrong, that much is clear. What we must do, however, is combat their nonsense each and every day. Each of us, in our own way, has a part to play.
The next time you hear someone saying that we “can’t afford to be outside the EU as we need to be part of something big”, you could gently point out that in the last 25 years the EU has lost almost 40% of its share of the world’s economic output.
You could add that the EU27’s share is down to 18.3%, and falling.
If you’re told that this is rubbish, tell them these are the official figures from the IMF and World Bank.
And if that still doesn’t work, tell them that it was the IMF that George Osborne and the Remain campaign were calling as references at the time they were giving their economic Armageddon projections....
HUSBANDS AND WIVES
We don’t have wives or husbands who are hedge fund managers, we’re not part of any political party, and no big business interests seem to be interested in us. It’s only you, dear reader, who keeps us fighting for a clean Brexit.
Someone has to produce great info like that above, which will then be repeated by those who might have the 'name' but who somehow never seem to do the work. We don’t care about that. We just want to ensure the facts get out there, however that happens.
Please send us your comments and we will publish them below. You can of course use a pseudonym if you prefer, and it's always nice to know roughly where you're writing from. Please always state the headline of the article you're commenting on.
[ Sources: IMF WEO tables | EU Commission ]            05.15am, 12 December 2017
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READERS' COMMENTS
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Name: : Sally T, UK      Date/Time: 12 Dec 2017, 3.16pm
Message: It's a simple fact the EU's importance has been reducing over time as developing countries' growth rates have far exceeded those of more established economies. Added to that, the strictures of the Eurozone have held back some EU economies, like Italy, Greece, etc. Then you have all the smaller EU countries whose economies were tiny in the first place. Despite all this, Remainers seem to think the EU is huge and is such an important part of global trade. The truth is that we'll be looking outwards at all the fasting growing areas of the world, as well as doing more business with the anglosphere. As you mentioned on Twitter, the trend really is our friend!
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