So who's already made their mind up which way to vote, stay in or leave ?
I've actually started watching some of the debates on TV now and I have to be honest its hard to get past a lot of the political bull and scare mongering
One of the main arguments for leaving is we'll have full control of how and when we do things from laws to trade, where as one of the main arguments for staying is we're economically better off in EU.
So I decided to do a bit of research into this and the results (based on facts and true figures) is quite surprising
Our net contributions (minus the rebate) into the EU are £14.7Bn (£282M a week) and we receive £7.6Bn back, leaving us as net contributors of £7.1Bn (£136.5M a week)
This means we can effectively then take our £14.7Bn, still pay all the activities in the UK that receive EU funding and have £7.1Bn a year left
Now there's lots of talk that we'll end up with a Norway style trade agreement if we leave so I thought I'd have a look at what that actually is;
Norway currently contributes approx. £866M a year in order to participate in various agreements (including free trade). These payments are calculated based on their GDP so if we end up with a worse case scenario of a Norway style agreement and we choose to pay into all the things that Norway does (unlikely we would want to pay for the Schengen and several other things) we could end up with a bill of around £5.1Bn (given our GDP is approx. 6 times bigger than that of Norways). That still leaves us £2Bn a year better off.
To put that £2Bn into perspective, Local Governments have had to cut £1.9Bn from their budgets this year and have to save a further £3.5Bn over the following 3 years. That EU saving would effectively mean no more cuts to local authority budgets.
Given the strength of the UK economy and our trading position globally its unlikely that we'll end up with a trade agreement anywhere near as bad as Norway has, so the £5.1Bn contribution will probably be a lot less if we still want to fully participate in all the free trade agreements across the EU.
So even as a worse case the UK is financially better off outside of the EU, despite what our beloved Government keeps telling us.
Personally I'm in the Vote Leave camp
We get our full independence back, we don't have to follow any of the EU rules we don't want to, and we're financially better off every year.