Coun Foyster (Mail, September 29) paints a dismal picture of Italy’s present state, and extends that to mean keep well away from the whole EU. He goes on to press for what’s come to be known as a ‘hard Brexit’. Well, we’ll see how that turns out.
Meanwhile, here’s a couple of recently published facts that relate to his Italy story.
First: In the year 2000 there were just 15 EU countries, all of which aimed to increase their national productivity between then and now. How has Britain performed? Not well: only Italy, amongst the larger nations, performed worse than Britain in increasing productivity over that period. Last year, we were ninth out of the 15 for our productivity per head, and had gone downwards in relation to the average for the whole group. And it can’t be EU over-regulation to blame for the poor performance, since our economy is less regulated than those of other EU countries.
Second, and related to Coun Foyster’s point about all the second-hand clothes stalls on one Italian market place: Financial reports now appearing, show a decline for the first time in many years in the sales of new clothing in Britain. One reason seems to be that many people are now buying more secondhand from charity shops. Would you believe it!
We have higher income inequality than our European counterparts, suffered a notable decline in real wages between 2008 and 2014, work longer hours than European counterparts, and have a relatively poor record of export competitiveness.
But hey! UKIP is going to tell us how to get all that right, and it will soon all be just plain sailing!
John Tippler
Spalding
