Please don't leave us isolated from the Titanic

Ed Milliband has recently warned that we're going to soon be living off raw potatoes and stale bread.

He attacked David Cameron over his decision to keep us out of any new European treaty. I won't quote him exactly but in summary; Britain will be isolated, the city will fall apart and before long you'll be queueing up in Soviet style mile long queues just to get some bread.

I exaggerate of course, but he genuinely does think the city (by which I mean the financial heart of London) will be worse off for being left out. This is rather strange considering the reason Cameron didn't go into the treaty was because the EU wanted the UK to be subject to the same new financial rules as everyone else in the EU... in other words, they wanted to control our financial industry. Doing this would mean there was no incentive to be in London, because it would be the same as anywhere in the EU. This would mean it would make most sense for a bank to move Germany (close to the European Central Bank where the power would be).

I apologise for this first part, how dreadfully dull I know. But now I'll move on the the crux of what I actually wanted to say. Isolation from the EU, how will we survive?

Well I would suggest that we'll survive in the same way someone does when a ship is sinking and they 'isolate' themselves by getting into a lifeboat.

The enormous disaster that is the mainship takes on water and the person in the life raft remains safe and dry, even if they are a bit rocked by the waves caused by the ship going down. This leaves the person in the life boat in a great position to get on another ship should one that is seaworthy turn up.

I'm hoping we're all getting the analogy.

You see, while free trade is excellent the political control of the EU is largely unnecessary and extremely expensive. Having public workers do any job is usually quite expensive (excluding Teachers, Nurses..) but having public workers do a job where no one in the building speaks the same language so everything has to be translated 20 times is the Mercedes A-Class of expensive, ie its not just expensive, its not that good either.

So what is to be done? Well what if we keep the free trade regulations and bin everything else? I mean EVERYTHING else. That particularly includes the Common Agricultural Policy... which for those of you who do not know, it where your money is taken off you and given to vineyard owners, so that they can tell you that Champagne is only called Champagne if it is from a specific region of France, otherwise it is 'sparkling white wine', very useful. In fact, it is worse than that, but I'm trying to give you a flavour.

So we're left with just the Common Market provisions, wouldn't that be nice? Is it even possible you ask? Well yes, we know this because Norway and Switzerland already have this arrangement. Both basically enjoy the free market but without having their countries run... well, from another country. And how does it affect their economy?

Well I'd like to finish with this. Below is the top five countries by GDP per captia. That is, how much money the country makes, divided by how many people in that country, it is an excellent way of working out how rich a country is proportionate to its size (population wise):

Luxembourg (tax haven, doesn't count)
Norway (in EFTA but not EU)
Qatar (not European)
Switzerland (in EFTA but not EU)
United Arab Emirates (not European)

So apart from a tax haven, the only countries in the top five that are European are outside of the EU but within the European Free Trade Area (ie they enjoy the Common Market, but don't have to waste their money on paying for bureaucrats to tell them what to call Champagne).

In fact, pretty much anyway of measuring the proportionate wealth in a country leaves the Swiss and the Nords way out in front of Germany, France, the UK etc. Which leaves us with the question, why aren't we joining them. And that is a question to which I just don't know the answer.