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Should The United Kingdom Withdraw From The European Union?

Decent Essays

Should the United Kingdom withdraw from the European Union? The two prevailing opinions regarding the European Union are that the United Kingdom should either withdraw from the EU or renegotiate to give the UK greater independence from it. These views are not in keeping with the increasingly globalised and international nature of society and are based largely on myths and misinformation. Firstly, it must be established exactly why withdrawing from the EU would be a poor decision for the UK to make. This will be accomplished by critically assessing the main arguments for withdrawal in order to remove the gild that the public’s misinformed perception has coated these arguments in, which has led to recent polls finding that a “Vote today would see Britain exiting [the] EU” (Orb International, 2014, cited in Shipman, 2014). One popular criticism of the EU is that the free movement of people has led to “benefit tourism”, whereby immigrants from other EU member states come to Britain “with the sole purpose of accessing a more generous benefit system”, according to Iain Duncan Smith (2011). The supposed cost of this was £2.5bn per year (Little, 2011), which, understandably, caused resentment towards the EU from British taxpayers; after all, their hard-earned income was being taken and given to foreigners who, in their eyes, could not be bothered to work. What the public was not made aware of, however, was that this massive figure was completely unrealistic because it was the

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