Brexit Is No Business of U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/opinion/brexit-is-no-business-of-us.html

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To the Editor:

Mr. Obama has said that Britain must stay in the European Union to have influence on the world stage, and on his current visit here has already encouraged Britain’s voters to stay in the European Union. Perhaps it has not occurred to him that this is equivalent to King George III and his ministers in the 18th century advising Britain’s American colonists that they must stay in the British Empire to have any influence in the world.

The reality is that Britain has negligible influence in the European Union although being the second largest net contributor to it. We have under 10 percent of the total votes in the European Parliament and are constantly outvoted while also having only one European commissioner out of 28. At least 50 percent of our laws and regulations that override the laws of our own Parliament are made by some 25,000 European civil servants in Brussels. Their declared intention is to create a fully federal and centralized Europe, and the next step is to make every E.U. country’s finance minister submit his or her government’s budget to an E.U. financial controller for approval, thus removing the main remaining vestige of national sovereignty from the member states.

Would the United States submit to such conditions? The reaction to Mr. Obama’s intervention is likely to be the same as that of Americans if our prime minister made a special visit to Washington or New York to advise the American people on how to vote in their presidential election.

NOEL BAPTISTE

Ilford-on-Sea, England