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Our period in the EU led to the loss of substantial market share in many important areas of economic life. In the first ten years in the EEC our car output halved, before the Thatcher government helped rebuild the industry by inviting in large Japanese producers. German and French cars proved too competitive for the largely nationalised UK industry on entry when the tariffs came off. We lost a large part of our steel industry to more competitive German steel. Under Labour and under Conservatives the progres
Our fishing industry went from producing more fish than we consumed to losing large amounts of capacity to foreign vessels under the Common Fishery Policy. Our ports were drained of trawlers and we turned to importing more of what we ate. Large industrial trawlers from the continent , some over 100 m in length were allowed to hoover up too many fish and do damage to the fishing grounds. Our natural resource was plundered.
Brian Micklethwait