It's about the economy!

Every week I watch as the western economies continue to struggle. The eurozone is a disaster waiting to happen, Britain and the US are seeing very little growth and unemployment continues to rise. Yet our politicians do not know what to do.

The Bank of England have just announced £75 billion worth of 'quantitative easing', or in layman's language, printing more money. This seems rather desperate, and shows that those at the reins of power; both politicians and finance chiefs do not know what to do. If something isn't done, and done quickly our economy is going to disappear down an economic plug hole.

We are in a mess, every week unemployment continues to rise; the latest figures for June to August show that unemployment rose by 117,000 to take it to 2.57 million. Today Philips, the Dutch electronics and lighting group has announced 4,500 jobs cuts. The independent forecaster Ernst and Young says the Bank of England's new quantitative easing bout is unlikely to prompt recovery. They have also downgraded its forecast for gross domestic product (GDP) to just 0.9% this year, well below the 1.4% it predicted three months ago.

The latest rescue attempt for the euro - a £385 billion bailout fund falls far short of the estimated £1.75 trillion needed to stop contagion spreading from Greece to Italy and Spain. Confidence isn't very high that any of what our politicians are doing is going to work.

Politicians carry on trying to patch up this sinking ship with sticking plaster in the vain hope that it will stay afloat. The simple fact is it isn't working, it would make more sense now to jump out of this boat and swim to safety, rather than sink and die. We have been told that if we don't save the euro the world economy is doomed and we will go into an even greater recession. It is quite obvious the euro is doomed; if Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland stay in they will just need more and more taxpayers money, and eventually it is going to run out. They need to leave, if they leave now there will be pain, but eventually that pain will become easier as they will have been able to devalue and rescue their own economies. If they stay it will mean disaster for all of us, and long term pain.

What should the UK do? Well we should leave the EU, we should cut immigration, deregulate, cut tax and encourage manufacturing.

If we left the EU would it be a disaster for us? We are told our economy is so entwined in the EU that to leave would be economic suicide. Is this true? No of course not! We hand over in hard cash about £20 billion every year, add to that the £12.32 billion the British tax payer has spent so far in trying to save the euro. Taking the £3.09 billion that was handed over via the IMF that still leaves over £9 billion we have handed directly to the EU.

Our EU membership also brings hidden costs; the Common Agricultural policy, the Common Fisheries Policy (since joining the Common Market ten's of thousands of jobs have been lost in the fishing industry alone), green regulations, which burden business with extra costs and the thousands of regulations which stifle growth.

Brussels is trying to stop Britain from vetoing the Financial Transaction Tax on the City of London. To put it simply this would be a disaster. At the moment the City accounts for 70 per cent of financial services business in the EU area. It accounts for about 10 per cent of the UK's economic output and contributes about £124 billion to the UK economy. This tax would be a disaster and destroy our economy in an instance.

Politicians argue that we need to stay within the EU because of the trade issue; to put it simply this would make no difference as we could still trade outside of the EU, as Switzerland and Norway have shown. The argument doesn't stand up to any scrutiny, they need us more than we need them. If we left would the Germans stop selling us BMW's, Mercedes, etc? Would the French stop selling us wine, cheese, Renault cars? Would the Italians stop selling us Fiats? Would the Swede's stop selling us Volvo's? Would the Finns stop selling us Nokia mobile phones? Would they not want to trade with us and buy JCB diggers and Triumph motor cycles? Of course not! It is just plain daft to think that they wouldn't trade with us.

If we wanted to leave there is nothing they could do to stop us, they need us more than we need them, as I have already written we hand over billions every year with no obvious benefits. What would the EU do without our money? After the Germans we are the largest contributor to the EU coffers.

We could also cut immigration meaning we could get British people back to work. We could stop the many hundreds of thousands of foreign workers coming into this country ever year, thus putting the British worker first in the queue for jobs. If you don't think British people want to work let me relay this story. I was listening to BBC radio 4 last week and there was a lady being interviewed who had lost who job in the public sector, she had applied for 120 jobs and not even got an interview. People want to work, but there are no jobs, were is the sense of importing more and more foreign labour when there are not the jobs for the indigenous population?

We need to encourage manufacturing, just look at the economies that are growing, they all make things. China, India, Brazil, South Korea, etc are continuing to see economic growth. They must be doing something right, why aren't we copying them?

We need to cut regulation, it hampers business and stifles growth! That is obvious, it does not take a genius to work that one out. The recent decision to implement an EU regulation on petrol pumps has meant that 1800 petrol retailers have had to replace their petrol pumps. This idiotic diktat was brought in for a negligible reason, and if you argue that the oil companies can afford it, what about the independent petrol retailers? Can they?

I could go on, but I am sure you get the idea. Something needs to be done, many of the answers are very simple and I have only covered a small part of what could be done. The economy is something that needs to grow, it provides jobs and security and pays for all those things we have come to rely on like the NHS and the welfare state. If we want to keep them and continue to maintain a good standard of living something has got change. Unfortunately our politicians are either too incompetent or just do not care so things are unlikely to change.