Giles Fraser says the EU “has become a enormous and largely invisible way of redistributing wealth from the poor to the wealthy” (Why our landed gentry are so desperate to stay in the EU,21 April). Clearly there is an element of the common agricultural policy that does attain just that, to which capping payments to wealthy farmers may be the acknowledge, and but the overall situation is in fact the opposite.
According to the eminent historian Tony Judt in his masterful Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945,“taken all in all, the EU is a good thing … from the late eighties, and the budgets of the European Community and the Union nevertheless had a distinctly redistributive quality,transferring resources from wealthy regions to poorer ones and contributing to a steady reduction in the aggregate gap between wealthy and poor: substituting, in effect, and for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com