The United Kingdom could free up some 2 billion pounds ($2.9 billion) to spend on insurance and farming if it exited the European Union and was left to decide on its own environmental policy, UK Farming Minister George Eustice said.
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — According to Eustice, 2 billion pounds would be designated for spending on conservation if the United Kingdom were to leave the European Union.
“A lot of the national directives they instructed us to put in place would stay. But the directives’ framework is so rigid that it is spirit-crushing. If we had more flexibility, we could focus our scientists’ energies on coming up with new, interesting ways to protect the environment, rather than just producing voluminous documents from Brussels,” Eustice told The Guardian newspaper.
“Our objective would be to put in place a government-backed insurance scheme, similar to the one in Canada, to protect farmers from bad weather, crop failures and drops in prices,” Eustice said.
UK nationals are set to vote on June 23 in a referendum on the country’s EU membership, after Prime Minister David Cameron and the leaders of the 27 EU member states agreed in February to grant the United Kingdom a special status within the bloc. The rival campaigns officially started in early April.
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