The following is a statement written in response to being asked to comment on how the EU has affected the natural health industry on a Facebook page supporting a political party in Essex. I am re-publishing it on this blog for those who may be interested.

My name is Mark Lester, and I am a UKIP member in Margaret Thatcher’s constituency of Finchley where I run a company called The Finchley Clinic Ltd.

I’d like to make a few comments concerning how our membership of the EU has wrought enormous damage to my industry – natural health. In my area of business and expertise, unfortunately it is not possible to be a serious supporter of the natural natural medicine industry AND a supporter of EU membership. To claim otherwise is nonsense, and it is little surprise that there is overwhelming support from those involved in my industry to leave the EU. Now I will explain why in brief (though I could, and perhaps one day will, write an entire book on the subject).

One by one, various EU directives, covering every aspect of the natural medicine / food supplement industry has come under regulation. Supposedly designed “to protect consumers”, but sadly merely Orwellian doublespeak – a thinly veiled smokescreen meaning “protect corporate interests, take away freedom of choice, and suppress expression of legitimate opinion”, these regulations have, with one slow insidious directive after another, done enormous damage to the entire industry. One by one, these directives have tied us up in regulatory knots, put more than one company I know of out of business altogether, have put several on the brink, and in the case of my extremely ethical company who did nothing wrong, and paid lots of taxes, reduced us from a rapidly expanding and very profitable small company, to one which is now just about managing to trade profitably.

This is a huge subject. But a SHORT summary of how the EU has affected public health, removed consumer choice, hugely damaged a thriving UK industry, caused trade to simply haemorrhage into the arms of non EU countries at our own expense, and caused a general dumbing down in the quality of the products still available is summarised in the articles I wrote here  and here,

The basic problem with the Lib Dems is that none of them are business people, and none of them have ever had ANY real responsibility. It’s all very well for academics to pontificate, but Vince Cable and his Liberal buddies wouldn’t last five minutes if they actually had to run an SME – the supposed life-blood of the economy. If he had, and had come up against the amount of petty, business damaging, red tape that my industry has had to put up with from the EU, and then to add insult to injury was forced without his democratic consent to contribute financially to this nonsense with his own hard earned tax payers money, I suspect he wouldn’t be such a committed Europhile.

It has been claimed that the industry was unregulated before the EU wastes of tax payers money decided to interfere. This contention however is erroneous. The industry was regulated by The Drugs Act 1968 and other UK laws and dangerous products were banned. Personally I didn’t notice too many dead bodies lining the streets before the EU decided to butt in. Did any of you? Then it was claimed it was about “harmonisation”. Well, assuming we needed to be “harmonised” in the first place, which we didn’t, this “harmonisation” was once again a smokescreen. It was Orwellian doublespeak for what was actually occurring, meaning “dumbing down, pharmaceuticalisation, and reduction of availability”

I must add it was never my intention to become a member of a political party. However in the end I felt I had no choice as I witnessed the breathtakingly unethical and unfair destruction of an industry by entirely unelected officials, who clearly didn’t know the first thing about the industry they were presuming to have the authority to regulate.