The common agricultural policy and EU solidarity | Letters

Giles Fraser says the EU "has become a huge and largely invisible way of redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich" (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 do just that, to which capping payments to rich farmers may be the answer, 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, 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 rich and poor: substituting, in effect, for the nationally based Social-Democratic programmes of an earlier generation."