Resetting the UK-EU Relationship (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redwood (Con)]

I welcome the Government’s emphasis on growth and I look forward to future debates when we can exchange positive ideas on how to get more people into work, have better-paid jobs and extend investment in these islands. However, I must say to the Government that the measures currently being discussed, often in secret without proper text, are very worrying. They will either add nothing at all to our growth rate or, worse still, they will subtract from it and do damage. Look at what will happen to our fishing industry now that, for many more years, so much of the catch will be offered to continental super-trawlers and other vessels. This has delayed the rebuilding of the British fishing industry and means that we do not get all the inward investment and domestic investment in fish processing and food processing that would follow from having more catch landed in the United Kingdom.

Or look at the idea that we should join the carbon taxes and emissions scheme and the electricity scheme of the European Union. It would be another ratcheting up of the costs of electricity and energy in this country. Their carbon taxes are higher even than our high ones. Are not our carbon taxes doing enough damage already? Does the Front Bench opposite not see the factories closing and the plants being destroyed by ultra-high energy prices? Yet they want to volunteer for more of the same and take it out of our control.

If the Government decide to offer large new sums of money to the European Union, as they usually seem to when they visit Brussels, it will all be borrowed money. We are in a time of stress in our public finances; we are not looking for new ways to spend money. The more they spend giving it to Brussels, the more it will be resented by many people here in the United Kingdom and the more it will mean that those high levels of borrowing keep our interest rates above those of our competitors and stifle private investment and private growth, which is what we so clearly need.

We do not need to look forward, or even to forecast, to know what will happen with ever closer alignment to the European Union, because we have lived through it. In the 20 years that elapsed before we joined the European Economic Community, our economy grew at 3.4% per year: a very good rate of growth. In the 20 years of our early membership when we were a member of the European customs union, until the full single market was declared in 1992, our growth rate slumped to 1.76%. Of course it did, because we took all the tariffs off the things that the European continent was good at and just watched as it laid waste to so much of our industry, with all those closures, and we did not get the market opening on the services that drive the success of our economy. So of course that is what happened.

If you then roll the camera forward to our years in the single market, from 1992 to 2020, our growth rate fell again, even compared with the poor performance when we were just in the customs union. Again, of course it did, because of the anti-innovation, high-cost spirit of so many of those regulations. The last thing we need for a growth strategy now is more laws made in Europe. We know that they do not work; we know that they slow us down. Why do we want to link to the part of the world that is growing so slowly, when our great friends and allies in the United States of America are growing at twice the pace of the European Union? We seem to be negative about them and positive about joining the slow lane. We should not want to join the slow lane. This set of negotiations is bad for Britain and bad for growth.