EU Referendum Leaflet

Debate between Andrew Percy and Paul Scully

Monday 9th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Paul Scully]

I will leave my hon. Friend to be the judge of that. There is nothing in the leaflet about the actual option available to voters, which is between a UK able to take its own democratic decisions and an EU emboldened by our thumbs up to further integration.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I used my leaflet to light my fire on a cold Yorkshire night; it was a thoroughly useful use of taxpayers’ money. Is not a more important point that, if we vote to remain in by a very small margin—say, less than in the Scottish referendum—a large part of the electorate, including many in my constituency, will feel that the result has been fiddled precisely because of this wasted document that we have all been provided with?

[Paul Scully]

I really hope that we do not get to that. All Conservative Members in the 2015 intake, no matter what side of the debate we stand on, have signed a letter to say that, come 24 June, we will come together and abide by the result, because we have a Government to support, a country to help to run and difficult decisions to continue to make. It is important that we come together. We do not want anything to push people towards a sense of unfair treatment on one side or another. My hon. Friend makes a good point.

The Five Presidents’ report shows the direction of travel, should we vote to remain. It sets out plans for fiscal and political union, further pooling of decision making on national budgets and harmonisation of insolvency law, company law, property rights and social security systems. It makes it clear that those plans are to be pursued as single market measures applying to all 28 states. The Governor of the Bank of England admits there are risks of remaining in the European Union, in particular in relation to the development of the euro area. We have been roped into bail-out packages before, despite assurances that that would no longer happen. The latest guarantee, I am afraid, is no better. The Financial Times reports that it has seen the German draft White Paper pushing for progress towards a European army. That was due to emerge in June but is now being held back until July. Make no mistake: should we vote to remain, the European club will not be the same as the one we are already in for long.

The EU budget relentlessly increases. Only last month, Jean-Claude Juncker told my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Kelly Tolhurst) that he did not have to answer to her when she asked him what he was doing to bear down on the EU budget at a time when member states were having to bear down on budgets. That is not the answer of a man who cares much about greater accountability; that is the view of a man who wants to be left alone to get on with the project without interference from irritating ingrates.

Voting to stay in is not the same as voting to stay put. Despite the leaflet having positive headlines on each page, the body of the text suggests, in a number of ways, that the only way is Europe and that we are stuffed if we leave. Some are implied. For example, it suggests that many jobs might be lost, via the dubious claim that 3 million jobs are linked to the EU—a link described by the academic on whose study that figure was based as “pure Goebbels”. That link, by the way, first came about in around 2000 as a reason for joining the eurozone.

Some claims are more direct but simplistic and with little merit, such as the EU abolishing roaming charges. I can either wait until next year to use my EE phone in the EU at the same rate as I pay in the UK, or I can use my other phone, which is on the Three network, to travel today to EU countries, as well as Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Macau, New Zealand, Norway, Sri Lanka, Switzerland and the USA, with absolutely no roaming charges. I do not have to wait for the EU to catch up with me.

That is another way in which the free market is far more agile than an unwieldy 1950s political project that is representing a smaller proportion of global trade over time as the rest of the world overtakes, despite the number of EU states tripling since we first joined. The economy of every continent has grown over the past decade except that of Antarctica and that of Europe. It is baffling that we should shackle ourselves to a political project with a limited vision to continue being a regional power, rather than looking further and using our attributes to be a global trading nation. Why are we paying to be a member of the world’s only stagnant customs union?

The leaflet claims that, as the UK is not part of the EU’s border-free zone, we control our own borders. We can certainly check passports at our border, and we can refuse entry to those without any valid identity documents. However, that is not the same as saying that we can refuse entry to anyone from other EU countries if they have valid documents, and it is certainly not the same as saying that we can control immigration.

Immigration

Debate between Andrew Percy and Paul Scully

Monday 19th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Percy (in the Chair)]

Mr Speaker has agreed that for this debate, members of the public may use handheld electronic devices in the Public Gallery provided that they are silent. Photos, however, must not be taken.

[Paul Scully (Sutton and Cheam) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the e-petition relating to immigration.

It is a privilege, an honour and a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Percy. Given the petition before us, the members of the Petitions Committee wanted to ensure that we addressed immigration fully, despite the fact that we have already had a number of immigration debates in the House—not least last week, on Second Reading of the Immigration Bill, which allows us to go further in tackling mass uncontrolled immigration. As a Committee, we thought it important that, although some of the petition’s wording was not quite what many Members would support, we did not just brush these issues under the carpet. We must tackle immigration in a responsible way, in a full and frank debate, to ensure that we can get the resolution and result that we all want: measured, controlled immigration.

This is a really serious issue. We wanted to ensure that we reflected the concerns of the population as a whole. I know from going around my constituency of Sutton and Cheam that immigration probably became the No. 1 issue during the election campaign—its last month in particular. That is reflected in opinion polls. It was Ipsos MORI, I believe, that recently came up with immigration as the No. 1 issue for people at the moment.

There are a number of areas in the petition, and I will take them in turn. One point is that there is a belief among the 198,000 who have signed the petition to date that many people are trying to convert the UK into a Muslim country. I do not particularly subscribe to that view. I can understand people’s fears given some of the headlines in the tabloid press and some of the comments on Twitter, Facebook and other parts of the internet, but we need to look at the situation as a whole.

Given such headlines and the reality of what is happening in places such as Syria and Iraq, and that we see people from the UK travelling to Syria to join ISIS, it is not surprising—indeed, it is very welcome—that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has come up with his statement on countering extremism. We are looking at taking tougher action against individuals. We are going to ensure that there can be extremism disruption orders on individuals who foment and preach hatred and encourage people to decide to remove themselves from their families and travel to those foreign areas to fight alongside people who, frankly, have a disgusting doctrine and no sense of respect for human life at all.

There is tougher action on premises as well: any premises that are hosting such extremism can be closed down. We are giving Ofcom more powers so that it will be able to close down TV and radio stations that are repeating those sorts of messages. We are reviewing schools and other public institutions—colleges and the like—where radicalism and extremism might be fomented. It is also important, and I welcome the fact, that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary is having a review of sharia law in the UK. That review is a very important cornerstone of our counter-extremism policy.

I can understand people’s views in certain parts of the country where multiculturalism may have failed and stalled somewhat, sometimes because of the fact that so many people are coming into one area. We can look at Tower Hamlets and parts of the north, for example, where extreme groups have actually built up no-go areas for white British people. It was quickly stamped down on in Tower Hamlets, which was welcome. Vigilante gangs were walking around that area picking on people just minding their own business. That sort of thing has no business in the UK at all. However, only a tiny minority of people are committing such actions. We need to do more to stamp such behaviour out, hence the counter-extremism.

I will give one quick example of where community cohesion slightly breaks down, on a small scale, in my constituency of Sutton and Cheam. In the lead-up to my election, there was a controversial planning application for a small mosque on Green Lane in Worcester Park. I objected to it, as did a number of people, purely and simply because it was in totally the wrong place. There was no parking around and it would have been on a really busy junction that was already at capacity. It was rejected by the planning committee for that reason. However, it was conflated into anti-Muslim feeling among a few people around that area; the two issues got conflated.

There is an Ahmadiyya mosque nearby, in Morden. It is the biggest mosque in Europe; about 15,000 people worship there. A lot of residents in Worcester Park who do not particularly know the ins and outs of Islam thought, “Why do you want this small mosque on the corner of Green Lane? Why can’t people go to the massive mosque round the corner?” They did not understand that Ahmadis are one group that actually unites the Sunnis and the Shi’as, who both dismiss Ahmadi Muslims as not being of the faith, as apostate. Sending Sunnis and Shi’as to that mosque would be like sending someone from the Church of England faith to a Mormon church, frankly, given the different doctrine that they perceive the Ahmadis to have, even though in many cases that is just not the reality at all.

The mosque in Morden recently suffered a fire, which destroyed a lot of its administration offices—back offices. Fortunately, the mosque itself was not damaged. It happened on the day after Eid; if it had been the day of Eid, there would have been 10,000 to 15,000 people in the building. As it happened, there were, I think, 10—there were no injuries and certainly no fatalities. However, 70 firefighters put out that fire.

The police and a number of community leaders organised a number of community events to try to calm the situation down, because it was not clear at the beginning whether it was a race hate or religious hate crime. We believe that, fortunately, it was not such a crime. It was a couple of teenagers, one of whom has been given bail and is coming back in the new year; we are hoping that it was nothing quite as sinister. None the less, the fact that people had to go round the community and set people’s minds at rest shows the unease that there is sometimes and the awkwardness when it comes to keeping a cohesive community.