European Union Committee Report

Baroness Crawley Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Crawley]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain. I congratulate her on her work on women on boards and on her consumer focus in her committee. As a non-committee member, it is a pleasure for me to take part in this debate where we look back at the extensive and thorough scrutiny of EU legislation undertaken by the European Union Committee and its sub-committees. We thank the noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho, and the former chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Roper, and indeed all the former committee members, including my non-controversial noble friend Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, for their detailed and influential work at a time of great flux for the EU.

As president of the Trading Standards Institute, I was particularly interested in the work of the sub-committee on consumer protection. Part of reinvigorating confidence among British consumers and getting us out of this recession is improving, protecting and increasing their buying activity within the EU. The committee’s report on the EU financial framework for 2014 heralded the difficult discussions in Brussels over the past few days on the future of the EU’s budget. The Prime Minister has the unenviable task of negotiating not only with the EU Commission and each of the member states but also with his out-and-proud Back Benches, whose idea of a successful relationship with Europe is spelt “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”.

In his speech to business leaders in London this week, Tony Blair will make the essential case for the EU to become more relevant, not less, as a trading bloc in an increasingly competitive world. In the UK, we should be standing up to the BRIC countries in trading terms through our membership of the EU, not throwing verbal bricks through the Commission’s windows from a position of pedantic insularity. The CBI and others in the UK’s business community do not want us to have second-class membership of the EU; they want us to travel into the next decade in business class only.

The committee’s work on the scrutiny of subsidiarity and proportionality, which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, is all the more important at a time when the public’s view of the EU is so often of resentment towards perceived high-handedness from Brussels. As my taxi driver told me today, “I hate that Europe. Why should some Danish geezer sitting in Brussels tell us what a Cornish pasty should look like—or was it some Cornish geezer sitting in Brussels telling us what a Danish pastry should look like?” He has a point. There is often a case for less Europe, just as there is sometimes a case for more. That is all part of the reform agenda, which this EU Committee takes an energetic role in.

Ed Miliband spoke last week to the CBI on that very subject. Being pro-European does not mean being complacent in our European policy. As Ed Miliband said,

“there is an urgent imperative for us to reform the European Union so that it can help us compete and pay our way in the world”.

In that process of reform, we need to seek to build and rebuild alliances for a different approach. From our point of view in the Opposition, that means a more pro-growth, pro-jobs approach for all parts of Europe, including the UK.

Does anyone really think that a weaker and de-integrating Europe would bring us improved living standards in the UK in the future or that it would be anything other than a wondrous windfall for all those Asian and South American businesses that are busy plotting, as we speak, to dominate global consumer markets tomorrow, never mind the next decade? Does anyone really think that, if our Eurosceptic friends—all those people who still have trouble dealing with the tragic events of 1066—have their way, we would have anything other than a Europe that simply could not protect our future prosperity, in Birmingham as much as in Barcelona and in Manchester as much as in Milan? Do we really want Britain to be decoupled and to cast itself adrift from Europe, and to set itself up as some kind of bargain basement Atlantis, with all the economic strength of the Faroe Islands and all the political influence of Rockall?

Some may want to take risks with Britain’s prosperity, but the Opposition most emphatically do not. This EU Committee will continue to be an example to us all.