Europe

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Douglas Alexander (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)]

It is, of course, courteous to welcome the Foreign Secretary to the Front Bench, and indeed back to Britain. I am sure it was more agreeable celebrating Hillary Clinton’s time in office last night than watching those on the Opposition Benches celebrate the vote he chose to miss.

The right hon. Gentleman’s speech was, as ever, amusing, but rather less enlightening in terms of its principles, and I will speak about that in a minute. This debate is taking place in the context not just of a speech made last week but of some figures. On Friday it was confirmed by the Office for National Statistics that the United Kingdom economy shrank by 0.3% in the last quarter, and last week we learned that throughout 2012 the UK economy did not grow at all. Unemployment is high.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Alexander]

No, it is important the hon. Gentleman listens. I will make a little progress and then I will happily take some interventions.

Unemployment today is high, borrowing is rising and growth is flatlining. The International Monetary Fund is worried, credit rating agencies are concerned, and the British public are anxious. It tells us all we need to know about the Government’s focus that against such a backdrop they chose to call a general debate in Government time not on the economy, but on Europe.

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[George Freeman]

rose—

[Ben Gummer]

rose—

[Mr Douglas Alexander]

Let me make a little more progress.

The Prime Minister has repeatedly talked about bringing back EU social and employment laws. On 15 November 2005, he said:

“I want, as a strategic imperative, to take back from the European Union social and employment legislation.”

He gave no qualification of that statement. The Foreign Secretary has often singled out the EU’s fisheries policy. He has said he “deplored” it, but was rather more measured in his response to the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil). The Foreign Secretary has also said that he has

“long argued that far greater control over fisheries should pass back to national and regional bodies.”—[Official Report, 16 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 199.]

He has been equally explicit on justice and home affairs. On 16 June 2008, he said:

“The whole area of justice and home affairs…should be matters for individual nations.”

However, the Prime Minister seems to have misplaced his shopping list on the way to delivering his speech last week. All he said on the matter was this:

“we need to examine whether the balance is right in so many areas where the European Union has legislated including on the environment, social affairs and crime.”

The words “employment law” did not feature in his speech; fisheries were mentioned only in passing; there was not a single reference to the common agricultural policy or agriculture; the word “repatriation” was never mentioned; and he did not even utter the term “opt-out”. He promised his Back Benchers chunks of red meat and instead delivered a text full of tofu. The reason he chose only to serve up the vegetarian option last Wednesday is that before, during and after the Prime Minister’s speech a couple of truths endure: the impression of unity can only be achieved through the device of obscurity, and the gap between what the Conservative Back Benchers will demand and what the European Union can deliver remains simply unbridgeable.

[Ben Gummer]

The right hon. Gentleman is proceeding elegantly, which is characteristic, but this is a general debate on the matter of Europe. We have a settled position on the Conservative Benches—[Laughter.] Well, we do, and we are still waiting and looking forward to hearing the opinion of Her Majesty’s Opposition, were they to come into government in two years’ time.

[Mr Alexander]

The hon. Gentleman did his best to read the Whips’ brief with a degree of conviction, but the idea that there is a settled position is risible. The only attempt to try and find common ground is on the basis of obscurity. The Prime Minister cannot level with his Back Benchers, and he cannot level with European leaders. That is why he has tried to avoid making the speech for the past year. It is not that he does not have talented speechwriters, it is that he did not know what to say. He does not know how to reconcile the demands of his Back Benchers with the needs of the country, and the Foreign Secretary demonstrated the same thing today.

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[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

What a refreshing change to be in the Chamber today, having this interesting, broad and generous discussion about the European Union, which is so different from many such debates that I have watched remotely or participated in in my short time here. The same is no doubt true for other Members. The mood has changed, and the reason why is the Prime Minister’s speech last week. The greatest service that his speech has done not only to the country but to the European debate is that it has allowed us, at last, to open up this debate properly. It has allowed the full spectrum of belief and thinking—on both sides of the House—to find its voice and come alive, and with a graciousness that we have not had in such debates for many decades. That is a good thing, because this debate is too important for us to allow it to become reconciled only through rancour. We have to approach it afresh. The British public are tired, frustrated and irritated with this discussion and we need to have it in a new way that gets to the heart of the matter.

That was why I was so pleased with the way in which the Prime Minister opened his speech last Wednesday. It began, so importantly, by dealing with the historical context, which we have not discussed properly in this Chamber for many years. When we have been discussing the minutiae of European treaties, we have forgotten the reason for Europe, why this country is a member of the European Union and why so many of its other members care so deeply about the political consequences of this great community, which has done so much, with NATO, to forge a peace since the second world war. It has been the longest peace that the continent has enjoyed in its modern history.

As Tomas Masaryk so memorably said, our continent is

“a laboratory atop a vast graveyard”.

It behoves us not to forget that although we have found peace within the continent during the past 60 years, the edges of our continent are as dangerous, as vociferous and as potentially alive to crisis and trauma as they have been at any point in the past five or six centuries. Furthermore, we have to be alive to the fact that, as the Prime Minister said, our relationship with the European Union is peculiarly British; a golden thread runs from the very first engagement that we had in our modern history—the Norman conquest—all the way through to now, and it is peculiarly English. That has stamped its mark on the relationship between Great Britain—and then the United Kingdom—and Europe. Even in that prototype of European summitry at the field of the cloth of gold, which the Minister will know of far better than I do, the discussions between the delegations contained many of the same tensions that we see now in European summitry and in the discussions that he has to have on a weekly basis on our behalf.

None of that is to say that other nations in the European Union do not have their own peculiar, individual, unique relationships with other member states; for the Finns, for the Spanish, for the Italians and for the Germans these relationships are very special. So we are not in a unique position in encountering a difficult or particularly interesting relationship with our fellow member states; the relationship is made different by the great ditch that lies between us, but we still have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that other nation states also have these peculiar interests.

The Prime Minister recognised not only that changing relationship with the European Union, but the changing demos of the European Union. We would do well not to forget that the demos is changing in our own country, too. This is a remarkable moment for us and for our nation and, I would propose, for reform of the European Union. I am glad that the tone has changed as a result of his new beginning last week.

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[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

Throughout the debate, we have been asked to consider the choice between optimism and pessimism and between certainty and uncertainty. It is clear to me, however, that the people on the Opposition Benches who would call themselves optimists are so optimistic about the benefits of the European Union that they do not want an open debate with the British people in which they get to have their say. Those Opposition Members complain that the uncertainty of the referendum period is damaging, but will not give us any certainty about whether they support having a referendum now or at any point in the future.

The debate today, and the debate that the Prime Minister has rightly started, is about our bottom line. What do we want from the European Union if we are to maintain our membership? What case will we put to the British people in the referendum campaign based on what we have renegotiated? Without certainty, without a bottom line and without the referendum, there is a danger that the debate will carry on for ever. Britain and other member states will grumble about the EU and what they do and do not get out of it, but there will never be clarity about what we want to get back, what we think is the best deal for Britain and whether we should consider that our national interest is better served by considering a future outside the EU. If someone has a negotiating position, they have to consider walking away from the table if they cannot get what they want; otherwise they are never taken seriously. That is the story of the Labour Government: they gave away Britain’s opt-out on social policy and £7 billion of our rebate and got nothing in return. Their rhetoric about Britain being at the heart of Europe was exactly that: a rhetorical position, totally meaningless. We got nothing out of Tony Blair’s positioning himself at the centre of a grand European stage—nothing that could be shown to be of any real benefit to the British people.

Following the Prime Minister’s speech, the German newspaper Bild wrote that:

“Most EU countries have tacitly agreed to build Europe above the heads of the people. Motto: The European project is simply too important for democratic participation. And then along comes this Cameron!”

That is exactly what the Prime Minister has done: he has demonstrated that we can have an open debate about Britain’s future in the European Union and put it to the people. If we start that national conversation, ultimately we will have a clear view and an answer, and an end to the debate.

There has been considerable discussion of the European social model and what reforms we would want. We certainly see the case for nation states and national Parliaments making decisions in that area. I believe that the social model of Europe has to be reformed if Europe is to be competitive in an increasingly competitive world, and that view has been expressed by a number of my right hon. and hon. Friends. It was also expressed by Tony Blair in an interview in Der Spiegel this week, but although, “We want reform—reform of social policy,” are fine words, if you do not have a clear view of what you want and do not back it up with a referendum, you will not get what you want. The reason countries such as Ireland could negotiate after their people originally said no to the Lisbon treaty is that they had a clear, definitive position as a country. The European Commission had to deal with them because they had the power to bring down the entire treaty; that was the strength they had in that negotiation. We have to learn from that.

We have to take a simple and pragmatic view of what is in our national interest. Britain, like Germany, is seeing its exports grow not within the EU, but in the growing consumer economies around the world. Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia—those are the growing developing markets and we cannot ignore that. Neither can Europe ignore the fact that one of the reasons for the debt crisis is that the European model has been too expensive and the wealth generated by the European Union has not been enough to sustain it. That is a lesson we have to learn.

[Ben Gummer]

Does my hon. Friend agree that EU reform will result in that market itself growing, which will enable us to expand our exports into the EU?

[Damian Collins]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. That is why a reformed Europe—more liberal, more open and more competitive—is something we all want and would all work towards achieving.

We should realise that even if, at the end of the process, the British people decide that our future lies outside the EU—Britain could decide to leave; that is in the gift of the British people and this Parliament—we cannot abolish the European Union. It is a fact of life and it will continue to work in its own way. It is inevitable that the eurozone countries will see closer co-ordinated integration as part of the solution to the crisis in the eurozone, but it is clear that we will never be part of that inner core. There has to be a view of what Europe means for countries that are not only not in the eurozone, but have no desire ever to be in the eurozone, and what their relationship is with the EU.

My constituency, other than that of my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke), is about the closest to the continent of Europe. From Folkestone, we can see France clearly, and the channel tunnel at Folkestone is a direct link to the continent. Our business links and our trade through the ferry ports of Kent and through the tunnel will continue. Companies’ investments, such as that of EDF in the cross-channel electricity pipe and Dungeness nuclear power station in my constituency, will continue. They make those investments because it makes business sense for them; they are not doing us a favour because we are in the European Union. Those pragmatic business decisions will continue to be taken because Britain is an open, low-tax, competitive economy with a very large consumer market, which is attractive to investors.

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[Andrea Leadsom]

My right hon. Friend makes a good point. Clearly, as part of a newly negotiated relationship with Brussels, it will be important for Britain to bring back significant powers. At the same time, the EU is set to change itself. It is already changing significantly, and changing in ways that already benefit Britain. Just one example is the eurozone’s decision to create a single regulator for eurozone financial institutions, and the recognition that in doing so there was the potential for member states to caucus against non-euro members. It has been agreed, at the request of Britain and other non-euro member states, to have a double majority, so that eurozone members cannot exclude non-euro countries from having a say in a vote. That is an important, game-changing precedent that points the way to a future for the European Union. There is a group of eurozone members that need to move towards a country called Europe where they underwrite one another’s debts and move to a federal united states of Europe. At the same time, there can be another very strong group of non-euro member countries that can find a different path. The Fresh Start project, which I was closely involved in establishing 18 months ago, has recently recommended a number of reforms. I hope that the Government will take close account of its recommendations.

[Ben Gummer]

Does my hon. Friend not agree that that does not necessarily preclude closer co-operation in some areas? For example, a single sex offenders register across the European Union is necessary to stop some of the outrages that some of us have seen in our constituencies. People have come in unchecked and have committed crimes.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. It is essential that Britain co-operate fully with the EU on matters of crime and policing. I will come on to that, because it is one of the recommendations in the Fresh Start manifesto that Britain repatriate its competency in that area. In other words, Britain can envisage a scenario where we co-operate fully with the EU, but do not necessarily have to opt in to directives that cannot then be changed under qualified majority voting and are subject to European Court of Justice oversight. It is perfectly possible for Britain to repatriate crime and policing without having to give up its sovereignty in that area.