Multiannual Financial Framework

Chris Kelly Excerpts

Wednesday 31st October 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

The Labour party—the Opposition—will of course vote with us this evening, not the other way round. As the hon. Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) correctly pointed out, exactly the same happened with the Maastricht treaty.

The amendment spoken to so ably by my hon. Friend the Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is absolutely right. It deals not just with the mechanics or the technicalities, but with what is really going on under the surface. The real questions are, “Where is the money coming from?” and “What is the object of this multiannual financial framework?”

I have been to many conferences in the past year in my capacity as Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee—in Cyprus and Denmark, and, before that, elsewhere—and I have attended similar conferences with my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington). They are living on another planet: that is the real problem. The main feature of that big landscape is where we are today. This is part of a picture that must be dealt with.

I know that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is conscious of that. He knows that Mr Barroso’s speech calling for a federal Europe, which was made only a short time ago, has put us at a crossroads. We cannot continue to assume that what was being considered before that date still applies. We are now on a different journey. They are on one planet, and we are on another. We have to make a stand, and that is what this is all about.

A letter dated 18 December 2011 from the Prime Minister and from the Prime Ministers of several other member states, included the following passage:

“European public spending cannot be exempt from the considerable efforts made by the Member States to bring their public spending under control.”

We are cutting here; we need growth. They are not cutting, but increasing. That is the point.

[Chris Kelly (Dudley South) (Con)]

I know that my hon. Friend has a great deal of empathy with the private sector. The private sector is the engine of growth in our economy and it becomes more efficient every year, but does my hon. Friend agree that in Brussels the only thing that increases is the appetite for our money?

[Mr Cash]

Absolutely. It is impossible to make any public expenditure—including our contributions to the whole of the public sector: health, education, local government, the lot—unless the money comes from reasonably taxed small and medium-sized enterprises. Yet the whole of the Commission’s paper—which is at the heart of the 2020 strategy and at the heart of why the Commission is asking for this increased amount of money, which it calls an investment for growth—contains only one reference to small and medium-sized businesses, in one line. That is the problem we are up against. We cannot give money to the public sector unless we get it from private enterprise on a reasonably taxed basis.

The Prime Minister’s letter continues:

“The action taken in 2011 to curb”—

“curb”: that is the word he uses—

“annual growth in European payment appropriations should therefore be stepped up progressively over the remaining years of this financial perspective and payment appropriations should increase, at most, by no more than inflation over the next financial perspectives.”

The situation was wrong then, and it has got worse since. That was in December 2011. We are now in October 2012, and we know what the picture is, and it is getting progressively worse. That is why we had to call for a reduction rather than merely what the Prime Minister describes as an

“increase, at most, by no more than inflation over the next financial perspectives.”