European Communities Act 1972 (Repeal) Bill

David Lidington Excerpts

Friday 26th October 2012 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)]

My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) has always been a champion of greater direct democracy in this House. In choosing to introduce a Bill that was selected in the way he described, he has demonstrated to the House that he is fully prepared to practise what he preaches.

As the debate has shown, the Bill, which has considerable technical deficiencies, is in effect being used as a proxy for a debate about the principle of whether the United Kingdom should be in the European Union. The challenge to my hon. Friend is that our continued membership for 40 years derives not from some mythical conspiracy of civil servants in King Charles street—by the way, they come from a much more diverse range of social and educational backgrounds these days than the caricature he presented to the House—but from a hard-headed, calculated and pragmatic decision by successive Governments, and successive leaders of the Conservative party, that despite the acknowledged flaws and drawbacks of the European Union as it has existed and as it exists today, our membership of it is to the national advantage. It is to the advantage of the British people because of what it gives us through trade, market access, the attraction of foreign direct investment, and increased diplomatic leverage over foreign and security policies.

My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton posed what I think is a false choice between increasing our trade with the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America and maintaining the lion’s share of our trade that remains with the European Union. Although I think that future growth will indeed, as he says, come largely from those emerging markets, the bulk of our trade and inward investment will continue to come from Europe.