Europe

Henry Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Douglas Alexander]

I shall make a little progress before giving way.

The Prime Minister’s speech last week disregarded the greatest concern—I would argue—of the British people, namely the need for stability, growth and jobs. In truth, it was a speech that the Prime Minister did not want to give, on a subject he prefers not to talk about, at a time when no decision was required. Its primary aim was to try to deliver unity through the device of obscurity. That is why the Foreign Secretary’s speech was so illuminating.

Alas, I calculate that the Prime Minister’s speech managed to unite the Conservative party for less than 96 hours, at which point the papers were once again full of new plans and plots against him from within the Conservative ranks. Who can blame them?

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Alexander]

I will make a little more progress.

Far from resolving the issue of Europe, the Prime Minister’s speech ended up prompting more questions than it answered. Those questions, alas, were singularly avoided by the Foreign Secretary in his speech today. Instead of setting out red lines for the negotiations or detailing the powers he wants to repatriate, the Prime Minister instead described five principles, about which we have heard more today, with which few hon. Members could disagree. I am happy to confirm for the Foreign Secretary—this might discombobulate Conservative Back Benchers—that the Opposition are happy to endorse the five principles. Foreign Secretaries have been advocating them for many years.

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[Mr Alexander]

Modesty aside, may I suggest that the right hon. Gentleman has a look at the speech I gave at Chatham House? Frankly, it set out far more details of specific changes that we would like to see in the European Union than the Prime Minister was able to manage in his speech. We do not suggest that the status quo is what we will or should advocate. We want to see change in Europe. We also recognise that change is coming to Europe. However, there is a fundamental disagreement between this side of the House and that side of the House on how best to achieve the objective of change within the European Union.

[Henry Smith]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Alexander]

I am keen to make a little more progress.

Of course there are differences between our parties’ approaches on what those changes should include. My judgment is that the reason the Prime Minister was unable last week to set out the changes he wanted to see, beyond the change in working hours for junior doctors, was that the brittle façade of unity to which he is aspiring will crack—indeed, will disintegrate—as soon as he starts to get into the specifics, whether on employment law, social policy, fisheries policy, or a wide range of other issues. I commend the speech I gave, because it details changes in policy. We want to see Europe moving towards growth, and specific policies within the Commission to advance growth, rather than the approach taken in recent years. We see some institutional changes that are required. Of course there are other areas that we will look at, and they are set out in the speech. It is a matter of regret, however, that the Prime Minister felt unable even to match the shadow Foreign Secretary in the level of detail he could provide in his much-trailed speech last week.

One other point on which there was only obscurity last week was that of timing. The Prime Minister seemed unable to be clear on the most basic issue, because it remains uncertain whether treaty change will even happen on the time scale he suggested. At present, no intergovernmental conference is planned for 2015 and most EU Governments now claim there is no need for a big treaty revision for years to come. The only certainty, therefore, is more uncertainty delivered by the Prime Minister.

After both the Prime Minister’s speech and the Foreign Secretary’s speech today, we have been left with a commitment to an in/out referendum on a repatriation agenda that is unknown, within a time frame that is uncertain and towards an end goal that remains wholly undefined. In the debate in the House in 2011—when, incidentally, the Foreign Secretary voted alongside me in the Division Lobby—we argued that to announce an in/out referendum in these circumstances would not serve Britain’s national interest. Our position remains: reform of Europe, not exit from Europe.

Labour recognises, as I have sought to suggest, that the need for EU reform did not begin with the eurozone crisis, which is why our agenda for change must address the need for institutional, as well as policy, reform. That means tackling issues such as how to give national Parliaments more of a say over the making of EU legislation and delivering credible proposals for reform of the free movement directive and family-related entitlements at EU level.

The most immediate focus, however, must be on changes that promote and create jobs and growth. That is why we have consistently called not just for restraint, but for reform of the EU budget. The budget might be only 1% of GDP, but it could be better used, with a greater focus on securing growth and continued reform of the CAP. Alongside reform of the budget, we have argued for a new position of EU growth commissioner and a new mechanism better to assess the impact of every new piece of EU legislation to promote growth across the EU.

Protections for the single market and revival of the prospects for growth should be Europe’s priority for change, but to support and defend the single market—this was the point I was alluding to earlier—we must first understand how the market works. The internal market involves more than simply the absence of tariffs and trade quotas at the border. Common regulatory standards covering issues such as consumer rights, environmental standards and health and safety rules are not simply additions to the workings of the single market, but the basis on which it is built.

That means that a credible growth strategy for the UK as part of the EU cannot, and should not, be pursued on the basis of cheap labour, poor labour standards, poor safety standards and environmentally shoddy goods. If European partners, such as the Germans and the Dutch, can compete in global markets with high European standards, why do some Government Members claim that Britain cannot do so? The Opposition understand that the real agenda on certain Government Benches is not only to bring powers back, but to take rights away.

The Government’s approach threatens the directives on parental leave and agency workers and could mean that they no longer apply in the UK. On the working time directive, it is right that we have the opt-out negotiated by the last Labour Government, but what is the Government’s position? They cannot tell us whether they oppose every aspect of the working time directive. Perhaps the Foreign Secretary will nod or shake his head. Does he support the maintenance of four weeks’ paid holiday entitlement?

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[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak in what is an extremely timely and important debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. As Members of this House, we are all very privileged to have the opportunity to contribute and have our say. Every time I walk through the doors, I am conscious that there are approximately 100,000 people in my constituency whom I am seeking to represent. I was struck by the concluding remarks of the hon. Member for Wirral South (Alison McGovern). She has left her place, but she spoke about giving dignity back to our constituents. I can think of no greater way of doing that than to give them a say on our future relationship with the European Union. The influence of the EU in the past four decades has increasingly dominated every aspect of our national life.

On 1 January 1973—I do not remember it; I was only three years old—we joined what was then referred to as the Common Market or the European Economic Community. When I was six, our membership was confirmed in a referendum. It is important to say that most people thought they were voting in favour of a common market—a customs union or a free trade area. [Interruption.] At the time, some people referred to the small print in the treaty of Rome about ever-closer union, but generally people believed that, essentially, they were joining an economic free trading agreement.

Over ensuing decades, the European Economic Community developed into the European Community and then into the European Union, and the various Acts and treaties, including the Single European Act, which has been referred to, the Maastricht treaty and the failed EU constitution, which had to be rebranded and essentially presented and passed by the previous Government as the Lisbon treaty, have seen an inexorable moving of power from this Parliament to a centralised EU.

I am often struck that people refer to the EU as a federal project—if only it were a little more federal with more subsidiarity! Over the past 40 years, however, it has grown into a central government project, and it is right that the Prime Minister has offered the country a chance to decide its future relationship with the EU. Last Wednesday’s speech will prove to be one of the most important speeches that a British Prime Minister has made in the past half century, and I, for one, am grateful for the clear direction he has set out—as the Foreign Secretary said, it is much clearer than what we hear from Her Majesty’s Opposition.

I only wish that our coalition partners were also signed up to a referendum. It certainly used to be their policy. I do not often quote the Deputy Prime Minister, but I would like to now. Writing in The Guardian on 25 February 2008, he said:

“It’s time we pulled out the thorn and healed the wound, time for a debate politicians have been too cowardly to hold for 30 years—time for a referendum on the big question. Do we want to be in or out? Nobody in Britain under the age of 51 has ever been asked that simple question. None of them were eligible to vote in that 1975 referendum. That includes half of all MPs. Two generations have never had their say.”

That was five years ago, so now that age is 56, and we are into a new Parliament.

[Kate Hoey]

Why does the hon. Gentleman think the Deputy Prime Minister has changed his mind?

[Henry Smith]

I wish I knew how the Deputy Prime Minister’s mind worked. You would be quite right, Mr Deputy Speaker, to rule me out of order for being unparliamentary if I used the word “hypocrisy” in the Chamber, and I would never use the word “hypocrisy” in the Chamber to refer to another right hon. or hon. Member, but I think that the Deputy Prime Minister is guilty of rank inconsistency over his party’s position on a referendum.

This country has a unique position in the world; we have global links like no other nation on earth and we of course have our proximity to the European continent. This nation’s success has been rooted in being a free trading nation that seeks links and co-operation with the world. Our best opportunity for the future, as in the past, is to utilise those unique links and act as a conduit—a bridge—between the world and the European continent.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

I do not want to give the hon. Gentleman a history lesson, but the British empire was actually founded on protectionism. Until the repeal of the corn laws, we had very restrictive markets for our goods.

[Henry Smith]

I was hoping to speak yesterday, to quote from the Reform Act of 1831 and refer to the sweeping away of the rotten boroughs—[Hon. Members: “1832.”] My apologies; I will refrain from using dates. Nevertheless, our history is based on free trade, as is our future.

[Mr Cash]

Does my hon. Friend accept that there is a serious problem if the free trade arrangements that he and I, along with many others, want are in any way obstructed by the exclusive competence of the European Union overlaying the question of whether we could trade freely with, for example, all the members of the Commonwealth and emerging markets?

[Henry Smith]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. It is an EU competence to negotiate free trade agreements. If we had that competence back, as a sovereign Parliament and a sovereign nation, we would once again be free to forge those free trade agreements. I am struck by the fact that there is a multilingual central European country that is free of the European Union, but which has free trade agreements with the European Union—and, indeed, the rest of the world—and that is the nation of Switzerland. It is perfectly possible for us to maintain co-operation and free trading with Europe and to extend that to the rest of the world.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Switzerland can indeed trade, by agreement, with the European single market, but it has to comply with the highest EU standards in food and farming—the policy area that I shadow for the Labour party—or not export into it. It does not have any say in the rules, however.

[Henry Smith]

It is the same with world free trade agreements. It is high time that we gave the British people back the ability to determine how their relationship with Europe and the rest of the world should go forward, so that we can have greater global free trade for greater prosperity and bring back democracy. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister on delivering that promise.