UK-EU Summit

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Bernard Jenkin

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) and his flowery optimism for the future of this country, with it somehow being a terribly good thing that we are realigning ourselves with the European Union without actually rejoining it. It makes me wonder about all the debates I have attended over 33 years in the House about our relationship with what used to be called the common market, then the European Communities and now the European Union.

This debate has a ring of familiarity about it, because there are two sides in the House that tend to completely misunderstand each other—only, I think that Conservative Members now understand the truth, because that came out in the referendum. The referendum demonstrated that the House of Commons was completely out of alignment with the population on the question of our membership of the European Union. The whole Brexit story was about a battle within the House as to whether the pro-EU majority would assert itself and somehow negate the referendum, or whether the referendum would be respected. That is why my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition and her shadow Cabinet colleagues are right to put at the front of the motion the importance of honouring the referendum result.

The fact is that a referendum result represents a superior mandate to a single term of election for an elected Government, because that referendum takes place on a single issue. I do not think anyone would pretend that the European Union was the main issue at the last general election, so anyone in the Government or indeed in the Liberal Democrats trying to use the general election result as a mandate to circumvent the result of the 2016 referendum is playing a dangerous political game.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Of course, that argument was used in reverse on those of us who had had concerns about Europe for 40 years as we were told—exactly to my hon. Friend’s point—that a referendum was superior to continuous elections. We made a decision after the last referendum; that was a generational move. We have hardly had a generation in the few years since the referendum.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. The important point is that we do not have a written constitution, but we do have in our minds a hierarchy of legitimacy on which, in the end, the democratic credibility of the House depends. The fact is, a referendum represents a superior mandate on a single issue and, with a great struggle, the pro-EU majority eventually aligned itself with the decision that the British people had taken on our membership of the European Union.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I am happy to point out that after the referendum and since we left the European Union, we are spending way more than £350 million a week more on the NHS than we were, and our contributions to the European Union have fallen dramatically—in fact, much faster than was expected under the withdrawal agreement. So the benefit that was on the side of the bus has turned out to be correct, although I believe it was a statistical sleight of hand to use that particular number; I disowned it at the time. But have no doubt that if we are to get drawn back into the European Union, we will have to start raiding the NHS to make payments to the European Union again. I do not think that is what the British people voted for.

That brings me back to this great defence fund, which I think will be borrowed. Will we have to borrow some of that fund as well? No, it was going to be borrowed through some European Central Bank mechanism. Will it instead be taxed? In any case, it is all Government borrowing, so will we add to Government borrowing by participating in the borrowing or funding of that fund, or would it not be better if we just remained aloof from it to concentrate on spending money on our own defence? That is the point that has already been made: the money that we have committed to defence over the years, in the period since the second world war and, indeed, since the end of the cold war, is far greater than that of the vast majority of EU countries. We also mandate our nuclear deterrent to the protection of the whole of Europe. We play our part in the defence of Europe. As for the idea that we can deploy troops more quickly through free movement of people, what planet are the Liberal Democrats on? It is utterly ludicrous.

I come back to the point about the defence fund. There have been such funds in Europe before, but I can assure Members that the game that every country plays is the one where what they put in, they get out. The French are past masters at that. They will participate in a multilateral programme, but if they do not get the lion’s share, they pull out. They pulled out of the Eurofighter programme when that was meant to be part of their deal because they were not getting enough work out of it. Therefore, the idea that it is a freebie for British defence companies to participate in the fund and get extra money into the British defence industries will simply not happen.

In any case, this fund is not about creating warfighting capability this year or next year, which is what we need; it is about the very long-term, big programmes that the defence industries want. That will not rescue us from America’s absence from NATO, if that were to occur for more than a few months or a few years under Donald Trump. Let us also remember that Donald Trump will not be there forever; he has 45 more months to go. Let us not do more damage to NATO by making it look to the other side of the Atlantic that we will take care of our own defence in Europe from now on. That is very dangerous.

I remember Madeleine Albright, a Democrat Secretary of State, railing against what was then called the European security and defence policy. She warned that it represented the “Three Ds”: the duplication of NATO assets, which was wasteful and unnecessary; the discrimination against non-EU members of NATO such as Norway, Turkey, Canada and the United States; and the decoupling of American and European defence policy. Is that what we want? Is that what this House wants? Is that what the Labour party wants? No. The Labour party says that NATO is the cornerstone of our defence and rightly so, but what signal is it sending to President Trump?

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I ask that he wait just a minute.

What signal is it sending to Donald Trump by suggesting that we will have an EU defence policy that excludes the United States? It is exactly the wrong signal for this moment.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend raises that point, which I want to elaborate further. The real point is that J. D. Vance, the vice president, came over to Munich and ripped a hole through the Europeans, including ourselves, for not having spent enough, although we were one of the top spenders. Since then, the Americans have gone on and on about that, but each time we get the sense that they are keener to decouple. Does what we are about to do not give strength to the argument that we do not need them any longer and therefore they need to look somewhere else? That is the danger, because NATO was not just about defence of the west; it was about making sure that the US never goes into isolationism again.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

Yes. That promise of creating an EU defence capability has been on the table since the St Malo declaration of 1999, in the aftermath of the Maastricht treaty that first introduced the word “defence” into the EU. That was when France and the United Kingdom, under a Labour Government, declared that the EU would have autonomous military capability, with separable but not separate military forces from NATO.

We still have the absurdity in which the armed forces of the EU countries are allocated to NATO tasks but, at the same time, are ready for EU tasks. There had to be a complicated de-confliction arrangement to try to ensure that an EU defence mission does not conflict with a NATO defence mission. We finished up with something called the Berlin-plus arrangements, which Turkey has never accepted because it is not a member of the EU but is a member of NATO.

There has always been an impasse between NATO and the EU on those two questions, and it is all completely unnecessary because NATO has a military headquarters, it has a political committee and it is an international organisation. Indeed, it is the most successful military alliance in the world. Why is the EU trying to duplicate it just for itself? The EU is more interested in statecraft and state-building than defending our own continent. The anger with which Ursula von der Leyen and Friedrich Merz have attacked Trump reflects a latent anti-Americanism that has always been there and which we could do without at this moment.