European Union (Finance) Bill

Debate between Kevin Foster and Alex Salmond

Tuesday 23rd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

I have been listening with interest to the right hon. Gentleman’s points about funding for Scotland. How does he think this support would be getting on without the benefit of the UK’s rebate?

[Alex Salmond]

One of the reasons we do so incredibly badly in many European programmes as regards funding is that the Treasury’s interest, when looking at additionality, as it calls it, is always to minimise EU expenditure. Although it is perfectly acceptable for the Government to defend the rebate, it is less acceptable to look at every European programme and try to minimise expenditure on it, because in doing so, we lose some of the alternative opportunities that the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South talked about. If the Treasury looks at every European programme and says, “How do we minimise spending?”, what follows as a natural consequence is that our share of that spending is also diminished. In the case of the common agricultural policy, it is possible to make a direct connection with the negotiating stance of the right hon. Member for North Shropshire, who was trying to abolish farm payments altogether and got the miserable, unfair and inequitable distribution of support that has been the end result of the CAP negotiations.

The Minister—I am not sure if it was a dead bat, a glorious drive through covers, or a catch at slips—rather evaded the direct question of what is the Prime Minister’s negotiating stance on the budget. The Minister said, after being passed a note, that the Prime Minister’s stance was to cut the whole budget and to protect the UK rebate. Let me point out that that has been the Government’s stance and policy since they took office in 2010; it is not a particular stance for these renegotiations. What the Minister is being asked—we really would like an answer—is whether the Prime Minister has a specific target in mind in renegotiations for changes in the EU budget or the UK contribution to it, and if so, what it is. Failure to answer that question throughout the debate adds to the no doubt unworthy, but considerable, suspicion shared across this Chamber that the Prime Minister is adopting this nebulous approach to what are his negotiating aims so that whatever he comes back with can be announced as a fundamental achievement. That does not stand scrutiny in this Committee, but even more importantly, it is a particularly poor campaigning argument in favour of the European cause.

I hope that the Minister—the last man in—will rise to the occasion by confirming that he is in favour of more equitable distribution of land ownership in Scotland and by giving us an insight into the Prime Minister’s true negotiating hand in the coming arguments and discussions in the European Union.