EU: UK Membership

Lord Willoughby de Broke Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, will remember that in our debate on Monday a week ago the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, accused us Eurorealists of being ideologues and went on to say that Europe is not a religion. You could have fooled me. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, who has just spoken, said quite rightly that for some Europhiles the EU is an article of faith. The high priests of this quasi-religion, the Commission and the Brussels Eurocracy, press on with their dangerous project regardless of the damage it is doing to the peoples of Europe. They are sacrificing the future of millions of Europeans on the altar of the EU and the euro.

You have only to look at Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, where unemployment is at 25%. Far worse than that is the youth unemployment; it is anything between 40% and 50%, depending on the country. What does that mean for this generation of school leavers and university leavers? It means that they have no future. I suppose that the high priests will say to them, “At least you need not worry about the work-life balance because there will not be any work”, but the Eurochickens now are coming home to roost. All over the EU, political parties have sprung up to oppose the notion of the central priesthood in the EU, the notion of ever-increasing centralisation and of further unity. Let us look at all the countries: in Finland they have the True Finns; in Italy, the Five Star Movement; in Greece, Syriza; in Spain, Podemos—a very new party which is leading the polls there; in France, Marine Le Pen; and even Germany, the motor of the European Union, has the Alternative für Deutschland.

That may all be very unpalatable to the Europhiles but those are the facts. In addition, of course, I have mentioned UKIP, my own party, which won the European elections and just got its second MP in Rochester. Talking of Rochester, I must congratulate the Liberal Democrat party on its performance in defeating the Monster Raving Loony Party by some 200 votes; it must be very satisfied with that. I am afraid that we have tied ourselves into an outdated and failing EU trade bloc. While the rest of the world is growing, the EU is failing. It is shrinking. It seems odd that our future should lie in this failing organisation. The idea is totally bizarre. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, for reminding the House—no one else did—that one of the principal reasons why we believe we should get out is that we would regain the right to make our own laws and to rule ourselves. Parliament would once again be sovereign, not Brussels.

My noble friend Lord Pearson asked what is the point of the EU. Surely the point of the EU is our strong voice in Europe. Let us look at the results of our strong voice in Europe recently. The Prime Minister was slapped down this summer by Angela Merkel and François Hollande on immigration; Jean-Claude Juncker was elected as president of the European Commission over the Prime Minister’s objections; we have recently been slapped with a £1.7 billion fine on top of our already enormous £20 billion annual contribution to the EU; and most recently we had the humiliating judgment by the European Court of Justice that the salaries of our bankers should be decided in Brussels, not in Britain.

I will finish by reminding your Lordships that there are 193 members of the United Nations and 165 of them seem to manage very well without being in the EU. Sometimes I wonder how they do it. The ice is cracking under the EU and the ship is sinking. We should get off it before it sinks completely.