Commission Work Programme 2015

Martin Horwood Excerpts

Monday 9th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Is it our right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg) who vetoed the debate, or is it simply some mystery in the machine? Is it some faceless bureaucrat, some poor fellow sitting patiently in the officials’ Box?

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

rose—

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Or is it my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham, who now wishes to intervene?

[Martin Horwood]

It certainly is not the hon. Member for Cheltenham, or indeed, I suspect, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr Clegg). The purpose of my intervention, however, is to take a rare opportunity to agree with the hon. Gentleman. I, too, think that debate on European matters in this place should not be subject to undue delay, and that European scrutiny that is scrunched into two short periods after a long delay is utterly inadequate when it comes to what the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) rightly described as a European equivalent of the Queen’s Speech. We should take a fresh look at all this in the next Parliament. Nevertheless, I should like the hon. Gentleman to substantiate any other allegations that he makes about individual Members.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am grateful for that helpful intervention. I was only speculating that the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam—my friend—was responsible. In fact, I think that that is unlikely; I think that the person in question is more deeply hidden in the machinery than such an easy target as the Deputy Prime Minister.

This topic is of fundamental importance. According to press reports that have appeared over the past few days, 187,370 Romanians and Bulgarians were given national insurance numbers in 2014 alone. In other words, more than 200,000 people from Romania and Bulgaria have been given national insurance numbers during the period in which we have been waiting for this debate. That is an extraordinary state of affairs. According to a report from Oxford university, the population has risen by 565,000 in three years, and two thirds of those people are from European Union countries. In London alone, the population of EU member state nationals has risen by 161,000, from 711,000 to 872,000, during those three years.

The Government shy away from debates on this subject, thinking that if they do not talk about it, the nation will not notice; but the nation has noticed. I see that the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) is present. His entire party is making hay with the subject, because other politicians, including the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden)—other major political figures—are shying away from it. They believe that if they keep quiet, no one will notice. However, this is an issue of great importance to our constituents, who are worried about the sheer number of people who are entering the country because of free movement.

The Government are not setting out the groundwork for the renegotiation properly. At the December 2014 Council, they agreed to the following words, which appeared in the Council’s conclusions in relation to Switzerland:

“It”

—the Council—

“considers that the free movement of persons is a fundamental pillar of EU policy, and that the internal market and its four freedoms are indivisible.”

That seems to me to be a pretty bold statement, especially in connection with what we have heard about the Prime Minister’s speech on immigration being sent to Mrs Merkel for approval before being delivered. It seems that our policy on immigration must have the stamp of approval from Berlin, but we must be so committed to the European ideal that we view the free movement of people as unchallengeable. If we think that in regard to Switzerland, how can we renegotiate ourselves?

When I raised that question with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe earlier, he said that Switzerland had tied itself into a number of treaty arrangements, and that if it removed itself from one of them, it might find itself being removed from all of them. Surely that is exactly what we are trying to do in a renegotiation: surely we are trying to remove ourselves from some of the treaties to which we have agreed, but not from all of them. Perhaps the Government think that that is an equally disgraceful approach, but if it is sauce for the Swiss goose, surely it is sauce for the British gander. It cannot be right for the Government to take such a strong pro-European line in this regard. It shows a lack of sincerity in their approach to renegotiation—and if they renegotiate with a lack of sincerity, the British people are far more likely to vote to leave the EU, and the Government will get precisely the result that they do not want.

Time is short, and you, Mr Deputy Speaker, have asked for the Minister for Europe to be given a couple of minutes in which to wind up the debate. It is illustrative of how little time we have been allowed that a debate on the equivalent of a much longer Queen’s Speech and the free movement of people has been so truncated because of the Government’s failure to deliver on their promises. However, I want to make one more comment, in support of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood). The financial transaction tax and the uniform corporation tax base represent a fundamental effort to take sovereignty from this country in fiscal matters, and patriate it to a European state. The fact that we have been given only 90 minutes in which to debate a matter of such importance is pretty poor according to the Government’s standard.