Cost of Living
Debate between Meg Hillier and David Ruffley
Mr David Ruffley (Bury St Edmunds) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley).
Our membership of the European Union affects, one way or another, the living standards of our constituents and the prosperity of our people. Membership of the European Union has primarily been founded on an economic case that membership is in our economic interests. In 1973, the argument was principally that we wanted to join a common market because it would raise living standards in this country. More recently, proponents of our membership of the EU say that one fifth of all EU direct inward investment comes to the United Kingdom, representing a source of jobs.
What our membership of the EU has never been, in the eyes of the British people, is, to use the treaty language, a project for
“ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe”
Since 2010, this Government and their Ministers have been engaged in pushing back against the onward march of greater economic integration and the attendant political integration that follows from that. We saw that when our Ministers ensured that we did not contribute to the bail-out mechanism for sovereign states in difficulty. In the banking union proposals, where the rules of the European Central Bank could have seen banks dancing to the tune of a European regulator, they ensured a double majority system to protect UK financial services.
We have also had to push back on greater justice and home affairs integration. The Home Secretary has sensibly entered a reservation on 130-odd justice and home affairs measures, including the European arrest warrant and DNA fingerprinting.
Mr Ruffley
I will not at the moment because time is short.
It is also the case that, historically, we have been against greater integration. Why else did we secure an opt-out from the euro—that disastrous project that we did not want anything to do with at the outset and that we will not, I trust, wish to join in the future? We were also, of course, one of the few EU countries to say that we would have nothing to do with the Schengen arrangements, whereby many of the other EU members decided to throw their borders wide open.
The question of whether UK membership of the EU is in the national economic interest is being asked with increasing urgency. Telling interventions have been made in recent days by Lords Lamont and Lawson and Michael Portillo, who have asked a question that has for too long been ignored: what are the costs and what are the benefits? They have come to the preliminary conclusion that the costs probably outweigh the benefits, but it is not just the words of Conservative politicians of the past that we should take into consideration.
Some important work has been done by Goldman Sachs. Jim O’Neill, who to my knowledge is not a card-carrying member of the Conservative party, has calculated that trade patterns are very much in flux. He says that if we look at German trade patterns from 2000 to 2012 and extrapolate to 2020, we will find, interestingly, that Germany will export 25% of its exports to the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—and a falling proportion of only 30% to the EU, and that 15% of them will be to China alone and just over 8% to France. The world economy and its trade patterns are in flux, and the idea that we have to be wedded, as an article of faith, to the single market deserves serious scrutiny and examination.
I regret the absence of a referendum Bill in the Gracious Speech. In the case of any hypothetical amendment so regretting that omission, I will gleefully and proudly support it for this reason and this reason alone: we have to have a rigorous and well-informed national debate about the costs and the benefits to our people of membership of the European Union.