Economic Growth

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hood]

The hon. Gentleman has been saying exactly what he said in the Maastricht debate ever since, at every opportunity. It will surprise no one, including me, if he continues to say those things, but I am speaking to the reality. Some say that the Conservative amendment is a UKIP amendment. In fact, the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) accepted that he agrees with a lot of what UKIP says.

I remind the House of something the Prime Minister said in his Conservative party leadership campaign. He promised the country and his party that he would make the Conservatives electable again, and get rid of the “nasty Tory” image. He travelled to the Arctic to embrace huskies, and came back here and cuddled hoodies. These are changed days. Where is he now? This week, with conspiracies going on behind his back in his own party in Parliament, he is away negotiating an EU trade deal. You could not make it up! As my grandmother used to say, when the cat’s away, the mice will play. That is what is happening to him.

The debate and the run-up to it are more like Shakespeare’s assassination plot in “Julius Caesar”. The big question is who will be Brutus. Margaret Thatcher’s political assassination in 1990 had nothing, or nothing much, to do with Europe, but we have the same modus operandi. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner) pointed out in a speech two weeks ago, the Conservatives kicked Mrs Thatcher out on the street like a dog.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is asking questions, but not pointing fingers. Does he think it was significant that the Chancellor made a very anti-European statement today? He made it clear that he is in line with the people who are calling for the referendum, and demanding we join them, while the Prime Minister is away. He may not be the great wizard, but he is certainly the great Machiavellian.

[Mr Hood]

I do not disagree with that. The Chancellor is supposed to be the campaign manager for the Conservative party and he could well fit the title of Brutus. I do not want to accuse him of being a Brutus, because there are so many of them about. It will be interesting to see who is the first to stick the dagger in. I should thank the hon. Member for Croydon South (Richard Ottaway) for having the temerity to speak up from the Government Benches in a pragmatic and sensible way on our membership of the European Union.

One of the many questions thrown at our Front-Bench team is whether they support a referendum. Hon. Members should not bother to ask me. I do not support a referendum on staying in the United Nations, I do not support a referendum on staying in NATO and I do not support a referendum on staying in the European Union. Yes, the EU needs reforming, but it can only be reformed from within. We cannot reform it and influence it from outside, and I hope that can be taken as read.

It is my judgment, supported by a considerable weight of evidence, that today’s Conservative party is so far to the right that it refuses to select candidates that are moderate, pragmatic or pro-Europe. There lies the difficulty. I started my younger political life being anti-Europe, but I accepted that the world moves on and I moved on with it. In the Labour party in the late ’70s and ’80s, it was difficult to be a candidate for a European seat without being anti-Europe. That is exactly where the Conservative party is now. The selection process is causing all the difficulties for its leader today in Parliament.

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[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I am very grateful to be called to contribute to this debate, particularly since some Members have decided to put Europe, which is one of my interests, firmly on the agenda.

This debate should be framed in the context of a paper passed by the Council of Europe in the last year entitled “The young generation sacrificed”, and the follow-up papers in which I have been involved. They address educational needs and opportunities for young people, the need for technical training and skills, and the right of youth to fundamental rights and access to a better life, because that is the generation we have stolen from as a result of our errors both in this country and across the EU. We should measure our Government’s wider performance alongside how that generation is treated.

In the European context, I have spent two days in Brussels and the Netherlands with the Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), and others. I was astonished at the extent to which not just the EU but the eurozone are straitjackets preventing growth. We met Olli Rehn, Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, who had a blueprint, put forward on 5 December. We also met Herman Van Rompuy—one more president of Europe—who put forward a blueprint for a deep and genuine economic and monetary union in December 2012. On 29 January 2013 José Manuel Barroso, the other current president, spoke at a European conference in support of Van Rompuy’s blueprint, saying it was the only way forward. However, what it was, in fact, was a constraining arrangement in economics—in countries’ banking systems and budgets—as the Chair of the ESC said. The arrangement would be contracted and would have penalty clauses, and it would punish Governments who are already in dire straits, and the people of their countries, for not coming up to what are, in fact, the aspirations of the northern European countries, who are making so much out of the European arrangement at present.

In fact, the statistics showed that we had a growth-free, recession-bound EU, and alongside it we have a growth-free, austerity-choked UK economy. As we have heard, even in these times, our deficit against the EU has gone up to £72 billion, which represents more than £1.25 billion every week. These countries are in a bad condition, but we are still in a worse condition. Oddly, the G7—our Prime Minister was there—reported how happy it is with the arrangements for the EU to continue to squeeze and choke these people, but that contradicts what the Chancellor said today. What he said about the ECOFIN meeting suggests that there would appear to be an argument against how the EU is performing and constraining people. I do not know who is telling the truth—was he just making his speech because of the leadership bid in the background, was he playing to the dissidents on his Back Benches, or was he genuinely saying that an attempt is being made in Europe to unlock that terrible arrangement set up in response to the eurozone crisis?

The crisis is a eurozone one. Everyone we spoke to did not talk about the countries in the south being a danger to the EU; they said that they were a danger to the euro. The euro has become the symbol of what they are doing to others to punish them, because the euro is more fundamental than the European project, and that really worries me. There is a growing meanness of spirit in what is being talked about in the EU: people are to be punished because the euro is being threatened. That is very strange, and it is certainly not what I voted for when I voted yes in the referendum to join the EU. There are serious questions to answer here, because I do not think the renegotiation being talked about by the Prime Minister has anything to do with that—it is on the fringes. His renegotiation is to do with justice and home affairs and Schengen agreements; it is not about the fundamentals of the European project, which is now an economic project driven by the euro and not by the interests of the people of Europe.

I wish to remark on some things in the Queen’s Speech, one of which is apprenticeships. We must be frank about them. Apprenticeships are now talked about by McDonald’s, which has them—in-service training for six months constitutes an apprenticeship. Tesco and Sainsbury’s say that they have apprenticeships, too, but these are not apprenticeships. The reality is that 60% of the skills shortages are in non-graduate technical skills—we are not training proper apprentices to do the jobs that need to be done.

Secondly, my constituency contains a large petrochemical industry that is losing money hand over fist; it is burdened by massive energy taxation that is not paid by the rest of the world, and even has a 5% to 10% disadvantage against the EU. What is there in the Queen’s Speech to remove those burdens from our industries to let them take people on? If those burdens are not addressed, we will not deal with the problem in the beginning, that of the youth who have been betrayed by this Government and, basically, by the European project.