National Referendum on the European Union

Debate between Neil Parish and Bernard Jenkin

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point, but this issue has come to the fore because it is about not only democracy and consent, but growth and jobs. If the coalition came into being for anything, it was for the deficit reduction programme. That is its raison d’être. It might not have escaped her notice that that programme is in trouble, because the economy is not growing. There are many reasons for that—the US, the crisis in the eurozone, and our country’s indebtedness and excessive taxation—but one fundamental reason is that we are overburdened with European regulation. That is why a majority of businessmen in this country now say that the advantages of the single market are outweighed by the disadvantages.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. I spent 10 years in the European Parliament and watched powers transferred from Westminster to Brussels, making business more expensive and introducing more regulation. If we want to free up our economy and move forward, we need substantially to renegotiate. The motion gives us a chance to send that message to the Government and to strengthen Ministers’ hands when they go to Europe to do so.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point.

We know from experience that we cannot rely even on the assurances given to us by our European partners. In 1992, we thought we had opted out of what was then called the social chapter. We thought that would protect us from the working time directive, but by the end of that Parliament the EU had circumvented the opt-out in typical fashion: it used a different treaty base to force the directive on to our statute book, against the wishes of our Parliament, by making it a health and safety programme.

The same thing is happening with the agency workers directive, which the Government have bitterly opposed because they know that it will price more young people out of the labour market. We now have above-average youth unemployment in this country when it used to be below-average.