Richard Drax
Main Page: Richard Drax (Conservative - South Dorset)Department Debates - View all Richard Drax's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Alison McGovern
I am tempted to give way but I will make some progress before I do.
Let us not forget the real issues. As I said, what matters to my constituents at the moment is the fact that our local authority has been cut to the bone and we are losing hundreds and hundreds of jobs. We are worried about employment and having a well-functioning economy on Merseyside where people have the money in their pockets to afford the prices in the shops. That is what people are really concerned about.
Because my time is limited and I have only four minutes left, I want to focus on a particular problem in Europe that I would have hoped we could all try to work together to deal with. This is timely, I hope, because yesterday a report by the Work Foundation demonstrated not only that youth unemployment is a significant problem on the continent of Europe but that the UK’s unemployment is higher than the European average, third only to Greece and Spain, and that we have youth unemployment that is higher than the OECD average. In yesterday’s Treasury questions, I asked how the Government planned to tackle the fact that their own predictions from the Department for Work and Pensions demonstrate that they have increased by 31,000 the number of young people to whom we will be paying jobseeker’s allowance by the end of this Parliament. We have the wrong economic plans. This problem cuts across the whole continent of Europe, and we ought to work together with our European partners to try to solve it. Considering this question helps to enlighten the debate about what we should do in Europe.
We need to focus on two things in the light of this problem. First, we need to rebalance the economy of Europe.
Alison McGovern
Briefly, if the hon. Gentleman wants to answer the question of what the Government should do about Europe.
Richard Drax
Just as a matter of observation, when talking about losing jobs and all the things the hon. Lady is mentioning, is it not the case that many more millions of people are out of work in Europe because this whole European federalism dream—we can call it what we like—is going horribly wrong? It is not just a UK matter; it is about what we are trying to live with, and we just cannot do it.
Alison McGovern
To help the hon. Gentleman, let me point out that what went horribly wrong was that the financial services industry invested in complicated products that it told us would help to manage risk, but it turned out that they made the risks worse. That sparked a financial crisis, and that has led to the problems that I have been describing.
We need a rebalancing of our European economy, and we need to think about how we can address the significant problem of inequality that is being created. In a recent Mansion House speech, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said that he was not in favour of a stimulus because it would lead to leakage in relation to imports. An EU-wide plan therefore makes sense, because we are part of a trading bloc and we should be working together to improve our shared economy. My right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), who is sadly no longer in his place, mentioned state aid rules to rebalance areas of the economy that use high technology. It makes sense to work with our European colleagues on rebalancing.
Some commentators have advanced the idea of a youth contract whereby we could use unused structural funds for a European youth guarantee. I would argue that in order to tackle youth unemployment we need to learn the lessons of the projects proposed by the best of our town halls in the UK and the best countries around the world that have used active labour markets to tackle these problems. If there are funds available in Europe, we should work together with colleagues to get them to the heart of the problem.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
In the 1970s I was chairman of the north-west London “Get Britain Out” campaign. I remember chairing a rally addressed on the one hand by local Labour MPs and Ken Gill, the general secretary of TASS—the Technical, Administrative and Supervisory Section—and a leading member of the Communist party on the party, and Enoch Powell on the other. I believed that position in good faith and I worked hard for it. I was disappointed by the outcome, but I soon came to recognise that I was wrong, just as I came to recognise that continuing to fight yesterday’s battles was wrong. We took a long time in the Labour party to recognise that. Indeed, when Labour members first went into the European Parliament, the Spanish socialists nicknamed them “Los Japonistos”, after the soldiers who emerged from the jungles in Guam 40 years after the war was over asking, “Is the war continuing?”
Why did I change my mind? I remember an excellent German-Jewish friend who had lost his family in the camps saying to me, “Jack, I’m not the greatest fan of the common market,” as it then was, “but we’ve had a continent at peace for a generation, unlike that which took my family from me.” I remember a very honourable Macmillanite Conservative in the 1980s—in the days when there were such people, before, in the immortal words of Julian Critchley, the “garagistes” took over the Conservative party—saying, “Jack, I’m proud of my country, but we can only be strong in a modern, bi-polar world,” as it was then, “if we are at the heart of the European Union, with its great traditions of Christian democracy and social democracy.”
The reason I changed my mind was also, yes, the rolling forward of the social dimension in the 1980s, when Jacques Delors—Frère Jacques, as we came to call him—came to address the TUC. However, it was also because of my experience in the real world of work, dealing with hard-headed business people—enlightened in their approach—who rightly argued that we needed a single market with common standards, at the heart of which was a social dimension that reflected a belief in the simple truth that how we treat workers is crucial to the quality of the service they provide and what they produce.
Richard Drax
Why do we need to be a member of a federalist state to treat our workers properly? Why cannot we pass those laws ourselves? Indeed, we have.
Jack Dromey
I am coming to that point in a moment.
On the argument that I have just deployed, I remember the chairman of the company then known as British Aerospace saying that we needed a single market, but that as a company and as a continent we could not succeed in the world on the basis of a race to the bottom. That brings me to my first concern, which is the hidden agenda that lies behind the Prime Minister’s argument. There was a tantalising glimpse of that last week when, extraordinarily, he seemed to suggest that we should return to the days when a junior doctor could work 100 hours a week. Repatriation is the cry, but the reality behind that is rolling back a generation of progress on workers’ rights and taking us back to the 1980s, an era I remember well.
Let me give the House an example, which relates to the acquired rights directive. The directive was legislated on at European Union level in 1978, and introduced here, reluctantly, by a Conservative Government in 1982. However, that Government did not extend it to cover 6 million public servants. What we saw was the most appalling Dutch auction, involving cut-throat competition as workers were transferred and suffered cuts to their pay, their holiday entitlement, their sickness entitlement and, often, their pension arrangements as well. I remember a particular example that I dealt with early on involving the Moreton-in-Marsh fire service training college, where 130 women caterers and housekeepers had seen dramatic cuts to their terms and conditions of employment. The only humorous side to that otherwise sad story was the fact that the managing director of the company concerned—Grand Metropolitan catering—was none other than a Mr Dick Turpin.
Two things happened at that time. First, in 1991, I took the case of the Eastbourne dustmen to the European Court of Justice, and we won. It was ruled that the British Government had acted unlawfully in denying protection on transfer from the public to the private sector. Secondly, employers themselves began to speak out. I remember Martin O’Halloran of ISS, the then chair of the CBI, saying that it was madness—that employers did not want a market based on a race to the bottom, and that they wanted a market in which we competed on quality and productivity, characterised by fair treatment and fair competition.
Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)
You have cut me down to size before I have even started, Mr Speaker, but I will comply with your ruling.
I want to speak in defence of agriculture in the EU and the dangers for our farmers, food producers, manufacturers and the UK economy that would arise from pulling out or from the prevarication we might see over the next few years. People do not often speak in defence of agriculture in the EU, but my discussions with farmers show that they have been universally in favour of staying in—and not because of CAP reform or subsidies, although I shall return to those issues in a moment.
The first issue is the clear benefit that being in the European Union brings to consumers. Our high food standards, animal welfare, food protection, food safety and so on—despite the recent issues that bubble along—are a direct result of our being in the EU and working across it to the highest standards. Examples include the beef hormone ban, comprehensive food labelling—although we can do more on that, a cross-Europe approach has been an enormous help to our farmers and food producers—and limits on the pesticide residue that can be left in our food.
I mentioned the higher welfare standards and one example is the ban on battery hens, which came at an enormous cost to our farmers. Despite their fears that they might be disadvantaged when we entered into the ban across Europe on 1 January last year, the demand for eggs from producers who met the highest standards meant that for a short period there was a premium on their eggs. We need to sing this out loud: our farmers provide the highest standards of animal welfare and food safety standards of which consumers can be proud. It is a question not just of domestic supply but of exports.
Richard Drax
We discussed eggs and their production in the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and it might interest the hon. Gentleman to learn that very few other countries met any of the requirements, at great cost to our producers.
Huw Irranca-Davies
I do not want to contradict the hon. Gentleman, but, to my surprise, the response of the EU on 1 January last year was a quite dramatic intervention: in Spain and elsewhere, immediate action was taken against suppliers who were not compliant, to the extent of closing down hatcheries and egg producers. My regular meetings with the British Egg Industry Council suggest that that has not been nearly as worrisome to its members as they thought it might be, and has, in fact, been to their advantage. The long-term advantage in the sector lies in having not just a level playing field, but in meeting the higher standards that consumers expect. Consumers are demanding more of food production.
The common agricultural policy is undergoing changes at the moment, but the rural development pillar has been directly beneficial to many hard-pressed rural communities throughout the UK by rewarding the delivery of biodiversity and good environmental outcomes as well as innovation and competitiveness in farming and food production, and supporting areas such as Wales and Scotland where there are natural environmental constraints.
Another benefit is found in European food protection labelling, such as protected designations of origin, protected geographical indications and traditional specialities guaranteed. We in the UK need to speak up proudly about how many of our foodstuffs, produced in every part of the UK, fall within one of those designations and because of that, have value added and command a premium price. It is interesting that, just within cheeses, we now have more than one speciality cheese for every single day of the year. That is the result of the European approach of recognising the very best in local and speciality foods. Examples include Welsh lamb, Stilton cheese, Scotch beef, traditional farm fresh turkey and traditionally farmed Gloucestershire Old Spots pork.
We should also look at what the EU does across its member states in agricultural scientific research. For example, this country is holding its breath over the spread of the Schmallenberg virus, but it is at EU level that the research is being done into how we can counter it in the seven or so member states affected. The UK specifically has €400,000 to carry out scientific studies designed to gather further information, and is working with farmers to deliver a joined-up approach to research and to provide advice to farmers and the farming community.
Access to the single market is also vital. My hon. Friend the Member for Stalybridge and Hyde (Jonathan Reynolds) spoke about this. Yes, if we were outside the EU, we could still negotiate access, but there are difficulties with that. First, there is the time it would take and the complexity of negotiating access for a range of different products; and secondly, as farmers and the NFU tell me, we would have to comply with the standards that were determined without our having any input into making those rules. It would be like playing a game but having no say in the rules—just being told what to do. That is surely not to our advantage and it is the reason why the farming community are adamant that they want to be in the EU, playing and leading.
CAP reform is a continuous process. This week, the European Parliament voted on a proposal that, although it has some good parts, is in many respects extremely retrograde, not least re-coupling payments to production rather than to added value through environmental gains and so on. That links back to the old problem, albeit not on the same scale, of wine lakes and butter mountains, and it is wrong headed. None the less, I believe that our farmers want us to be in there, at the front, arguing loudly as a progressive member of the EU. My one concern in all this is that Government’s overall approach in the past couple of years of shaking a big stick on every possible occasion, and their present position that we will carry a bit of a threat here just in case we need to use it, have an impact not only on the tone of the negotiations but on their outcome. Having one of the leading Eurosceptics in the Cabinet taking those negotiations forward may be a disaster.
Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Alison Seabeck). I do not agree with her views, but that is probably why we are on opposite sides of the Chamber.
I suspect that it will surprise a few Members in this place when I say that I love Europe. I love the languages, the culture, the history, the open roads, the mountains, the rivers, the wine—
Richard Drax
Indeed, the women. However, I do not want to be ruled by Europe.
Why do we not admire the diversity of this great European space rather like a family? I am a father of four. I am not offering any advice on how to be a father —it would be far beyond me to do that. However, I have noted from my experience and that of my friends that if you let your children go, they come home, but if you cudgel them over the head and say, “Do this job, do that course,” they say, “Goodbye,” and you lose them. Why can we not do the same with Europe? One rule simply does not fit all. The evidence is there to be seen.
I warmly congratulate the Prime Minister on his speech. It is perhaps rare for me to say that, but I really do. He is a man of courage, standing up for our country, which is what we are all here to do. My battle cry during the election campaign was, “We want our country back.” That is not being a pessimistic, down-at-heart little Englander. It is being optimistic. It is looking to the future and doing what is best for our country. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said so eloquently, this debate is about democracy and freedom. I am delighted that we are at last talking about this bogeyman—this elephant in the room—that nobody has discussed until now. The fact that the Prime Minister has at last said that we will have a referendum in 2017 allows us to speak our minds.
From the Opposition Benches we heard words such as “uncertainty” and “clarity”, but we do not have certainty and clarity now, because Europe as we know it is dead; it is finished. I am sure all hon. Members are familiar with the “Dead Parrot” sketch from Monty Python. As it stands and as it is being progressed, the parrot—Europe—is dead. It is finished. For 17 years the doctor—the accountant—has injected all this medicine into the poor EU parrot: “Wake up, wake up!” Yet there it lies saying, “No. I am a corrupt dead parrot; I am a finished parrot.” The evidence is there to see. Opposition Members are shaking their heads—yes, the nightmare Member for South Dorset is standing up for his country. I am proud to be in the Chamber and to speak in this way, and I have 46 seconds left to speak up for my constituents and my country—our country.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham said, this place has lost so much power. We were put here to stand up for our constituents and they say that they are worried about the way Europe is going. It is time to look at the issue and at whether we can renegotiate the powers. Again, we are asked, “What powers?” I say all powers—repatriate the lot so that this House becomes a sovereign Parliament once again and all hon. Members do the job that we were sent here to do.