EU Membership: Economic Benefits

Sheryll Murray Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Gethins]

I will make some progress.

Scotland’s renewables industry is thriving, with no thanks to this Government, but a huge amount of thanks to our co-operation with our European partners, which has created a huge amount of benefit.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

rose—

[Stephen Gethins]

I will happily take an intervention from a Conservative Member—they are all helpfully badged.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Can I help a little? I say to people who are going to speak very shortly and want to remain on the list: if you intervene, I am going to drop you down the list. Make your minds up—you cannot have it both ways at the expense of everybody else.

[Mrs Murray]

I will not intervene, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Okay, thank you.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

I want to make a short contribution about the effect of the EU on the economic viability of our fishing industry and to congratulate the fishermen who have taken part in the flotilla on the Thames today to make sure we hear where they stand.

Our fishing industry is a ghost of its former self. Before we joined the EU, we had a successful, viable fishing industry all around the coast. I remember seeing fishing boats in south-east Cornwall moored three or four deep along the quayside. I do not see that today. Although fishing is no longer the largest employer in Looe—tourism is—people come to traditional fishing towns and expect to see fish being landed. A highlight they often mention is tasting fish and chips from one of the award-winning restaurants or buying fresh catch from fishmongers such as Pengelly’s in Looe. Where would tourism be without our fishing?

In 1971, just before we joined the EU, we had a thriving fishing industry bringing home millions of tonnes of fish and directly employing over 21,000 people. Last year, it caught about 600,000 tonnes and employed under 12,000 fishermen. According to a report co-ordinated by the New Economics Foundation, there was a 12% fall in the number of fishermen between 2003 and 2013. My late husband, Neil, was one such fisherman. He was forced to fish alone on his boat as a result of economic pressures arising from reducing quotas while still trying to meet the costs of increasing insurance, harbour dues and landing charges, not to mention repair costs and gear replacement.

The report attributes the decreasing employment to a decline in the number of vessels owing to the forced scrapping imposed by successive Governments to meet the artificial targets from the European Commission and to vessels investing in new technology—the latter might be true for larger vessels, operating with several deckhands, but is certainly not the case for small fishermen like Neil. It was a simple economic decision taken because he often could not land and sell the fish that swam into his net. The report also says that the trend of declining numbers of fishing vessels and fishermen is likely to continue.

The report does not mention the declining fish quotas that the EU sets each year. Haddock is just one example. The UK gets 10% of the total allowable catch, while France gets 70%, and the same applies to many other species in many other areas. Would hon. Members go into a bank alongside a French person, each of them with a bundle of notes to the value of £70, and throw £60 into the wastepaper bin, while the French person invests it all? That is effectively what fishermen in Looe are being forced to do today because of the quota share-out agreed by the EU in 1983 known as “relative stability”.

[Bob Stewart]

Everyone in the House knows the sad story of my hon. Friend’s husband. How much increased capacity would the fishermen of Looe get were we to leave the EU?

[Mrs Murray]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I will come to it in a moment.

I will not get into arguments with those who want to remain, further sacrifice this great industry and abandon the economic wellbeing of our coastal fishing towns, which would be disproportionately affected. I cannot say that Neil died as a result of the common fisheries policy, but I can say that it contributed to the economic pressure he felt when deciding to fish alone. We talked about it and decided that it was better that he work alone in less rough water than work in storms to provide for two families.

I say we throw our fishermen a lifeline. Our Fisheries Minister has been to Brussels and seen for himself how little he can deliver through horse trading in the Council of Ministers over proposals put forward by the unelected European Commission. I say, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), that if we vote to leave, the Minister could make the decisions that apply to fishermen in the UK’s 200-mile median line limit.

As someone who has lived and breathed the UK fishing industry for 30 years, I say there are no economic benefits to UK fishermen from EU membership. About 92% of UK fishermen are calling for the UK to leave. I say we throw them a lifeline, vote to leave and take back control of our 200-mile line—80% of the total EU pond. We would not necessarily have to say to member states, “You can’t come and fish in our waters”, but it would be on our terms, not those arising from horse trading among 28 states sitting around the EU table debating proposals from the unelected, appointed, bureaucratic European Commission in Brussels.

--- Later in debate ---

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Preston (Mr Hendrick), and I agreed with most of what he said.

When we started this process, if I had been split down the middle I was 49% for leave, and 51% for remain. Today, I am 127% in favour of remain—don’t worry, I haven’t got my figures from the leave campaign. Two reasons have got me to that position. The first is just looking at some of the facts. I am a south-west Member of Parliament. In the first quarter of this year, we exported goods worth £9.7 billion from the south-west to the EU. Some 64% of all exports from the south-west go to the EU. In my constituency, 5,249 jobs are reckoned to be dependent on trade with and membership of the EU—one of the highest, if not the highest, in the county. On a conservative estimate, 45,000 jobs will be at risk in my region were we to leave.

The average take-home pay in North Dorset, leafy and beautiful as it is, is £16,500. It would be a dereliction of my duty to vote in any way other than to protect and to preserve that. I am not one of those ideologues who wishes to sacrifice, on some altar of so-called sovereignty, the livelihoods of my constituents. Sovereignty as an abstract does not pay the mortgage, does not pay the rent, does not pay the bills and does not put food on the table. I would not be able to look my constituents in the eye and say, “But don’t worry, we’re free and all the rest of it, so we can starve in our own independence.” What a marvellous, marvellous legacy to leave!

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

I relied on fisheries to pay my mortgage and put food on my table for my children. Will my hon. Friend look me in the eye and say he is happy to sacrifice an industry for the EU ideal?

[Simon Hoare]

In the first instance I would not say that our fishing sector has been sacrificed, but I have to think about agriculture. We are all absolutely right to look at this issue from the perspective of our constituents. Agriculture, in particular the dairy sector in North Dorset, would not be able to survive without the continued, guaranteed, politically colour-blind support the EU provides to British agriculture.

There are two specific things I would like to say. The first relates to the absolute lack of clarity and united vision from the leave campaign: Albania, Norway, the World Trade Organisation, something like the North American Free Trade Agreement, we can stand alone, imperial preference, let’s bring back the corn laws—whatever it might happen to be! Somehow or other we have an arrogance, which I think was probably the death of a lot of our industries some years ago, that we have a right to sell to the rest of the world, in particular Europe, on terms to our satisfaction, and that they should feel jolly grateful that they are allowed to buy our product. The global marketplace does not work like that anymore. We have to earn our living.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)]

I feel a bit of a lone voice because I am going to speak in favour of voting to leave next week. It is very important for me to do so because I believe that Labour Members’ comments about a Tory Brexit betray the fact that they are not listening to the British people. The vote next week will quite clearly be very close, but at least half of the British people have had enough of the EU and want to leave. By calling this a Tory Brexit, Labour Members are just not listening to the many millions of British people who have genuine concerns about our current relationship with the EU.

This debate, however, is about the supposed economic benefits of our membership of the EU. I will address one very specific point in that regard. According to the House of Commons Library, in 2016 Britain is forecast to give £20.5 billion gross and £11.2 billion net to the EU, so we will be getting back some money from that £20 billion. No one can deny that that will be a large sum of money, and there are various opinions about how it could be spent, but only if we leave will we get to decide how it can be apportioned.

Part of the money we get back from the EU comes in the form of economic development aid. The constituency in Cornwall that I have the privilege of representing is one of the areas in England that benefits the most from that aid. Over the past decades, Cornwall has received hundreds of millions of pounds in regional growth funding from the EU.

[Mrs Sheryll Murray]

I believe Cornwall has been getting around £65 million a year since 2001.

[Steve Double]

I thank my hon. Friend for that—I was about to make the point that over the past 10 years or so Cornwall has received around £600 million in economic development aid. But we need to remember that that is not EU money. The EU does not actually have any money—there is no magic EU money tree. It is our money, which we give to the EU. It converts it into euros, then converts that into sterling to give back to us, except that it gives it back with a whole load of strings, bureaucracy and red tape attached about how we can spend it.

The fact is that that money is not working. It was meant to create 10,000 new jobs in Cornwall. In fact, in the past 10 years or so, it has created around a third of that number. That Cornwall has now qualified for a third round of EU funding demonstrates that the funding is failing. It is not lifting the Cornish economy as intended. It is not raising wages or the standard of living in the way it was designed to.