Mr Robert Walter (North Dorset, Conservative)

I am pleased to deliver my maiden speech in this important debate on the future of our country and our continent. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) and the hon. Members for Harlow (Mr. Rammell) and for Liverpool, Riverside (Ms Ellman) on their maiden speeches. They delivered excellent speeches and I am sure that we shall hear more from them.

I should like to pay tribute to my predecessor, Sir Nicholas Baker. In view of the hurly-burly of the general election, many hon. Members may be forgiven for being unaware of the sad death of Nicholas Baker one week before the election. Although Parliament had been dissolved, I understand that, technically, he died while in the service of the House. Nicholas was elected in 1979 and was a most assiduous and diligent constituency representative. I got to know him 15 years ago, when he was the parliamentary vice-chairman of the Conservative party's foreign affairs forum. I was at that time deputy chairman of that organisation. He maintained a close interest in the forum and in foreign affairs in general right up until his death. In fact, just two months before his death, he published a pamphlet on Britain and the third world, under the auspices of the Conservative political centre.

Nicholas served in government as a parliamentary private secretary, as a well-respected whip and latterly, before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, as Immigration Minister at the Home Office. Sadly, his multiple sclerosis was overtaken by the onset of cancer and, in the end, his passing was a blessed relief both to Nicholas—an intensely religious man—and to his devoted wife Carol. I am sure that the whole House sends Lady Baker and Nicholas's two children the warmest good wishes for the future.

Nicholas Baker bequeathed me a constituency that must rank among the most beautiful in the country. The little Hovis delivery boy wheeling his bicycle up the hill on our television screens has a misleading Yorkshire accent, for that is Gold hill in Shaftesbury, the ancient Saxon market town in the northern part of my constituency of North Dorset. Although my constituency has traditionally based its economy on agriculture, which is still important today—the market at Sturminster Newton is the largest calf market in England—North Dorset's economic base is as modern as any in Britain.

Our largest private sector employer, Cobham plc at Wimborne Minster, is a major aerospace contractor. It is currently undertaking a significant part of the rebuilding of the Royal Air Force's Nimrod fleet and constructing the Phoenix battlefield reconnaissance aircraft for the Army; and it is a world leader in fuelling and refuelling systems for military aircraft. At Blandford Forum, my largest public sector employer is the rapidly expanding headquarters of the Royal Corps of Signals—the Army's computer department, at the leading edge of modern warfare.

It is the prosperity and security of Britain's engagement with our European partners that create the economic framework for all that activity. As the Prime Minister goes to Amsterdam, he asks us in this debate to take note of many and various documents; but the message he must take from the House is that Britain is a proud and independent nation which has much to contribute and much to gain from the European Union, but that it totally rejects the concept of a centralised European super-state, a European Government or a European nation. The sort of federal solution that we created in Canada, Australia and India would be neither relevant nor beneficial in modern Europe.

Lest I am accused of shifting from long-held and positive views on Britain's role in Europe and adopting a Euro-sceptic stance, let me tell the House that I believe that there is more that unites Conservative Members on the basic principles of our European engagement than might occasionally divide us on the detail. I cannot say as much of those on the Government Benches, for, as the Prime Minister goes to Amsterdam, I fear that the prosperity of my constituency, of the people of this country and of the whole of Europe is threatened.

Our prosperity is threatened by a resurgence of dirigiste, old socialist ideology in the form of the Government's commitment to the social chapter, the proposed Amsterdam employment chapter and the whole concept of adopting the European social model in our employment practices—labour market practices which have led to uncompetitiveness in continental Europe, to ever-increasing unemployment and to a 35 per cent. increase in business failures in Germany in the past two years. One cannot wonder that inward investment in Britain has grown and unemployment fallen when one compares, for example, employers' non-wage costs: for every £100 of direct wage costs in Germany, the employer has to add £31 of social costs; in Britain that additional sum averages less than half that figure, at only £15.

Speaking to fellow socialists in Sweden last week, the Prime Minister said: The role of Government is not old style state intervention or heaping regulations on employers. The new way is about education, skills, new technology, developing small businesses and equipping people to survive in a completely different set of economic conditions. Many Conservative Members could find comfort in that statement, but we immediately part company with the Government on the draft Amsterdam treaty, which proposes to incorporate protocol 14 of the Maastricht treaty—the social chapter—in the treaty itself, thereby ending Britain's opt-out. That move is supported by the Government and was an election pledge, repeated today by the Foreign Secretary. We cannot envisage what employment benefit would accrue to the United Kingdom from the new employment chapter. It would create an employment committee in Brussels to consult the social partners; and it would create incentive measures, funded by the Community budget, to provide financial assistance to the unemployed—it all sounds to me like old Europe, old Labour.

The basis of Britain's success in Europe is the very competitive nature of the single market. A rigid framework of employment laws imposed right across the continent would destroy that competitive spirit, both here and elsewhere. If the Prime Minister truly believes what he said in Malmo, he can agree to neither the social chapter nor the employment chapter.

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