People in glasshouses should not throw stones. The speeches that I have heard this evening from Conservative Members do not give me cause for any enthusiasm. Some of the opinions that they have expressed have not coincided with mine. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should do some missionary work among his right hon. and hon. Friends before starting on mine.

I do not know why Members of this place are still so sensitive. Is it because we are conscious of the fact that we are criticised by many for comprising one of the most ineffective legislatures in western Europe? Is it thought that the European Parliament might become more effective than the Westminster Parliament? I believe that in 20 years the European Parliament will be more important than the House of Commons.

I agree with the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs that our national goals can be achieved only in co-operation with others. I believe strongly that we must co-operate with people from other countries. We talk about controlling multinational companies, but how can one country on its own control the strength of the multinationals? It is only by co-operating with other countries that we can exercise that control. The Council of Ministers missed a good opportunity to exercise that control when it voted down the proposals that were advanced by the Parliament and the Committee of which I was a member for five years. Had that legislation been voted through it would have meant that workers in multinational companies could have had much more information about the way their companies operated.

So it is conceivable that some of the aims which we support can be achieved. In many areas of foreign policy, for example, I found that the European Community was much more sensible in its approach than I have found the House of Commons to be in the two years that I have been here.

Earlier this year, the states of the Community raised the level of their subscriptions to the club. What I have said already does not mean that I am uncritical of the European Community. Indeed, I am extremely critical. It has been a goal of the European Community for some time to control agricultural spending, but somehow, because of the actions of the Council of Ministers, I believe, that goal has not been achieved. As regards the budget compromise, which has been much praised by Government Members, some four weeks after the subscriptions were raised we got an inkling that there was not enough to pay for the rapidly rising costs of the organisation.

If the bleak picture drawn by the budget Commissioner in Brussels recently is correct, spending cuts are obviously on the way. These will have to come from the social and regional funds, youth training, job creation or industrial research programmes. We benefit greatly from the social and regional funds of the European Community and it is a great pity that those funds are such a small percentage of the total budget spending of the Community. If we could control agricultural spending, obviously this country in particular would benefit.

The figures also show that the much-hailed system of budgetary discipline agreed by EEC Finance Ministers in 1984 to control the growth of agricultural spending and keep it below the overall growth in EEC revenue is all too easy to breach. The idea is constantly bandied about that the EEC and its institutions are hopelessly spendthrift, restrained only by the valiant efforts of the Secretary of State and his colleagues. But the Community is made up of 12 member states and its budget is directly the result of their decisions. The Commission is only the bureaucracy which tries to put the policies into effect, and occasionally suggests policies.

The European Parliament as it is at present is only a sop to democratic control. It can add only a small amount of extra spending at the margins. It cannot do anything about the vast bulk of the budget, and above all agricultural spending. The budget crisis which is likely to land on us yet again is, I suggest, the result of years of fudged compromises in the Council of Ministers and of a failure to co-ordinate the policies of the different national Departments involved.

The Financial Times, in a very good article on "The crisis that never went away" a few weeks ago, said: The Council perpetuates the legal myth that it is somehow united and indivisible. In reality, it is a machine of ill-fitting cogs often working in competition rather than co-ordination. The unhappy consequence is the annual budget, invariably negotiated through the night by junior treasury Ministers who have been known to make wild and foolish compromises in the early hours in the faint hope of getting to bed.