Orders of the Day — European Union

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:45 pm on 21 June 1995.

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Photo of Hon. Douglas Hurd Hon. Douglas Hurd , Witney 3:45, 21 June 1995

No, I have to get on.

I say that we have only the beginnings of budget discipline because we are not yet satisfied, but, when my right hon. Friend discusses in Cannes next week how much money the European Union should spend on helping the countries of eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, the whole discussion will be within spending guidelines laid down under his chairmanship in Edinburgh in 1992. There will be plenty of argument—there always is plenty of argument about these matters—but it will be within the financial bounds already set, something that would have been inconceivable in the early years.

The enlargement of the Union, which was regarded as heretical in the old days, has happened and will happen again. The argument set out in Bruges by Lady Thatcher about including the east is now orthodox. It is also now orthodox to say that the European Union should do less and do it better. That is a phrase of the present President of the Commission, Mr. Santer. It is inconceivable that his predecessor, Jacques Delors, in his heyday would have used such a phrase.

No one in a position of authority now talks about the "United States of Europe". Indeed, the federal Chancellor of Germany, who used to use the phrase, has explicitly renounced it, saying that we are not aiming for a United States of Europe. The European Commission and the European Parliament have recently set out their ideas of how the intergovernmental conference should end up, and there are many things in their papers that we would contest.

It is notable that in neither the Commission's paper nor in the Parliament's paper is it suggested that further matters should be transferred from the competence of nations to the competence of the European Union. That, in itself, shows the change of mindset in recent years. As the chairman of the reflections group told me in Madrid this week, the dreaded F-word is nowhere to be seen.