Intergovernmental Conference

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 5:16 pm on 21 March 1996.

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Photo of Robin Cook Robin Cook , Livingston 5:16, 21 March 1996

No.

If the authors of the White Paper had been able to lift their eyes above the Government's obsession with deregulation, they could have offered a positive response to initiatives in Europe to stimulate employment. They could have told us what the Government would do about dropping their opposition to the sale of Union bonds to finance major transport projects throughout Europe. They could have told us that they will not oppose President Santer's proposal to transfer surplus funds from the agricultural budget to spending on industry and on support for small and medium-sized enterprises—a proposal that will definitely be on the table in Turin. Or they could have told us how they reconcile the convergence criteria with the urgent need to create more employment in Europe.

I pick up the point made in an intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Mr. Smith). The gaping hole in the White Paper is the absence of any discussion of the single currency. Paragraph 17 does say that the single currency is a "notable omission" from the IGC. It is certainly a notable omission from the White Paper. I can conceive of no other Government in Europe who would present to their Parliament a White Paper on Europe without a discussion on where they stood on the single currency.

The Foreign Secretary may be unaware of it, but a debate is raging on the continent about the link between the convergence criteria and employment levels. An election is being fought in Baden-Wurttemberg on that issue. The result may well prompt new thinking, even in the German Government, on the convergence criteria.

I find it negligent of the Government, at this crucial moment in the debate, to miss the opportunity of saying what they believe to be the way out of the problems created by the convergence criteria. Of course, I realise the problem for them in doing so. Whatever reservations they may have about the single currency, they signed up in full to the convergence criteria at Maastricht.

In the light of all that has happened since to the economies of Europe, was it right to adopt convergence criteria that have obliged many of the economies of Europe to deflate at the same time as one another? Is not the lesson of the past three years that any progress to a common currency in Europe can be stable and secure only if it is based on convergence to common economic performance of output, jobs, investment and unit costs—precisely the tests of convergence for which we have argued for three years? Judged by that standard, the White Paper's massive failure is its failure to propose a single European measure to stimulate investment, boost skills, develop technology or create jobs.

I know that the Foreign Secretary could not do anything so positive, because to do so he would need to appear enthusiastic about Europe. The Foreign Secretary's dilemma, which will not have been lost on him, is that he is seeking to produce a negotiating strategy for an international conference that would be acceptable to a nationalist party.

While the rest of the world builds regional alliances and is coming to terms with a global economy in which we are more interdependent than we are independent, the Conservative party is living on a planet of its own, demanding repatriation of even those powers that we have shared with our own regional alliance.