EU: Recent Developments — Motion to Take Note

Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:05 pm on 16 February 2012.

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Photo of Lord Willoughby de Broke Lord Willoughby de Broke UKIP 4:05, 16 February 2012

I am sorry that the noble Lord takes it like that. The fact is that the German Finance Minister, Herr Schaeuble, is recommending more and more pain to be inflicted on Greece regardless of the fact that it is going to do the Greek population and Greece's economy no good at all. That is what austerity is leading to. That is why I used that expression. He is saying that more austerity will bring you free-austerity macht frei. I repeat that.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, asked, will it really be worse for the Greeks or any of the other countries afflicted by the euro to leave it? I agree that it is not going to be easy, but will it be any worse than the pain inflicted by 10, 15 or 20 years of austerity, low employment, no jobs and lower pensions? That cannot be a viable alternative in a democratic country.

Worse, almost, than the financial pain which the euro ideology is inflicting on Europe is the failure and erosion of democracy. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and even Italy are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the European Commission. When the European Commission says jump, all they can ask is, "How high?". I remind your Lordships of what happened to the Greek Prime Minister when he threatened to ask his countrymen whether they wanted to submit to the harsh criteria of the bailout fund. He was immediately given a sharp lesson in Euro democracy and told that, if he had the referendum, he would be out. In fact, he was out anyway, and there was, of course, no referendum. It is ironic that what scared the pants off the bureaucracy was the prospect of a democratic vote in Greece, the country that gave the world democracy.

I do not really understand why our Government are spending quite so much political capital and time supporting what is going on in Europe now. Our membership of the EU costs us £18 billion a year; EU regulations and red tape are costing our businesses fortunes every single year. We have lost control of our immigration policy; we have lost control of our energy policy; and the emissions directives have forced us into enormously expensive wind and energy policies which are putting many people in this country into fuel poverty. On the evidence so far, if the EU is the answer, we have been asking the wrong question.

However, I want to end on a more positive note. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, said in his opening speech that he supported the Commonwealth. We should stop being quite so Eurocentric and look, as he said, at our interests in the Commonwealth and beyond. After all, we have many ties with it, both legal and financial. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is not here, but I cannot resist reminding him of the words of Winston Churchill when he was challenged by De Gaulle. He said:

"If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea".

The political construct of the EU is yesterday's idea. The future lies with the growth economies of the Commonwealth, the USA, South America, China and the Pacific rim, not with the moribund, zero-growth EU.

I remind the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, whom I am pleased to see in his place, that the UN has 193 members. 166 of those are nation states that do not belong to the EU, yet they manage to trade perfectly well with each other and with members of the European Union without being stifled by the panoply of directives and regulations that emanate from the Commission.

To prosper in this world we do not need to belong to the EU club and its stifling rules. There is only one club in the world that we need to belong to-that is the world, and we are already a member.