Steven Baker: ...paper 300, which I recommend to hon. Members-that considers the future of public debts, the prospects and implications. In my hand, I have a set of graphs that show the public debt for western European nations, plus Japan and the United States, disappearing exponentially. Hundreds of per cent. of GDP are owed by the nations of the western world, including Europe and Japan. The situation is...
Steven Baker: It is a huge privilege and tremendous pleasure to rise to speak in support of the Government in relation to the European Union. My only regret is that my Whip is not here to see the day. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), who have seen this farce go on for year after sorry year with these accounts failing to...
Steven Baker: ...we get bogged down either in procedural matters or, matters that verge on the nationalistic, but this evening he has transcended that old territory and talked about what is good for the UK and Europe in broader terms. I shall attempt to add to his remarks. If we wish to say something about what is going on in Europe today, we must talk about the broader sweep of political economy, and I...
Steven Baker: I am most grateful for that. We have talked about political economy, and great matters are at stake. It seems to me that there have always been two visions for Europe: a classical liberal vision and a vision of a so-called social Europe—an interventionist Europe. A classical liberal Europe would enable free movement of people, services and goods, all of which are to be applauded because we...
Steven Baker: I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for that, but the question is not whether we should help our friends in Europe, but how we should do so. Everybody here is interested in securing the maximum of human flourishing right across Europe—I do not doubt that—but the question is how to do that. Should it be done through the omnipotence of the state or through free trade, free markets and...
Steven Baker: ...afternoon. I know that you, Mr Speaker, have taken an extremely close interest in the issue, including through extensive correspondence, as the hall falls within your constituency. The Minister for Europe, my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), being a resident of Princes Risborough, has taken a very close interest also, so my sense this evening, given that it turns...
Steven Baker: ...seven files of objections and evidence against HS2, which will cut a deep scar through the middle of the area of outstanding natural beauty in which her constituency sits. The Minister for Europe, my right hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), and the Attorney-General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), were present earlier, and I...
Steven Baker: Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is time for this country to lead Europe into the hope and potential of a new post-bureaucratic age?
Steven Baker: ...under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) on securing this debate. I confess that I was for a long time a great fan of the European Union. I was very pro-Europe and internationalist, as indeed I still am, but the Lisbon treaty caused me to look closely at the nature of the European Union. I do not have to find my...
Steven Baker: May I draw my right hon. Friend’s attention to the initiative for a free and prosperous Europe which was launched yesterday with the support of think-tanks and non-governmental organisations across the continent? In a nutshell, it asked the EU to stop centralising power, and instead to build prosperity on liberty and responsibility. There is an appetite throughout Europe for the kind of...
Steven Baker: ...heart-rendingly long, if it is undertaken at all. It is therefore with a sense of grinding determination that I bring before the House the issue of licensing individuals to ride motorcycles under European Union legislation. As my hon. Friend the Minister knows, since the coalition came to power this is not the first battle that bikers have fought against the EU and its intervention in...
Steven Baker: Without wishing to astonish my right hon. Friend the Minister, it will be my pleasure to support the Government on this European matter, for all the reasons that he has set out. I am very grateful to find myself in the company of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). However, I want to place on the record my profound misgivings about the huge centralisation of...
Steven Baker: ...who sit on the Front Bench than he is, and I will return for the second if not the third time to a speech made by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister in Prague in 2007, when he said of the European Union: “It is the last gasp of an outdated ideology, a philosophy that has no place in our new world of freedom, a world which demands that we fight this bureaucratic over-reach and lead...
Steven Baker: .... Although Wycombe has an ethnic minority population of around one fifth, 80% of the school’s pupils are from minorities and the school now receives increasing numbers of students from eastern Europe. Crucially, about three quarters of the students do not speak English as their first language. That is the context for Cressex school, and that is the challenge to which it must rise.
Steven Baker: ...is serendipitous, with the Prime Minister explaining that the warning lights are flashing on the dashboard of the world economy, and it looks like quantitative easing is going to be stepped up in Europe and Japan, just as it is being ramped out in America—and, of course, it has stopped in the UK. If anything, we are not at the end of a great experiment in monetary policy; we are at some...
Steven Baker: ...-closer union and a single nation state. This is a very happy day indeed. There are many subjects I care about extremely deeply, but the one thing that got me into politics was the treatment of the European Union constitution and, in due course, the Lisbon treaty. I am a sinner who has repented. I confess to the House that for many years I annoyed my wife most sincerely by being thoroughly...
Steven Baker: .... We are delighted that it has come forward and we look forward to its progress. In due course the people will decide. On the one hand they have the choice of radicalism—political union across Europe. That is the radical choice. The moderate, conservative choice is trade and co-operation among friendly nation states. People in the end will choose either for the European Union, or for Britain.
Steven Baker: My right hon. Friend is right, and it is not for us to choose the destiny of the other peoples of Europe. We might offer them our advice in different ways, but since they now have the euro as a currency they had better make the best of it—although, again, I do not want to be drawn too far off into ideas about money and banking. We are in a fix. I agree with my right hon. Friend that since...
Steven Baker: ...ensure that they are appropriately restrained in the usual way through normal purdah rules, or as close to them as we can get. The matter may seem very technical, but the crucial point is that the European Union is positively anti-democratic. That can be seen in the Lisbon treaty, and some Opposition Members have complained about it in relation to Greece. One can see why the European Union...
Steven Baker: ...heavily in the referendum campaign, it would greatly assist the campaign to leave, particularly if some of the Commissioners came over on speaking tours and explained their plans for a federal Europe. Notwithstanding that, it is a matter of concern that the EU institutions might end up being the only unregulated parties in the course of the campaign. I am therefore keen to hear the...