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European Affairs

I beg hon. Members’ pardon. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley is a great man who shows great courage and is prepared to put his strong beliefs about the EU before his own consideration for promotion. I applaud that greatly. My hon. Friend, myself and other Conservative Members—all very young people—are going to take the EU in a different direction. I was born on the day that Edward Heath signed the documents to take us into the Common Market— 24 January 1972. Of course, when we had the referendum on whether we should stay in the Common Market, I was only three years of age, so I could not vote. Many hon. Members were too young to participate in that referendum, but there will come a time—I am convinced of this more than I am of anything else—when my generation of Conservative Members of Parliament will start to address some of the fundamental flaws in our membership of the EU and will make it more appropriate to our generation. One of the problems and frustrations that we face is that we in Great Britain play by the Queensberry rules, we do what the EU tells us to do and we are compliant, unlike our partners in the EU who repeatedly break agreements and cheat. An example of that is the Irish. The Irish have recently given their dairy farmers £300 million in illegal subsidies. I thought that we were in something called a common market, whereby industries were meant to be treated in the same way across the whole EU. How is it feasible for the Irish to give £300 million to their dairy farmers? How on earth can Shropshire farmers compete against that and imports of cheese and other milk products, when the Irish are flagrantly going against the spirit of subsidies? I recently went to Romania. We are going to give £8 billion of taxpayers’ money to help the Romanians and Bulgarians with their agriculture, so that their systems become comparable with ours. That money is being sent to foreign countries. Our own dairy farmers in Shrewsbury —I hasten to say that I am chairman of the all-party dairy farmers group, of which there are now nearly 100 members—are going out of business day after day, while we prop up the Irish, the Romanians and the Bulgarians.