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European Communities (Finance) Bill

My hon. Friend makes a good point. We are entitled to ask this question: when the then Prime Minister and the current Prime Minister pledged that the British rebate would be non-negotiable, in May 2005 and June 2005 respectively, were they simply being naive or was it worse than that? Did they genuinely believe that they could get through the process without conceding the British rebate, but fail to appreciate how incompetent they were at negotiation, or did they know all along that they would have to break that promise? So £7 billion of potential UK public spending, debt reduction or tax reduction—as some of my hon. Friends might prefer—has been lost. Much worse, however, is the fact that the baseline for future own resources decisions has been shifted downwards, and the cap on the cost to the UK of the surrender of the rebate comes off in 2013. The negotiating ratchet works inexorably against the interest of the United Kingdom. As the Government contemplate the fiscal and public service delivery challenges that face the UK in 2008, they might come to rue the day that they so casually threw away £1.9 billion a year and rising. When next we hear that this or that objective cannot be achieved because of a funding problem, the British people will remember what happened here tonight. To Parliament's shame, we have now become complicit in this sell-out of the UK interest. The hard-fought-for rebate—our principal bargaining tool for reform of the EU budget—is being whittled away before our very eyes, and Parliament watches, apparently paralysed, as the Government betray the British people. This shameful, one single-clause Bill sums up 10 years of this new Labour Government: wasted money, broken promises and incompetent delivery. I urge my hon. Friends to vote against the Third Reading of the Bill tonight.