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Financial Management

My party takes an enlightened view of the European Union. I had an opportunity during the previous debate to touch on some of these themes, so I shall not rehearse them again at length. Liberal Democrats regard the EU as having a useful role to play in bringing nation states together to co-ordinate our response to the current economic crisis effectively. We emphatically think that the EU has a role to play in trying to mitigate the effects of climate change and prevent it from being as bad as it otherwise would be. Most people would accept that the EU and public opinion across Europe are further ahead in the debate than anywhere else in the world—certainly further ahead than in north America and Asia. The European Union, with Britain at the forefront, has a role to play in taking that agenda even further forward. The EU also has a key role to play in international diplomacy; we share the values of democracy, free speech and free markets, although free market economics have been challenged in the past few months. Probably the greatest foreign policy development and achievement in my adult lifetime has been the expansion of the European Union and the embracing by eastern European states that previously lived under oppression of freedom and those broad liberal values that we often take for granted in this country. I regret the paranoia that the Conservative party typically displays towards the European Union—the sense that everything that emerges from Europe must inherently be bad or a cause for suspicion. That paranoia persuaded the Conservative party to vote unnecessarily against the Government in the previous Division. However, I and my party recognise that just as politics in the United Kingdom is broken to some extent, politics and the financial and budgetary process in the European Union need to be dramatically overhauled. My party rightly recognises and welcomes some of the limited progress that has been made, but our bottom line is that that progress is not good enough. I echo the sentiments expressed in this debate by the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman about the terrible, wearying cycle of these debates; year after year we hear that the European Union has, yet again, not met the standards that we are entitled to expect it to meet on behalf of our constituents, who pay their taxes and contribute to the UK's financial contribution to the EU budget.