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Financial Management

I apologise for not being able to be here for the first part of this debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, although I was here for the whole of the first debate. I have had the misfortune to debate this nonsense for the past 12 years, often in Standing Committees and sometimes in the Chamber. I sound almost like a broken gramophone record, but I wish to repeat some sensible thoughts in the hope that they will have some impact on my hon. Friend the Minister. There is a simple way to eliminate the fraud that is taking place, which is to change the whole European Union budget system into a new mode of operation. I add that although both Eurosceptics and Euro-enthusiasts keep talking about ““Europe””, the organisation is not Europe; it is the European Union. Europe is a continent that includes a lot of countries that are not in the EU, and the EU is a political construct imposed upon some of those countries. I therefore speak of the EU, not Europe. I love Europe and go there on my holidays every year, and various of its countries are absolutely wonderful. To overcome the problem, we must completely reform the budget. It currently redistributes revenue and income across the EU in a way that is sometimes rather arbitrary. Some countries pay more than they should and some receive more than they should. A way to overcome that would be to have a budget allocated by a simple fiscal transfer system that gave to those who were poor and took from those who were rich, so that everything was proportionate to the prosperity of the member state. That is if one wants to have such a budget at all—there may be a case for not having one, but that is another debate. If we are to have one, the way to make it fair and acceptable to everybody is to ensure that everybody receives according to their needs and gives according to their ability. There would then also be a transfer of power, from the EU bureaucrats who decide where the money will be allocated to the member states. Devolving more power back to member states would be sensible and agreeable. If fraud then occurred within those member states, that would be their problem. In Britain, we would no doubt spend the money sensibly and avoid the problem of having lots of apparently generous donations from the EU to local projects with the EU logo all over them when we are massive net contributors and only part of our money is being handed back. Britain suffers more from that than most countries. As a wealthy country we would be a net contributor under the system that I am proposing, but we would not be a net contributor with France, Denmark and even Ireland being net recipients. Like us, they would be net contributors. The cumulative figure for net contributions by Britain to the EU since we joined is £125 billion. The sums will rise substantially by 2013 because of the poor deal negotiated by Tony Blair during the British presidency. Of course, with the devaluation and depreciation of the currency, we pay substantially more each year. If contributions were a proportion of our national income rather than effectively geared to the euro, we would pay less. A system whereby there was a budget for pooled contributions from member states, where poor countries received and rich ones gave an amount proportionate to their living standards, would be a fair system that would eliminate the problem of fraud. We would not have the massive confusion and complexity of these budget reports. Decisions about where money was spent would not be made by bureaucrats in Brussels, but by democratically elected Governments in member states.