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European Council

I have given way to two Europhobes, and I think three would be too many. It is a real worry when one party, the governing party of our country, is so monolithic—without internal debate, internal division or much internal discussion. [Interruption.] I look forward to hearing the speech of the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) when he makes it. Then we have the fundamental problem that this Government and the ruling elites of the European Union are at one. Mr Sarkozy, Mrs Merkel, Mr Van Rompuy, Mr Barroso, Mr Rajoy, Mr Berlusconi and Mr Monti are all applying the 1930s austerity recession approach of making the poor pay and protecting the rich, which is the official policy of Her Majesty's Government. I do not understand why there is any debate or division at all because for the first time those the other major European Union capitals and the Brussels institutions are on the same wavelength as Her Majesty's Government. That is why there has to be some policy for growth, as people are pointing out again and again. Mrs Lagarde and Mr Soros have pointed that out and Mr Obama is seeking to achieve it. Government Members are correct to suggest that not only the European project but the entire western, democratic, liberal, rule-of-law, market economy project is under threat because of a generalised crisis based on inequality and the giving of too much power to money and too little power to people. The answer to that must be forms of solidarity. In 1942, at the height of the war, before we had won El Alamein or turned any corner, Winston Churchill sent a Cabinet memorandum to his colleagues saying, ““Hard as it may be to say at this time, I think we should start considering the possibility of a council of Europe for after the war. We need to move towards a united states of Europe where all may travel and trade freely. I think we should conduct studies about how to have economic unity.”” How extraordinary that at the height of the war—that was not the Zurich speech—Winston Churchill had that vision for what we have half-achieved, perhaps, in my lifetime and certainly in recent years. That is also why Mrs Thatcher, our then Prime Minister, after pushing through the Single European Act—the biggest transfer of sovereignty ever in British history—supported the arrival of Jacques Delors as President of the Commission. In 1984, our contribution to the EC budget was £656 million, but by 1990 she had increased it to £2.54 billion, quadrupling Britain's solidarity budget to the then European Community. When tasked about that in the House of Commons, she said that of course we should help our poor friends in Portugal and Greece and also implicitly in Ireland and Spain. She was absolutely right. That is why we set up the International Monetary Fund after the war—precisely to deal with imbalances, crises, sudden recessions and, yes, Government incompetences that produce the kind of problems that Greece and some other countries are facing. It is quite preposterous to say that Britain will renege on its obligations to the IMF. I was happy to vote with the Government on this in the last Division and I certainly hope that Opposition Front Benchers are not going to play the Eurosceptic card on the IMF question if the matter comes back to the House. Finally, what do we have today? We have the surreal sight of a British Prime Minister in Davos not enjoying himself on the slopes but lecturing other European leaders on what they should do. What example is he citing—£1 trillion-worth of debt, recession economics, mounting unemployment or mounting poverty? There are mounting concerns all over the world, as the Chinese told the Chancellor of the Exchequer when he was in Beijing recently, about whether Britain is serious about marginalising itself in Europe and not helping to support Europeans with problems through the IMF. If it is, China cannot be interested in Britain because it is not interested in an isolated, protectionist Britain. We are taking huge risks with our economy and our nation by promoting these new, protectionist, isolationist politics. It is bad enough that we have to live with 1930s, Treasury-driven economics, but it will be a disaster if Britain continues to have the reputation it has sadly earned internationally as a country that wants to turn its back on Europe and that seriously believes its future could lie only in competing with Belgium for exports to India. This is a turning point for our nation. We either break out of this isolationist, protectionist logjam and work in solidarity with the countries of Europe that are growing and creating jobs and that have much better public finances than we have, or we pretend, in our own little sinking ship, that everything is for the best and this is the best of all possible worlds.