Lloyd Evans
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Richard Laming, Chair of the Federal Union, (and a late stand-in for Charles Kennedy), said the best case for the EU was economic. Free trade rules had abolished national protectionism. The single market, he claimed, has “created a 50 per cent increase in the UK’s growth rate of trade.” Because our currency and our armed forces are no longer the strengths they were “we have to be members of the EU if we want to defend our liberal values”. He pointed to the beneficial effects of co-operation on policing. Thanks to the European arrest warrant, “bank robbers can longer flee to the south of Spain”. Europe meanwhile is reforming “and improving”, he said. Farming takes up far less of the budget than it once did, and more cash is being devoted to “measures that will get the economy moving again”.
Daniel Hannan, MEP for South-East England, began with a question. Had Britain stayed out of Europe would any serious party now be pressing for us to join? He compared us to Switzerland, with twice our per capita income, which ‘sells twice as much as we do to the EU’. Dismissing the Eurocrats as “benign cranks”, he blamed our continued membership on institutional sloth. “The inertia that builds around an established dispensation.” Consultancies and charities, whose incomes are guaranteed by the EU, share much of the blame. For their employees “it’s not about freedom and self-determination but about mortgages and school fees”. Our accession to Europe was “an ethical tragedy” which had seemed attractive in the 1970s when our economy was failing while western Europe boomed. But Europe’s economy, which peaked just when we joined the common market, once contributed 36 per cent to the world’s GDP. That figure now stands at 26 per cent and is expected to fall to 15 per cent by 2020.”We have shackled ourselves to a corpse,” he said. He urged us not to “throw away, without a shot being fired in anger, the freedoms our forefathers fought and died for.” He reminded us that during his 8-minute speech the UK had handed over another £180,000 to Europe.
Denis MacShane, a former Europe minister, attacked the notion that Britain might survive ‘like Switzerland’, by informing us that Switzerland forks out CHF 1 billion a year for access to European markets. Without the EU, foreign governments would slap tariffs on our exports, as George Bush had done with British steel and Scottish cashmere. He claimed that during the BSE crisis, when Australia and Hong Kong were rejecting British beef, a European ruling obliged member states to accept our meat.
He attacked the myth that MPs’ activities are dominated by European legislation. Just over 6 per cent of UK laws originate in Brussels, he said. “Nine and a half out of every ten statutes we pass are made in Britain.” “I know which way the vote will go,” he added to the broadly Euro-sceptic audience, “but I’m not sure the British want to be Swiss.”
Opponents of the motion were heavily defeated, although a fair chunk of the ‘undecideds’ swung towards the opposers during the debate.
For Against Undecided
Pre-vote: 414 77 95
End vote: 470 116 0
(total 586)
(Figures as recorded on the night)
For Against Undecided
Pre-vote: 314 77 87
End vote: 470 116 0
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