Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side.
Christopher Booker, of the Sunday Telegraph, proposed the motion by taking a blast at his own side. The present Euro crisis had inspired Tory Eurosceptics to talk of “a re-negotiation” and a “repatriation of powers”. This, he said, utterly misconstrued the EU project and its “sacred aim” to strip nations of their rights and “never to give back a power once ceded.” He called the EU “a 40-year-long slow-motion coup d’etat” and “a crazy make-believe project” whose hubristic ambitions were now facing nemesis. He heaped scorn on Herman van Rompuy for claiming that the best remedy for the Euro was “more Europe”. Booker said the disintegration of the EU is “as certain as anything in history”.
Phillip Souta, director of Business for New Europe, hung his case on two pegs. The benefits of Europe are vast, he said. And the alternative is risible. During the 1990s, a debate between “deepening” or “widening” the EU had been fought and won by the wideners. So the prospect of a United States of Europe had vanished. Those who feared that spectre, like Christopher Booker, had fallen prey to “the Franco-German federalist conspiracy theory”.
Britain will have more influence inside Europe, he suggested. We can liberalise the EU from within and wield extra clout abroad. Rejecting the idea of a UK referendum he called it “damaging for the country”. Heckled at this point by the largely Eurosceptic audience, he insisted that “nobody is forcing us to be members of the EU”. The heckling increased. “UKIP at the last election,” he reminded us, “polled just 3.1 per cent.” He argued that an EU break-up would send us back to the protectionism and competitive devaluations of the 1930s. As for the notion that the UK might hold Europe to ransom and demand a new settlement, “that is not British,” said Mr Souta. We must stay in the EU and make it work for us. We aren’t Norway or Switzerland.
Thriller-writer Frederick Forsyth saluted the “laudable” formation of the European project in the 1950s. But its founders made two blunders. First, they assumed that wars were caused by nationalism and that if nations became extinct war would follow. However wars, argued Forsyth, are caused by tyrants not by nations. Secondly, the founders of Europe were too ready to circumvent the principle of consent. The EU attitude to referendums is to “keep sending them back until the people get the right answer.” The device of Qualified Majority Voting had further eroded our freedoms. “No one has less influence than a negotiator who will be outvoted”. He dismissed the arguments of his opponents as “a torrent of irrelevances” and pointed out that we now live under two “mutually incompatible” constitutions in Brussels and in London. “One must be supreme.”
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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