European Union (Accessions) Bill

I will support the Bill, but want to take the opportunity to sound a note of caution. I first visited Romania in 1982 and have visited it a number of times since. On that first visit, we were shown many villages—the Potemkin villages—that were special and of a much better standard than others throughout Romania. Foreigners were shown a restricted amount of the country. We were only meant to see the nice bits and not the problems that it faced. Nevertheless, I could still see the terrible fear in people’s eyes as they lived under a tyrannical regime under communism. The problem with Ceausescu is that he was propped up by many western Governments. In fact, the Labour Government, under James Callaghan, insisted that Her Majesty the Queen put him up in Buckingham palace and gave him one of the highest orders. It was not just the Labour Government who were responsible, however. Others in the western world also ostentatiously fêted Ceausescu. When I visited Romania after the fall of communism in 1990, I was amazed at the differences. I walked along the boulevard of the Victory of Socialism, which is twice as long and twice as wide as the Champs-Elysées. It was built by Nicolae Ceausescu as a road to his palace, which is the biggest building in the world next to the Pentagon. Despite that ostentatiousness and the tremendous luxury in which he lived, the people of Romania were extremely poor. I saw people queuing for basic foodstuffs. The electricity supply was intermittent and, in many flats, only one electric light bulb could be turned on at various times of the day. It was George Orwell’s ““1984””. It was a terrible society. Although I saw how ghastly that society was and although I think that Mr. Ceausescu was an appalling man, I am concerned about the way in which he and his wife were executed on 24 December 1989. No matter how bad other evil brutes are, such as Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, they are given a proper hearing and trial, but President Ceausescu was tried with his wife, Elena, in a kangaroo court. He was sentenced to death almost immediately and did not have the right to a proper lawyer. The way in which the Romanian authorities carried out his trial and execution was wrong. I hope that they have learned their lesson from that. I am pleased that Romania can join the nations of a new modern Europe, but there are problems. Communism has taken its toll. It had a destructive impact, not just on Romania, but on most European countries that experienced it. I saw it at first hand as a child in Poland. However, few of us will have forgotten the images that we saw on television in 1990 of the orphanages in Romania and the appalling way in which those children were treated. Those institutions still exist. Outside modern Bucharest, children are kept in state institutions that are badly heated and lit, where they receive poor care. There are awful cases of neglect. There is also terrible environmental pollution. The Ploesti oil fields and other industrial complexes have devastated the local environment. I fear that Great Britain and the other EU countries will have to stump up a great deal of money to modernise those facilities and ensure that the environment is brought up to the modern standard that one would expect of an EU country. The infrastructure is a shambles. The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) stated that he was only in Bucharest for seven hours when he was Minister for Europe. That is the problem. Many Ministers get whisked to Bucharest, no doubt stay in a lovely hotel and see the best bits of Romania, but they do not see the shambolic state that it is in. If they were taken to villages like Scornicesti, Timisoara and Arad, they would see how backward the country is and the amount of money that it will need.