EU Financial Management

I shall keep my remarks brief. The debate is time-limited and most of the points have been covered in interventions and in the wonderful speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins)—the annual event. We always look forward to it. We know that the content will be riveting and the meaning profound. I entirely sign up to what he says, especially about the CAP. I know that we have all been assiduous and read every last dot and comma of the light reading that comes with the debate. As the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) said, one needs to approach these matters with some degree of scepticism. The Minister was positively Panglossian in his assessment. It is not an easy line to defend on behalf of the Government, because all is not right in the court of Brussels. I make no apologies for being sceptical. I wish to see a better European organisation, whether that is the EU or a subsequent body. The strength of the EU is that it is drawing in more and more countries. To be fair to those new entrants, they are faced with an enormous dilemma. Having spoken to representatives of those countries, I know that they are levered into a position in which they would not want to be. The Maastricht constriction immediately does enormous damage to those economies. Even though they may grow in the short run because of the benefits of the single European market, they subsequently have to make compromises, in the form of changes to their agricultural system and in response to the manufacturing pressures brought to bear on them, which often entail massive redundancies. These circumstances are directly relevant to the financial structure. The Maastricht criteria are far too restrictive and far too likely to lead to structural problems of the worst kind. Some of us would go much further, but I hope we will recognise that we owe a duty to the EU to make sure that its auditing and financial control are hundreds of per cent. better than they have been so far. They have been lamentable, resulting in the divorce between the peoples and the governance of the EU, reflected more recently in the divorce between national Governments and their electorates. That is why we will never revisit the European constitution because, if anything, the votes would be even more overwhelmingly against. That is why we could not hold a vote in the UK. The Government could not be seen to hold a vote that they knew they were bound to lose.