European Communities (Finance) Bill

This is a very small Bill, with one operative clause, although after the Chief Secretary's speech I am grateful that it does not have 30 clauses. That one operative clause contains, however, the single biggest spending commitment in the whole of the Government's legislative programme. It is a £7.4 billion bill, addressed to the British taxpayer, and an hour and six minutes of obfuscation from the Chief Secretary has not changed that. This is a stealth Bill, sneaked in without a mention in the Queen's Speech and completely ignored in the Prime Minister's speech in the debate that followed. Far from being something of which the Government are proud, it is a Bill that dare not speak its name. The Prime Minister has done with this Bill exactly what he always does with bad news: he has tried to slip it in under the radar in the hope that nobody will notice it. It is in order to congratulate the Chief Secretary, who made a valiant attempt to defend the completely indefensible. He gave a fair impression of a man who has been living in a complete vacuum since 1999. He stood here and told us that the own-resources decision that the Bill will implement is a great victory for Britain, despite the fact that his own Government told us for years—until they gave way in December 2005—that they would fight tooth and nail to avoid that. The Government are not proud of the Bill, and neither should they be. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that the Chancellor is not in his place to support the Chief Secretary. The agreement that the Bill implements is a bad deal for Britain, and the Chief Secretary knows it. We know it, too, because when the former Prime Minister signed away Britain's rebate, the current Prime Minister briefed every journalist he could find that it was a bad deal, that it was all Tony Blair's doing and that he would never have agreed to it. A Treasury official put it this way at the time:"““We have ended up giving away much more than we expected and with precious little to show for it in return””." A senior aide to the then Chancellor—no prizes for guessing who—told the press that the sell-out would inevitably lead to public spending cuts. No wonder the Government want to get this Bill out of the way at the very beginning of the Session with as little noise as possible. It is an embarrassment and reminds us again of some of this Government's serial failings, such as duplicity, in repeatedly breaking their promises on Europe; incompetence, in failing to obtain anything in return for our money at the negotiating table; and fiscal incontinence, in throwing away yet more hard-earned taxpayers' money for nothing in return.