European Communities (Finance) Bill

The so-called concession on the CAP was not worth the paper that it was not written on. Our experience of the CAP indicates the difficulty. The new settlement will be in 2013, but I do not imagine that we shall get any substantial concessions from the French. Indeed, this reminds me very much of the Berlin negotiations on Agenda 2000, when some concessions had been made on the CAP but then in marched President Chirac who cancelled the whole lot and took them back. This issue has been impossible to address. Every party in this country has promised at every election a fundamental reform of the CAP, but we have not got one. My hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford said that the negotiations have set the CAP expenditure on a remorseless downward path, but that is nonsense. It has been reducing as a proportion, but it has been increasing as a total, and it still represents well over half the annual EU budget going to 5 per cent. of the EU electorate. That goes to show what the EU's preoccupations are, so he was wrong to say that there has been a concession.