European Communities (Finance) Bill

I am grateful that we did not join the euro. Our present Prime Minister kept us out. The euro is going up as the dollar comes down. People are coming out of dollar stocks and there is a policy of benign neglect of the dollar, which improves the US exporting economy because it is picking up as domestic consumer demand falls, but European manufacturing will suffer. The problem for us is where we should be in that equation. My view is that we should try to reduce the exchange rate through lower interest rates, although I do not want to go into that. I want to know what benefits we are getting from the contribution enshrined in the Bill. Euro-enthusiasm has in some respects replaced socialism as a credo on the Labour Benches. The Liberals believe in ““My Europe, right or wrong””, or perhaps ““My Europe mainly right, very occasionally wrong but we don't talk about it””. However, the wealth of nations is built by hard-headed realism, not by impulsive romantic gestures, not by naivety and certainly not by being the slave of a dead ideology—Keynes' critique—repeating a pointless mantra about the inestimable benefits of EU membership. We have to be realistic and hard-headed. The reality is that we would be better off out, sloughing off the burdens of Europe, trading with the wider world and co-operating with the nations with which we share problems rather than achieving that co-operation by financing a huge superstructure of marble palaces in Brussels, a play-away Parliament, a massive bureaucracy and all the failed programmes that go with it. That is the reality.