European Union (Amendment) Bill

My hon. Friend knows that well, and she is absolutely right. It is striking that no other trade bloc has gone down this route of handing over its powers to a central organisation that over-regulates. The rest of the world is steaming ahead of us. That model, which is held up to be a paragon by Labour Members, has not been followed by anyone else and it is doing terrible damage to European competitiveness. May I again refer to the Convention on the Future of Europe, on which I sat? I raised the question of European competitiveness in the wider world, but there was no interest in that. This little European attitude—this inward-looking obsession with harmonisation and standardisation in Europe—dominated all the proceedings. The real question is not whether one country is more competitive or productive than another in Europe; it is whether Europe as a whole is competitive in the wider world, because that is where we ultimately have to earn our living. That issue was never addressed in the Convention. My point has finally been recognised in some quarters of the Commission. I am referring to a figure that has been published by the Commission. It is the estimate that the annual cost of all the over-regulation is as much as €600 billion. That exceeds the Commission's own estimate of the added value of having a single market. Its website estimates that figure to be only €240 billion a year. Even by the Commission's own arithmetic, the cost of all the regulation exceeds the supposed benefits of the single market in the first place.