Treaty of Lisbon (No. 6)

No, I am afraid I cannot agree to that. The existing Maastricht treaty text specifies"““more particularly the most disadvantaged among them””—" a reference to developing countries, and where aid should go. The explicit intention was to direct aid to the poorest countries in the world. That article was repealed by the Lisbon treaty, and it was not replaced by similar wording about the direction of the aid budget. I am afraid I do not agree with the Under-Secretary. Indeed, the treaty reinforces the move towards expenditure on things such as the neighbourhood policy. There are obviously deserving countries on the borders of Europe, but they are by no means the poorest countries in the world. It is not clear to me why we should distort the British aid programme, in ways of which I know the Government disapprove, by swinging it away from the poorest countries to those politically important to the EU. Running right the way through this treaty is a sort of ““little European”” attitude, which sees everything through the prism of continental Europe. That is completely out of cue with our historic and traditional concerns and responsibilities, which are global. Our horizons are much wider. It has been alleged in a puerile way that we in my party are somehow isolationist. Quite the reverse: we are the true internationalists. We believe that our responsibilities go much wider than Europe. Of course we are concerned with continental Europe. This country has often gone to war in the past to stop the continent falling under the domination of a single power. But we are also a maritime, global country with historic responsibilities that go much wider. That state of affairs will be undermined and distorted by this treaty. The other aspect of international development is trade. Trade has an enormous ability to lift countries out of poverty, and many studies have shown that even quite modest increases in trade flow have a much more benign effect on the lifting of countries out of poverty than even the most generous aid programmes. Trade rewards efficiency, and it creates a self-sustaining mechanism for economic lift-off. Many countries, such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, have followed that path. Aid, by contrast, reinforces dependency and invites corruption. I am a trade liberaliser; liberalisation is very important, as was recognised in the millennium goals of eight years ago. Tragically, not enough has been done since then to liberalise trade. The Doha round has stalled. The additional tragedy is that we are trapped; there is nothing that this country can do. We are quite unable to do anything on our own, and we do not have a trade policy. Hon. Members might remember that we used to have a Board of Trade. It does not exist any more. There is no expertise in this country; very few officials and practically no Ministers engage in trade policy at all, because we have handed over trade policy to our ex-colleague Peter Mandelson. He twice left the British Cabinet in disagreeable circumstances, and is now in an unelected body that meets in secret, which has a monopoly on trade policy. It is he who decides, not us. The reason for that is the fact that we are stuck in an old-fashioned customs union. The rest of the world has gone in the completely different direction of creating free trade agreements. That is the modern way; that is what more prosperous parts of the world have done. They have not created customs unions where everything is concentrated in an over-regulatory centralised system. They have created free trade areas that enable individual members to do bilateral deals and make agreements with other countries, including poor countries. We are unable to do that. Instead, we have the prospect of the European Commission bullying poor countries by trying to impose agreements on them that they often feel they do not want. I believe in free trade, but it is not an ideology. It must be entered into only on terms acceptable to the countries concerned. If we had more freedom, as the fifth largest economy in the world, to help those poor countries and the poor people in them, we could do something to help them before the Doha round is brought into effect. But we cannot do that, because of the complete inability of the European Union to think in any other way than centralisation or the reinforcement of the customs union, which is practically unique in the world. It is not a model that has been followed elsewhere. That argument was never examined during the so-called reform process that started in 2001. There was a fanatical resistance to any diminution in the powers of the central organisations.