European Affairs

The hon. Gentleman repeated all the jokes that we heard from the Foreign Secretary, and they were not funny the first time. He needs to wait and see the group's full complement. He will see how powerful it will become and how much of a stronger voice it will be in the EU. I am running out of time, but I want to reiterate the point that I made in an intervention on the Foreign Secretary to do with the problems of the relationship between NATO and the EU. As I have mentioned, I visited NATO recently, and I was astonished to learn that there is no formal agreement whatever. The two operations in Brussels do not talk to each other formally, because in NATO Turkey refuses to talk to the EU, and in the EU Cyprus refuses to talk to NATO. We cannot have such powerful organisations using such large sums and dealing with matters as serious as security not only in Europe but in the middle east and beyond, if those organisations cannot operate sensibly. As a consequence, the responsibilities of the two organisations are starting to overlap. Mission creep is taking place. Security, humanitarian aid and so on are all things that NATO does extremely well already, but the EU is now doing exactly the same sort of thing. There needs to be better co-operation, so that they decide who is doing what. At the moment, that is not the case. NATO has huge experience in peacekeeping and stabilisation operations, monitoring EU elections and so on. Why are we deciding to repeat all that, using very much the same people but in a different guise under the EU? Let us understand what the EU can do; it can do certain things well—but Bosnia is one example of where it did not work, and Iraq is another. We need to recognise that there are limits to what large international institutions can achieve. The Galileo project has been mentioned, and what an astonishing waste of money that is. It merely replicates something that already exists, and I do not understand why we do not hear more objections from Labour Members. When it was put to a vote not long ago, they were whipped into approving huge sums of money for a system that will probably never fly. There is one satellite up there now, but there are supposed to be 24. The system is about five years out of date, and it is simply not going to work. I have been dismayed by what I have heard today. The elections gave us in Parliament an excellent opportunity to listen to the electorate and understand what people want. It is clear that people want to put a halt to wandering any further into the relationship with the EU. They want to make the EU work, but only up to a certain point, and that is exactly where the Conservative party wishes to place itself. I remind the House of the EU's original objectives. If we were to review them now, and understand what we can do with the EU, we would march forward to a better tune and in a better direction than the one that we are going in now.