European Affairs

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper), who yet again has shown himself to be a serious politician who introduces to debates subjects that have not been raised earlier. We have been lucky enough to have on our Front Benches today some of the most important politicians in this Parliament: the rising stars of this Parliament. We have, of course, the dynamic duo on the Conservative Front Bench, and on the Labour Front Bench we have the Minister for Europe, who, I understand, now likes to be called Cardinal Richelieu. If I am one of the three musketeers, he is the evil one. On the Liberal Democrat Front Bench we have the hon. Member for East Dunbartonshire (Jo Swinson). I do not think that she will have a chance to speak today, but I am sure that she would always defend to the hilt whatever Liberal Democrat policy on Europe happened to be on that particular day. Let me now make a serious point, as one who is pro-European but anti-EU. We have spoken today of the number of service personnel in Afghanistan. I have a personal interest in that. It seems wrong that some of our European partners are not committed enough to the war in Afghanistan—although others are committing their troops alongside ours and those of the Americans, and they are suffering frightful casualties. It is, I believe, also the Government's position that some of our colleagues in the European Union are not doing enough. I do not know how the Government will deal with the problem. I know that they are at the heart of Europe, and I know that they have a great deal of power in Europe, but they do not seem to be entirely successful in that particular regard. Let me return to the stars on the Front Benches. There is a clear divide between them. On the Government Front Bench sits someone who really believes in the European Union, and really believes in a federal state. No—I should say "one state", a European state. I apologise for calling it a federal state. What the Minister believes in is one state called Europe. On our side is someone else who believes equally strongly in a Europe of nation states—someone who opposes the Lisbon treaty, and who actually speaks for the British people. That leads me rather nicely to my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition, who has been consistent on Europe and has spoken for the British people. [Laughter.] Labour Members laugh because they do not understand what consistency means. Let us go back a little in history. Why not? No one is listening today. There is no one up in the Galleries, and even the Whip has put down his pen. We can be honest, and the Government can be honest, about the situation. The only reason why they were elected at the 2005 general election is that they did two clever things. Their spin department—their polls—told them that the people wanted a say on Europe. The other thing that their polls told them was that people were scared stiff of Gordon Brown. So what we got was a promise that Tony Blair would serve a full term. Labour went back on that—there was no consistency there—and of course, when it came to the promise of a referendum on a European constitution, they went back on that as well. That is why they are in so much trouble. This is not about the actual issue; it is about lack of faith—about their lack of consistency. We just cannot believe them any longer. By way of contrast, let us turn to the new leader of the Conservative party. When I was considering who to vote for in the leadership election, I asked one of the candidates, who is now the leader of the party, "Are we going to pull out of the European People's party, as we can't have Conservatives sitting in the European Parliament who are federalists?" He replied, "Yes, we will." People said that would not happen, but he has delivered on it. He also said we would have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty if it had not been ratified first. He was absolutely truthful about that, too. Anyone who believes that the leader of my party—or, for that matter, the shadow Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague)—did not want to have that referendum is living in cloud cuckoo land. The first thing our new Foreign Secretary would have done would have been to go to Europe and get the articles of ratification back, and we would have had that referendum within six weeks. The fact is, of course, that that cannot now happen. Our policy for the current circumstance of the Lisbon treaty having been ratified was that we would not let matters rest, and within 24 hours we knew where we were going, which was to have this new, exciting, forward-looking Conservative party policy, which will win us so many votes. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney becomes Prime Minister, as I sincerely believe he will, he will be the most Eurosceptic leader of our country since Mrs. Thatcher. He will be more Eurosceptic than the current Prime Minister and Tony Blair—or John Major, for that matter—and he will do something that none of those Prime Ministers attempted, which has never been done before: he will get powers back from Europe. [Interruption.] Labour Members say that it cannot be done, but it can if we follow the reverse salami-slicing principle. If we try to eat a whole salami sausage in one go, we spit it out in disgust, but if we eat it slice by slice, it is okay and we can put up with it. That is how the European Union has taken so much more power over the past 25 or 30 years. We have never been asked if we want to give up any of those powers, but, slice by slice, it has taken them away.