My Lords, I prepared a very interesting and rather long speech for today’s debate but I decided to tear it up while reading the Times this morning on the train here. In it was a reference to an article in Saturday’s Times that was written by Matthew Parris, and which I was pointed to, about,
“the spittle-flecked obsessive reactionaries of UKIP”,
so I looked that article up. I got it out of the Library and I have it here. Its title is:
“Stamp on the grasshoppers of the Rabid Right”,
and is subtitled,
“These spittle-flecked, obsessive reactionaries belong in UKIP. Don’t let them shelter under the Conservative fern”.
I thought that it was the New Zealanders who had the fern and that the Conservatives had an oak tree, but let that rest.
The detail of this article gives offence to me and many of my friends. Matthew Parris says, talking about Conservative MPs, that,
“the local MP has spent a career repelling from party membership anyone under 70 who isn’t a spittle-flecked, obsessively anti-European, immigrant-hating social and cultural reactionary”.
That really is not terribly helpful, nor is the Prime Minister’s refusal to retract his insult that UKIP is largely composed of fruitcakes, cranks and closet racists.
In the Times today I saw the results of a ComRes poll over the weekend conducted for the Independent on Sunday and the Sunday Mirror. It showed that 14% of voters would vote for UKIP and only 9% for the Liberal Democrats; 28% would vote for the Conservatives, by the way, so we are catching them up.
A lot of Conservative MPs want to leave the EU, many more want to renegotiate their positions within the EU and at least three members of the current Cabinet have said they would be happy to leave the EU. All opinion polls in the past two years have found that about 50% of the people in this country would be
happy to leave the EU. I know that polls vary and will change from month to month and year to year but, nonetheless, they are definitely straws in the wind.
Are all these people who are polled, the MPs and the members of the Cabinet, all spittle-flecked, immigrant-hating, fruitcakes and racists? Of course they are not. Of course we are not. We want to get our country back. I do not think that is a crime and I do not think we should be treated in this extraordinary way by the leader of the Conservative Party or by a time-worn columnist on the Times.
I do not agree with anything that the Europhiles have said. They have been wrong all along and I think where they are trying to lead us now is very dangerous but I do not insult them—I do not have to, because I just look at the facts. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for mentioning Greece, which has been, as he said, singularly absent in our debates this evening. The Europhiles have skated over the results of what the euro has caused in Europe.
In Greece there is now a bitter hatred of the troika and the misery, poverty and unemployment that it has caused; the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, is absolutely right about that. The programme of forced austerity has brought misery to Greece, as the noble Lord said very clearly. The German Chancellor is routinely caricatured cruelly in full Nazi regalia. In Greece, unemployment is 26%; youth unemployment is a shocking 55%. The Greeks are run by the troika now; they have no fiscal independence at all.
The noble Lord, Lord Owen—he is not in his place to answer the question I want to ask him—said that the Germans will pay for the Greeks and for the “Club Med” in future as long as they obey the German-imposed rules. What happens if they cannot hack it, or if they are unable or unwilling to do so? What happens if the disaster scenario occurs that the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, mentioned at the end of his speech?
We have a bit of an answer from, I think, someone in the German Ministry of Finance—it may have been Herr Schäuble—who promised that they will have,
“more intense, compulsory employment of external technical assistance”.
What does that mean? Does it mean the European Gendarmerie Force? No, I think it just means that when the EU says “Jump!”, the Greeks can only say, “How high?”. I think that that is what is called pooling sovereignty in the EU.
The same thing is happening in Spain, of course. The EU’s vanity political project, the euro, is causing unemployment, unrest, riots and even talk of secession in Catalonia and Andalucía. Your Lordships want to know what the unemployment rate in Spain is. I will tell you: it is 26%, according to Eurostat. Youth unemployment is 49%. In Italy, Beppe Grillo’s out-of-euro party is making enormous inroads. The much derided Berlusconi, when he announced his possible candidacy—he was probably teasing the Italians a little—got it right when he said,
“I can’t allow my country to plunge into an endless recessionary spiral”.
I would have thought that was a pretty good electoral programme on which to run in Italy.
In France, we could soon hear the time-honoured cry: “Aux barricades!” when President Hollande comes up against what he believes is a world without bond markets, globalisation and the internet. When that collides with reality, where is he going to be then? France’s exports are already crashing. Unemployment is rising. The reality is that the EU is impaled on a Morton’s fork of its own making. On the one hand, there is permanent stagnation while the euro staggers along on the German support system; on the other, there is a deep economic depression as the eurozone breaks up. Those are the only two alternatives in front of us at the moment.
The ice is cracking under the European Union, however unpalatable that may be to the Europhiles in and outside this House. We do not know who is going to make it to the shore and who is going to fall in. However, what has happened is not the Eurosceptics’ fault. It is entirely down to the arrogance, conceit and distaste for democracy of the EU elite. As my noble friend Lord Pearson has asked, when are they going to apologise?
8.37 pm