The noble Lord shakes his head, but the former President of France specifically said that he would like to see north African countries in the European Union. France, therefore, would like these countries to join the European Union.
If you have all these countries in the Union, what does it mean? If you take Turkey and Ukraine together, by the time they come in, that is about 140 million extra people. By the time we have finished with all of them there will be 700 million people. If experience is anything to go by, the larger the EU becomes, the more centralised and authoritarian it becomes. For those reasons, I am opposed to any further expansion.
Every entrant into the EU reduces the existing countries’ influence, including of course our own. We must also remember that the rules of the European Union mean that sometime or other after these countries join the European Union they have the right of entry into this country to work and settle. So there are difficult problems about building ever more countries into the European Union. I used to talk about a country called Europe. Now we seem to be talking about an empire called Europe. In the end, it will not do Europe any good.
The second point is about the Commission membership. I can hardly oppose what is proposed. When we were debating the Lisbon treaty, some of us, including the noble Lords, Lord Pearson and Lord Willoughby de Broke, said that it was right that every country should have its own Commissioner. But we were told that as Europe got larger, they could not have each have a Commissioner because it would be too difficult to run the whole thing with so many Commissioners. I can hardly be against that. I welcome the fact that the Irish are to have their own Commissioner and other countries as well.
Then we come to developments in the EU, which is the third part of this debate. Of course, there have been so many developments in the European Union since we last had a debate that it is difficult to sort them out. I have done my best. I start with the eurozone. It is still in acute financial trouble, as we have already heard. There are problems in most of the countries of the eurozone. We have heard that unemployment in Spain and Greece is more than 25%. There has been rioting in the streets. Teargas has been hurled at demonstrators and some of them have been injured by police violence. There is hatred among some of the countries, particularly between Greece and Germany. That is not supposed to happen in the European Union. We are all supposed to be jolly friends together. But what has happened in the eurozone is pushing the
European Union apart. According to Eurostat on 3 December, 24.5% of EU citizens are at risk of poverty or social exclusion and that figure is increasing. What do those people who are in favour of expanding this organisation and keeping it going make of that?
When we went into the Common Market, we were promised that this was a great leap forward and that this was the organisation to be in. Britain would thrive and prosper inside it and so would every other country. Instead of that, the reverse is happening. Those of those who warned against ditching the pound and not adopting the euro were insulted by those, like Mr Blair, who led the campaign to ditch the pound. Mr Blair now thinks that people like myself are a virus because we happen to take a different point of view from him about the future of this country. He is the man who said before the 1997 election that he was a British patriot and then went on to sign the Lisbon treaty, got rid of many of our freedoms, and sacrificed part of our rebate. I had to say that because I resent having been insulted in that way by that particular person.
Then we have Frau Merkel telling us that outside Europe Union the United Kingdom will be alone. How insensitive can you get? I am of an age when I can remember being alone in 1940 and Frau Merkel seems to have forgotten about that. She also seems to have forgotten that there is a Commonwealth and Britain is part of that Commonwealth and one of its leaders. She was backed in all of that by Herr Schäuble, the German finance minister, who also believes that Britain could not exist outside the European Union.
Nearer to home, our own Prime Minister says he wishes to remain in the EU and once again he cites Norway to make his point. The United Kingdom has a population of 62 million. Norway has a population of 5 million. There is no comparison at all. Let us have a look at Norway. I mentioned some of Norway’s benefits in a previous debate. Let us look at Norway in other ways. It has the second highest GDP per capita in the world—in the world, not in the EU. It is the second wealthiest country in the world in monetary value and has the largest capital reserve per capita in the world.