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Mr. Robin Cook: Surely the right hon. and learned Gentleman will not move into his peroration without giving us his latest state of thinking on a referendum on the Amsterdam treaty. Will he now answer my question? Will he be recommending that his colleagues vote for new clause 47?
Mr. Howard: I note with great interest that the Foreign Secretary did not rise to intervene in my speech when I described the shabby trick perpetrated on his Government at Amsterdam. He did not seek to challenge one detail of the recital that I set out. The referendum is the Government's problem, not ours. It is the Government who are so keen on referendums. It is the Government who are holding referendums on Scottish devolution, Welsh devolution, regional devolution and on whether there should be a mayor and an authority for London. It is the Government who are so besotted with referendums.
Mr. Cook: The right hon. and learned Gentleman demanded a referendum as recently as October. When did he change his mind and why did he change it?
Mr. Howard: As I have said, it is the Government who are besotted with referendums. If the Government are so keen on them, the logic of their position is that they should hold one on Amsterdam.
I was dealing with job creation. We in this country have a higher proportion of working-age people in work than any other country in the EU. On the environment, thanks to the action of the Conservative Government, we are meeting our Rio target for cutting greenhouse gases. On law and order, we have seen crime fall every year for the past four years, to a greater extent than ever before.
Our vision for Europe--the Conservative vision--is of an outward-looking, flexible Europe. The nation state must remain the basic building block of the EU.
People are naturally proud of their own countries and politicians who ignore that sense of pride do so at their peril. Trying to build new institutions or transferring wide-ranging powers from long-standing institutions to new ones will end in disaster if those new institutions do not have the wholehearted support of those whom they are supposed to serve. That is why we oppose the extra powers for the European Parliament and the extension of qualified majority voting as agreed at Amsterdam. It is also why we argued for reform of the European Court of Justice.
Mr. Denzil Davies (Llanelli):
My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary spoke eloquently about the need to ensure the enlargement of the European Union to bring in the countries of the former Soviet Union--the colonies, as he described them. We on the Government Benches do not begrudge him his travels to those countries to ensure that the principles of democracy are well founded and well established, but I could not help thinking--a little heretically, I have to say--that if we were not, member of the European Union, what would the Foreign and Commonwealth Office do, poor thing?
I shall concentrate my remarks on the budget. My right hon. Friend mentioned the budget and, quite properly, said that there have to be changes somewhere along the line. Chapter 3 of "Developments in the European Union" mentions the budget for the calendar year 1998 but does not mention--I make no criticism, as it had not been mentioned in previous years--Britain's net contribution. It is quite difficult to find out our net contribution in any particular year, because we still deal in fiscal years and "they over there" deal in calendar years, and because the payments coming in do not always immediately match the payments going out. It is not easy to forecast at the beginning of a year the projects that will be accepted and the payments that will come in.
I finally found some figures in the old-fashioned Red Book of the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke). I am not sure whether we still have a Red Book--I found two red and green books. The figures were merely forecasts, and perhaps this year has been a bit better because of money coming in as a result of the bovine spongiform encephalopathy problems--I do not know--but over the next three years our average net contribution will be about £2.5 billion. That has, more or less, been the average figure over the past few years. That is a lot of money. The result of 1p on income tax is, I am told about £1.8 billion, so £2.5 billion every year comes close to 1½p.
Mr. Denis MacShane (Rotherham):
Is that all?
Mr. Davies:
My hon. Friend asks, "Is that all?" but we shall argue next week about £400 million in respect of single-parent families. He might not think that £1.8 billion or £2.5 billion is much, but compared to the £400 million they are large sums of money. Over four years, that £2.5 billion amounts to £10 billion.
Some of us go back a long way in the House. Indeed, some of us were at the Treasury when the transitional period came to an end. In 1978-79, our contributions shot up. Eventually--it took three or four years-- Mrs. Thatcher, with considerable political will, was able to obtain the Fontainebleau agreement. If it had not been for that agreement, our contributions would now be about £4 billion a year. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister a rhetorical question. What will happen to the Fontainebleau agreement as we move towards 1999 and 2000 and the restructuring of the budget? I am sure that my hon. Friend does not know, and I do not blame him for that.
My hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) might not think it a lot of money, but I found an article in The Economist of 9 August 1997, entitled "Who pays most?" It includes a table for the calendar year 1995. The figures were taken from the Court of Auditors report. To show that I at least try to do my homework, I looked through the latest Court of Auditors report to see whether there was a similar table, but I did not get further than volume one. There might be a second volume, but I do not think that the hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), who has, perhaps, spent more time than I have studying this in the past few days, could find a similar table either.
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset):
It may interest the right hon. Gentleman to know that various members of European Standing Committee B asked for those figures precisely because they could not be found. The figures have not been released, despite the fact that four weeks have elapsed. I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman will agree that that suggests that the figures are rather worse.
Mr. Davies:
Perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister can supply the hon. Gentleman with the figures when he replies to the debate.
The article shows that, in 1995, Germany contributed 140.2 per cent. of total net contributions to the European Union budget. The gross domestic product per person in Germany, as a percentage of the European Union average, was 106.7 per cent., whereas France's percentage of total net contributions was only 18 per cent.--its GDP, at 107.2 per cent., was higher than that of Germany. Italy did even better with a net contribution of 6.4 per cent. and a GDP of 101 per cent. Chancellor Kohl has every right to complain, as do we, because according to the table, we contributed 49.3 per cent of total net contributions. Almost half the net contributions to the budget came from Britain, whose GDP per person was 98.2 per cent.
I understand how the budget works--we have all looked at it in great deal detail, and the position might be different this year--but it is extraordinary that we were contributing almost half the net contributions, yet, as my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said, we are well down the line in terms of GDP per person.
I could not help looking at the figures for Ireland. I do not want to inflame Welsh farmers and make them throw any more very delicious Tesco beefburgers into the waters of Holyhead harbour, Fishguard or anywhere else, so I shall mention this quietly, but Ireland's net contribution to the EU budget was minus 19.7 per cent. In 1995 its GDP per head as a percentage of the EU average was 85.3 per cent., which is the same as the GDP per person in Wales. In fact it is probably slightly higher than in Wales. One can understand why Welsh farmers feel aggrieved when their incomes are going down and they have to endure imports of Irish beef. Welsh farmers contribute--perhaps they do not pay as little tax these days as they would like--to the European Union, whereas Ireland receives so much money back. My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary well understands the problem, but we really must look at the figures.
It used to be said that these payments are for being members of the club. I have not heard the latest "clitch"--as Ernie Bevin used to describe it--recently, but the European Union used to be described as a club, and we had to pay a membership fee. Clearly some countries do not pay a membership fee; others pay a very large membership fee. That should be examined.
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