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8.7 pm

Mr. Tony McNulty (Harrow, East): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor). His measured contribution did not excite too many enthusiastic nods on the sparsely populated Conservative Benches. He is far from the demented Euro-enthusiast described in the recent book by Giles Brandreth, the former Conservative Member for City of Chester. That author also mentions the Charnwood versus Fylde show that we have just witnessed. He writes:

"Little Michael Jack, eager beaver Financial Secretary, was on the line.


"'You know today's the day we publish the Finance Bill. I am supposed to be on the media spreading the good news on the economy, and what happens? I am pulled from every programme, and the whole thing is hijacked by the Secretary of State for Health'"--

that is, the present right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr. Dorrell)--

"'banging on about Europe. It is so bloody frustrating!'"

That was on 2 January 1997, when the right hon. Member for Charnwood had his Pauline conversion to a more Euro-sceptic view. The right hon. Member claimed in his speech that he has held the same views all the time. However, the former hon. Member for City of Chester was a very close friend of the right hon. Gentleman--either that, or the book is fiction--and he writes:

"This isn't mere positioning. Stephen's view on the EU has changed markedly over the last three years, but the message has only filtered out fitfully."

So there we have it. The right hon. Gentleman--whoonce represented Loughborough, and now represents Charnwood--was always a Euro-sceptic, or at least shifted in that direction when there was a leadership challenge in the air. He did so well in that challenge that now he has settled into a more natural, central position, between the sceptics and the Euro-enthusiasts, demented or otherwise.

It is interesting that much of what the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said ranks very highly in the mythology, dishonest kidology and rhetoric in which the Conservative party indulges in. Like St. Peter in the Gospels, he denies his friends--those Tory Members of the European Parliament who sit on the executive of what he termed the European People's party--not once but at least two or three times.

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Before the election, the Tories said that signing the social chapter would destroy jobs. Two years on, there is no sign of any destruction of jobs. In fact, more than half a million have been created. The piece of fiction produced as a manifesto by the Tories tells us that that is nonsense. It is certainly more--

Miss McIntosh: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. McNulty: Not in mid-sentence. The hon. Lady must be fairly tired given that she has two jobs, but I shall get back to her a little later.

The shadow Foreign Secretary, despite his denial, is more than aware of the Tory MEPs in the European People's party. They clearly say that there must be a

"gradual--but resolute--transformation of the European Community into a genuine political union on a federal model".

Those are Conservative MEPs. Does that not make a mockery of the opposition of the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe to a federal Europe? It certainly suggests that the Conservative party is perhaps being disingenuous, or perhaps something more malevolent than that.

Miss McIntosh: Perhaps the House and the hon. Gentleman should remember that when Britain signed the social chapter, we agreed to be exempt from it for the first two years. That is why there have so far been no major job losses other than those incurred from the working time directive and the minimum wage.

Mr. McNulty: I am grateful to the hon. Lady, but I hope, in her best interests, that her interventions in the European Parliament are slightly better than that.

On defence, too, we heard hot air and wind from the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe. The Government's proposals for European defence co-operation were approved by NATO at the recent Washington summit. All EU members of NATO signed up to them. There is an accord, as the hon. Member for Esher and Walton said. In NATO, and in some parts of the House, a grown-up and mature debate is occurring on European defence co-operation.

Another example of the naivety, malevolence, incompetence and disingenuousness of the Tories is the statement in their manifesto that there should be one parliamentary location for Europe. They suggest that it should be Brussels. Yet in their next breath, they say that they are totally opposed to any extension of majority voting. They cannot have one without the other. The French will never sign up to having Brussels as the only location for the Parliament. Under qualified majority voting, it will never happen. Perhaps the Luxembourgeois will not sign up to it either.

That is a good example of how replete the Tory manifesto is with dishonesty, but there are more. Their manifesto calls for a stop to the abolition of duty free, but it was the Conservative Government who negotiated that. What weasel words does the manifesto contain? I had the misfortune of having to pay for that lovely document, so the Tories got a few bob out of me; I tried using ecu, but they would not have them. "In Europe, not run by Europe" says about the protection of duty free:

"When plans were drawn up to abolish duty free, we set out clear conditions which had to be met."

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I have seen the conditions; they are not that clear.It goes on:


"They have not been met. So we believe that duty free must remain in place."

Since when have they thought that? Since 2 May 1997. Had they won the election, duty free could go to hell in a handcart.

There is nothing of substance in their manifesto. In three little lines, we can find one of the most historic flip-flop U-turns in Conservative party history, though God knows there have been plenty of them in the past two years. Here is another example from their pretty little manifesto. It says:

"We want to see humane treatment of animals across the whole of Europe."

Yet they troop in here to destroy the Bill on fox hunting and one of them--just one--singlehandedly destroyed a private Member's Bill on fur farming that 11 of the 12 remaining fur farmers in the country had signed up to. Somehow the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Mr. Forth) in his south-east London seat knows more about fur farming and humane treatment of animals than the fur farmers themselves do. That was abject nonsense from him.

Mr. Loughton: Why did the Government not support the Bill then?

Mr. McNulty: If the schoolchildren on the Back Benches want to speak, they can stand up and I will let them in.

Mr. Loughton rose--

Mr. McNulty: Oh, there he is.

Mr. Loughton: As the hon. Gentleman takes such exception to the passages on animal welfare, would he tell us why his Government did not support the fox hunting measure, why they did not rescue the Fur Farming Bill and why they have done absolutely nothing about live animal exports and a host of other promises in their manifesto that have not even been started on? Can he explain that?

Mr. McNulty: Yes, I can, and in one simple phrase--the hillbillies up the other end of the building. We have a full five-year programme covering all aspects of the EU, including animal welfare. We are implementing much of our manifesto, such as the minimum wage, the Health Bill and other matters to do with the EU. We will not have it all blocked by the hillbillies up the corridor.

The whole Tory manifesto is full of contradictions. It is all over the place, but that is just a symptom of the Conservative position on Europe. It is rumoured that the document is just their official manifesto. A minority report challenging some of it is expected out soon, and two unofficial alternatives are on the way as well as the one produced by the completely separate pro-European party. The Conservatives are all over the place, trying desperately to talk in code so that the xenophobes and

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Europhiles can somehow seem to be speaking the same language. It does not wash, and the people of Britain will see right through it.

I am glad to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch (Mr. Cryer) has popped back into the Chamber. I want to share with him one matter on which we agree.

Mr. John Cryer: Is there one?

Mr. McNulty: One among many, but not too many. I agree partly with what he said about London, although I do not share his doom and gloom about objective 2 status. It is right to get London's problems on the record. Those Members who represent outer London--and the responsibility weighs no less heavily on our inner-London counterparts--have a difficult task in persuading anyone on our own side of the House, never mind the Opposition, about the peculiarities of London. There is a myth that the whole of London and all its 7 million or 8 million inhabitants are rich and that there is no poverty.

Mr. MacShane: Streets paved with gold.

Mr. McNulty: My hon. Friend is joking, but that myth is a real problem. The streets of London are not paved with gold. Fourteen of the country's 20 poorest boroughs are in London, and they cover a significant majority of London's total area. In one sense, the city is a wealthy one, but it also has some of the country's most deprived areas, a fact that must be got through to the Government and to Europe.

Average earnings among Londoners are 30 per cent. higher than the UK average, but in boroughs such as Hackney and Tower Hamlets, more than one in three adults are on income support. Gross domestic product in London is the highest in Europe, but London has more unemployed people than Scotland and Northern Ireland combined. The European Commission and the Government need to take those matters seriously when they work on objective 1 status.

London has suffered far more than most, not over the past two years, but over the past 15 to 20 years. There has been a serious decline in manufacturing, which has largely gone. I do not make some cheap party political point here: the decline was rooted in the early 1970s and the oil crisis, and it has continued from there. It has not happened over the past two years. It was not some wicked plot by Baroness Thatcher and her Government to get rid of London's manufacturing base. A range of geographic and economic circumstances have contributed to the decline. It has not been matched by increases in growth in the service sector, as some people might think. Between 1984 and 1996, London gained only 9 per cent. extra service sector jobs in comparison with the west midlands, which gained 30 per cent.; the south-west, which gained 34 per cent.; and Scotland, which gained 22 per cent.

I am not saying that London is poverty stricken, but some flexibility is needed in the measure for objective 2 status to capture areas with deep pockets of poverty. At the moment, objective 2 status is limited to a small area around the Lea valley. The Association of London Government and others have clear proposals to expand that area, but not, hon. Members will be happy to know, to cover the west end and some other parts of London--

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certainly not the constituency of the right hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, although even a borough such as Bromley, which is not dissimilar to mine in Harrow, has strong and affluent parts but also suburban pockets of poverty which are all the worst for being within seas of affluence.

We ignore at our peril, and not merely in London--I am sure that it happens elsewhere but I can speak only for London--the increasing difficulties caused by suburban pockets of deprivation. Precisely because they are suburban they need to be tackled differently from inner cities where an entire area is poverty stricken. That was my pitch for London.

I must return to the official Conservative manifesto document. If those who run--I use that term loosely--the Conservative party were honest, the leaflet would not be called, "In Europe, not run by Europe". One would only need three of those words. One could drop the "run by Europe" and move the "not" up front so that the title was honest and stated "Not in Europe". My hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch would agree. He would have noted when he spoke that the cheers that he received were from Opposition and not from Labour Members. Clearly, that would be the honest position for Conservative Members.

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