Thursday, 30th September 2010
Speech to Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock Conservative Constituency Association
[Speech to Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock Conservative Constituency Association, South Beach Hotel, Troon, 30 September 2010]
It is a great pleasure to be back in my old stomping ground. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but it is actually 40 years this year since I was first elected as a Conservative councillor. I started my career in Girvan District Council and then went on to join Kyle & Carrick District Council, where I remained for 22 years.
But first let me congratulate Ed Milliband on winning the leadership election of the Labour Party. Let’s not forget that both he and his big brother David are the sons of the late Marxist theorist Ralph Milliband. One newspaper described him as a man of principle. It reminds me of the other Marx - Groucho Marx - who famously said “These are my principles. If you don’t like them I have others.” Let us not forget that Ed Milliband was also a member of Gordon Brown’s Labour Cabinet when they created the appalling financial mess we have today. No more boom and bust Gordon Brown said!
Now the official figure for UK debt is 56.3% of GDP. But many argue that this does not reflect the true size of the debt, as public sector pension liabilities and PFI initiatives have not been included in the calculation If they were, the Centre for Policy Studies argues that the real national debt is more like 103.5% of GDP. I would remind everyone that the EU some years ago set a growth and stability pact for Member States that insisted national debt must never exceed 2.5% of GDP. Ours is 103.5%! It is almost unbelievable that we are worse off than Greece! Typically, it is the Tories who are left to clean up Labour’s mess, although this time it will be with the assistance of our Lib/Dem coalition partners. Nick Clegg Danny Alexander and Vince Cable seem enthusiastic about the cuts and there will be few areas of the public sector that don’t feel the knife!
But frankly, it’s not before time. There are 9,000 public servants in the UK earning more than the PM. That is an outrage. 1,000 of them are earning more than £200,000 a year. Look at Mark Thompson, the Director General of the BBC on a staggering £838,000 a year! Is he worth it? There are some Council Chiefs earning over £250,000 a year and even some head teachers on £230,000. It is scandalous. Pay in the public sector has got completely out of hand. Maybe this economic recession will give us a chance to sort things out. Get rid of all the useless, surplus jobs, like the trampoline officer in Aberdeenshire Council and the Nappy Guidance Officer in Lanarkshire. Then we can have the long awaited bonfire of the quangos.
In Brussels, they seem oblivious to the fact that we are in the depths of the worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The combined ranks of Socialists, Communists, Greens and arch-federalists have voted for a massive 6% increase in the budget. Our Conservative & Reformist Group was the only group in Parliament demanding budget cuts. Their bizarre excuse for such a big increase at a time of severe economic stress, when people are losing their jobs and livelihoods across the EU, is that now is the time that the citizens of Europe need more integration and more centralisation! They live on another planet!
Of course now we have the Lisbon Treaty in force. Lisbon, for the first time establishes a European Union which is constitutionally separate from and superior to its Member States, just as the USA is separate from and superior to its 50 constituent states. The 27 EU Member States thereby lose their character as true, sovereign states. Constitutionally, they become more like regional states in a multinational federation, although they still retain some of the trappings of their former sovereignty. Simultaneously, the 500 million citizens of the EU become for the first time real citizens of the constitutionally new post-Lisbon European Union, with real citizens' rights and duties as compared to the merely notional or symbolic EU citizenship they were assumed to have possessed up to now.
Of course, most Europeans are blissfully unaware of these astonishing changes because, with the exception of the Irish, they have been denied any chance of learning about and debating them in a national referendum. The Lisbon Treaty is therefore a constitutional revolution by stealth.
There is another disturbing aspect to the Lisbon Treaty. The constitutional structure of the post-Lisbon EU is completed by the provision which turns the Council of Prime Ministers and Presidents into an "institution" of the new Union, so that whatever it does will be subject to legal review by the EU Court of Justice. So, in future, the summit meetings of the EU Heads of State will no longer be "intergovernmental" gatherings outside supranational European structures, as they have been up to now.
The European Council will in effect be the Cabinet Government of the post-Lisbon Union. Its individual members will be constitutionally obliged to represent the Union to their Member States as well as their Member States to the Union, with the former function imposing primacy of obligation in the case of any conflict or tension between the two. I would seriously doubt if all of the Heads of State or Government who make up the European Council themselves appreciate this change!
So just as Lisbon has reduced the sovereign powers of our Prime Ministers, it has also created a new and confusing tier of leadership. Our problem now in Europe is that we have more presidents than you can shake a stick at! Under Lisbon we now have a new President of the European Council - Herman Van Rompuy. We also have the President of the European Commission - Jose Manuel Barroso. In addition we have the President of the European Parliament - Jerzy Buzek and just to completely confuse everyone, we also still have the rotating EU presidency which changes every six months and is currently held by Belgium. This is a bit of a joke, because Belgium has not even been able to form a government months after its elections. So they can’t rule themselves but they are in charge of the whole of Europe! You couldn’t make it up!
There is a famous story about Henry Kissinger who once said in frustration, who do you phone if you want to speak to Europe? Everyone said the Lisbon Treaty would solve this conundrum. In fact it has made matters worse, because you now have a choice between Barroso, Buzek, Van Rompuy or whoever is in charge from Belgium. And believe me if I find this confusing just think what the average EU citizen must feel about it?
Unfortunately, a gaggle of presidents is not the only problem that has come in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty. The defence implications of the Treaty are very worrying. As we all know, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy - Cathy Ashton – is responsible for developing the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). She will be assisted in this role by the creation of an External Action Service which will see the establishment of EU embassies with ambassadors and a full complement of staff in almost every country in the world.
Baroness Ashton chairs the Foreign Affairs Council, comprising all the Foreign Ministers from the 27 Member States. She is able to propose CSDP missions and the Council will decide unanimously on their initiation. These missions may include just about any military operation, including anti-terrorist operations, peace-keeping, conflict prevention and even 'peace-making' missions, which is military speak for combat! Baroness Ashton is a very powerful lady! The Lisbon Treaty even includes a Mutual Assistance Clause which states that if a Member State is a victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States are obliged to provide aid and assistance by all means in their power. This is an absolute duplication of Article 5 in the NATO Treaty and further serves to illustrate how the Lisbon Treaty was designed to undermine NATO.
There are also some more positive aspects to the Lisbon Treaty. For instance there is now a mandatory requirement that all legislative proposals coming from the Commission must be communicated simultaneously to the European Parliament and to each of the 27 EU Member States. The Member States will then have a statutory 8 week period during which they can submit their considered opinions to the EU. No decisions can be taken on any legislative proposal until this statutory consultation has been conducted.
This new Treaty requirement opens up a whole field of subsidiarity which didn't exist before. It means that Member States and interest groups will really be able to have their say on key directives and regulations coming out of Brussels. But in reality, the 8 week consultation period is very tight. Just think how it might work in our case? The Commission will send their legislative proposal to the Czech government in Prague. The relevant Department will then examine the proposal and remit it to the appropriate committee who will then scrutinise it and perhaps even consult with stakeholders like the trades unions, chambers of commerce and farmers unions. Can all of this be achieved within 8 weeks? I doubt it!
Clearly we need to set up a new streamlined system of consultation if we are to make full use of this new subsidiarity principle and get the most out of Lisbon. We need teams of civil servants watching what is coming over the horizon, so that the wider stakeholder consultation on pending legislative proposals can be conducted long before the 8 week formal consultation process begins.
I am also glad to see that David Cameron has decided to take a leaf out of Germany’s book with regard to the question of sovereignty. Believe it or not, we may yet owe our salvation to the ruling of Germany's highest constitutional court. The German constitutional court in Karlsruhe took a long hard look at the Lisbon Treaty and back in June last year, while our attention was diverted by the Westminster expenses scandal and the European elections, they ruled that the German President could not sign the Treaty until the Bundestag had passed a specific act re-affirming German pre-eminence over Europe.
This robust and un-compromising judgement stated unequivocally that the German courts must always take precedence over the European courts, that the German Parliament must always take precedence over the European Parliament and that basically, when it comes to the EU, Germany must always come first. This Karlsruhe interpretation of the Treaty very eloquently demolished the old idea that EU law and EU decision take priority over all the Member States. It was almost like a declaration of war on the Lisbon Treaty.
In fact the German judges went on to explain that in their view the European Parliament is terminally undemocratic and therefore cannot be allowed to take decisions on behalf of the citizens of Europe. Their reasoning was simple. It only takes 67,000 Maltese to elect an MEP, whereas it takes 455,000 Swedes and 857,000 Germans....which is roughly about the same number as it takes to elect an MEP in Scotland, by the way.
All of this, as you can imagine, has come as a bit of a political bombshell to the Euro elite. The last place they expected to have their pet project derailed was Germany. So David Cameron has said that the new coalition government in Britain will propose a Sovereignty Bill which will mirror exactly what the German Constitution Court has recommended. In this way, we will re-assert the pre-eminence of Westminster over Brussels and even seek to claw back sovereignty in key areas such as the Social Chapter. The coalition agreement also includes a clause requiring the approval of the British electorate in a referendum before any legislation is introduced which would seek to increase the functions of the EU in a way that would affect the UK.
So, as we fight the mackerel war with Iceland and the Faroe Islands and fend off attempts to introduce an EU wide taxation policy, our European Conservatives & Reformists Group has its work cut out. We are pioneering the completion of the Single Market and demanding less regulation. We are also pushing for effective controls on immigration and supporting steps leading to a common energy market and energy security. Our group has at last given a voice to the millions of EU citizens who do not want to see the creation of a European Federal Superstate. The European Union is at a crossroads, yet a large number of people still hesitate to acknowledge that fact. The old post-war Schuman-Monnet concept does not fit with the new challenges of the 21st century. The federalist idea of “ever closer union”, which has been the driving force of the European integration process for the past 50 years, has p[roved not to be the sustainable way forward. It has been exhausted. Neither “the bigger the better” nor the “one size fits all” are valid concepts any longer.
Our objective is to identify a new definition of cooperation among European nations. There is a need for a new equilibrium between powers exercised at the EU level and the responsibilities of Member States. This approach should strike the right balance between ensuring the EU has the means and ability to deal with the issues that affect all Member States while protecting their national sovereignty.
