Friday, 27th November 2009
Speech to Dumfries Conservative Christmas Lunch
Ladies & Gentlemen,
It is a great pleasure to be once again with you in Dumfries and let me start by thanking you sincerely for the hard work you undertook during the European elections this year.
We had an enormously successful campaign. The Conservatives won the Euro elections right across the UK and indeed right across Europe. Based on our results in Scotland, we would have won six seats at a Westminster election. That is the opinion poll that counts. Labour was trounced. We swept the board in England and came top of the poll in Wales for the first time in almost a century! A brilliant result.
In the European Parliament we have formed our new ECR Group. We have a total of 54 MEPs from the UK, Poland, the Czech Republic and a smattering of other countries. We are robustly anti-federalist. That was the purpose of setting up our new group. That is why we left the centrist EPP-ED Group, because, always dominated by the Germans, they were too keen to do deals with the socialists and to pursue their dream of a United States of Europe. That is one dream we have never shared. Indeed we regard it as more of a nightmare.
But even although we have left the EPP Group, the combined forces of our former EPP colleagues and ourselves, together with the other non-aligned centre-right MEPs, gives us an overall majority in the House, able to defeat the combined leftist ranks of socialists, liberals, greens and communists.
Well, we are seeing some exciting developments in the EU. Only last week we saw the unedifying spectacle of the coronation of the pygmies in Brussels! This was the stitch-up by the 27 Prime Ministers, over a lavish dinner in the Council of Ministers palatial offices that resulted in two virtually unknown Eurocrats being elevated into the top jobs in Europe under the terms of the newly approved Lisbon Treaty. I am referring, of course, to the announcement that the new President of Europe is none other Herman Van Rompuy, while the High Representative for Foreign Affairs is Baroness Cathy Ashton.
Their appointment to these high offices came as little surprise to those of us who watch the Eurocrats at work on a daily basis. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, effectively run the show and bully all of the other leaders into submission. They decided early on that Tony Blair carried too much political baggage and in any case, would overshadow them on the world stage…which would never do. He was therefore a non-starter, despite the fact that Gordon Brown kept pressing his case right up until the last minute. Merkel and Sarkozy decided that they didn’t want someone as President of Europe who would ‘stop the traffic’ to quote David Milliband, so they chose the current Prime Minister of Belgium, who is so little known even in his own country that he would be hard-pressed to stop a taxi, never mind stop the traffic.
Van Rompuy has been Prime Minister of Belgium for less than a year. He is a deeply devout Catholic who goes into a monastic retreat annually in the Ardennes, where he apparently composes Haiku or Japanese-style poems. He is an arch federalist and only last week addressed a meeting of the shadowy Bilderberg Group in Brussels where he called for a Europe-wide system of Green taxes to pay for Brussels’ expanding bureaucracy and the soaring welfare costs of countries like Belgium. Apparently Henry Kissinger attended the Bilderberg dinner in Brussels last week, so he will now know the answer to his famous question “Who do you phone when you want to speak to Europe?” The answer, Mr Kissinger, is: “You phone Herman Van Rompuy!”
Side by side with this towering new appointment, Europe’s 500 million anxious citizens were told that they had a new Foreign Minister, or High Representative for Foreign Affairs, to use her correct title. This proved to be none other than Baroness Cathy Ashton, former Treasurer of CND, whom MI5 had under surveillance as a suspected Communist sympathiser! Baroness Ashton has never been elected to anything. She was the Chair of Hertfordshire Health Authority before being elevated to the House of Lords as a Labour apparatchik. As Labour’s Leader in the Lords, she steered through the debate on the Lisbon Treaty, ensuring that the manifesto pledge to give the people of Britain a say in a referendum was buried.
Less than a year ago she was sent to Brussels to take over from Peter Mandelson as Trade Commissioner, when he was recalled to Britain to join Gordon Brown’s Cabinet. She was chosen cynically by Brown simply because he wished to avoid the prospect of a by-election had he given the Brussels post to a sitting Labour MP. She is still virtually unknown in Brussels and is certainly totally unknown internationally and has little or no grasp of foreign affairs. Nevertheless, this Brownite quangocrat who apparently keeps a life-sized Dalek in her living room and is a great fan of science fiction, is now ensconced in a marble palace in the heart of Brussels, with 20 immediate staff at her beck and call. She is in charge of EU 130 embassies worldwide and more than 6000 staff. She will be able to sign Treaties on behalf of the EU without recourse to the Member States. In other words, she is in a hugely powerful position.
How did all this come about? Of course Gordon Brown hailed it all as a great success. He claimed that seizing one of the two top jobs for Britain proved that the UK was still “in the heart of Europe.” In fact the truth is a lot shabbier and represents not a victory, but a disgraceful sellout of British interests by Brown. If you recall that only a few weeks ago, Tony Blair was regarded as the favourite for the job of EU President. Support was building amongst many of the EU’s prime ministers, particularly the more Anglophile leaders from Eastern Europe. Even Sarkozy had hinted that he would like to see his old pal Tony in the top job. Merkel had to move fast. She called Sarko to Berlin and quickly put him in his place, deciding that they should both back the unknown Belgian Van Rompuy.
Next Sarko was despatched to placate Brown by offering him a deal. If he gave up his campaign for Blair to be President of Europe, Britain could have the No.2 position of Foreign Minister. However, as with all deals in Europe, there were serious strings attached.
According to France’s leading newspaper Le Monde – in a straight tit-for-tat deal, Brown was forced to agree that he will support the appointment of former French Cabinet Minister Michel Barnier to the hugely influential role of Internal Market Commissioner. Barnier is an arch protectionist and has previously called for the UK to give up our £3 billion annual rebate. He is also a fan of harmonised taxes across the EU. He wants a federal system of taxation to underpin the Euro, similar to the way the US tax system underpins the dollar. This would be the final trapping of power for the federalists. They already have their single currency, their central bank, their European Army, their supreme court, their flag and their anthem. All that is missing in their master-plan for a Federal United States of Europe is democracy! So Brown’s dirty deal might ultimately cost us our rebate and lead to an EU wide tax system. A shabby night’s work indeed!
Now each MEP has received a letter informing us that the approval of the Lisbon Treaty will require an additional 200 staff to be employed by the European Parliament. I can assume that this will be mirrored by an extra 200 in the European Commission and perhaps another 200 in the European Council of Ministers. So, at a time of austerity and recession, the Lisbon Treaty will provide us with another 600 Eurocrats, at an average salary of around £65,000 per year or a total annual extra staffing bill of £39 million. An entire new regiment of desk jockeys to plan ways of interfering in our lives!
So these are the pygmies that now run Europe and dangerous pygmies they may well turn out to be. We warned that this would happen after the Irish were bullied into voting YES in their second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
The Eurocrats like to put it about that the Irish saw sense and voted YES because they had been re-assured on issues like Ireland's neutrality and abortion and promised that they would always keep their Irish Commissioner. In fact that was only half the story. The Irish economy was hit for six during the recent economic recession. The country was bankrupt and the European Central Bank pumped 92 billion Euros into the Irish banks to prop them up and save them from collapse. The Irish were told in no uncertain terms that if they voted NO, the ECB would seek to claw back that money without delay, leaving Ireland destitute. Another potato famine loomed! It was pure blackmail. That's the real reason why Ireland voted YES. They were scared into doing so.
The same thing happened to President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic. Although President Klaus is an arch Euro-sceptic and firmly believes that the Lisbon Treaty will harm Europe and harm the Czech Republic, he was mercilessly bullied into signing up. The Germans warned him that they would ensure that the Czech Republic got no seat at all in the new European Commission and that once again all of the support pumped in Czech banks by the ECB would be withdrawn, leaving the country bankrupt.
Whenever the Czech Republic signed, there was immediately a mad rush to implement the Treaty lock, stock and barrel, with the appointment of the EU President and Foreign Minister, top of the agenda. This was why David Cameron quite rightly said that there was no longer any point in the UK holding a referendum on Lisbon. It is a done deal.
But don’t despair. David Cameron has a cunning plan! 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, 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. I wrote a lengthy newspaper article about this phenomenon, a copy of which I sent to William Hague and David Cameron, suggesting that they ask Britain's leading constitutional judges to take a close look at the German court's findings. I suggested that in the event the Lisbon Treaty is ratified by all 27 Member States before we come to power, this may be well be the answer to our problems. We could legally challenge the right of the EU institutions to take precedence over decisions taken in our parliament and in our courts. We could even, on that basis, seek to claw back sovereignty and re-negotiate our position in Europe.
The same day that David Cameron announced he was abandoning plans for a referendum in Britain, he outlined that this is indeed the path that he will follow. He has said that a new Conservative administration at Westminster 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.
I see this as a brilliant and decisive move which throws the weight of our legal establishment behind the primary need to define the ultimate sovereignty of our parliament over that of the EU institutions.
And for those pessimists who complain that a Conservative government will not be able to claw back aspects of the Social Chapter which have been so damaging to our economy and working practices I say this: Britain is one of the biggest contributors to the EU budget. There is an old adage that he who pays the piper calls the tune. I am confident that just as Maggie Thatcher successfully handbagged the Eurocrats and won a massive budget rebate for Britain, so David Cameron will be able to re-negotiate the UK opt-out from the working time directive and other harmful bits of socialist dogma.
In the meantime, after years of robust campaigning, Conservatives are poised to win the repatriation of fisheries management to the Member States. We have finally managed to convince the European Commission that years of micro-management from Brussels has had a catastrophic impact on our fisheries sector, destroying jobs and fish stocks alike. The recently published Commission Green Paper on CFP reform actually opens the door for the devolution of day to day management of our fishing industry back to the Member States and from them, down to the stakeholders – the fishermen themselves.
So all is not lost in Europe! Do not despair. David Cameron has outlined a pragmatic and robust policy which will put the UK back in the driving-seat of EU politics. The very fact that a French Minister attacked Cameron in such virulent terms yesterday simply proves that we must be doing something right!
So our new ECR Group has its work cut out. We need to defend Britain against the protectionism of the French and the encroaching Euro-federalism that the Lisbon Treaty embodies. We will continue the fight for more openness, accountability and democracy, in a way that respects the sovereignty of our nations and concentrates on economic recovery, growth and competitiveness.
At long last the anti-federalists in Europe have got a voice. You will be hearing a lot more from us in the months ahead. But let me end by quoting George W. Bush: He famously said in his clumsy way "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure!" The way Labour has fiddled the boundaries over the past 12 years means that they only need to score a draw at the general election to form a government. We need to gain a majority of 2 million votes to form a government. That is the extent of the challenge ahead of us. We need a swing of more than 8% from Labour to Conservative. No Party has achieved a swing of that magnitude since Clement Attlee in 1945.
So there is no room for even the tiniest morsel of complacency. We have hard work to do. The country has a straightforward choice. We can either have Gordon Brown or David Cameron as our next Prime Minister. Alex Salmond, the SNP, the Lib Dems, the Greens and UKIP are completely irrelevant. A vote for any of them will simply hand victory to Labour. Britain cannot survive another five years of Labour. Let's vote for change.
