Labour Conference Blog: Is Europe part of the problem or part of the solution?
By Lucy Thomas
Rafael Behr, Stewart Wood, Will Tanner and Glenis Willmott
At a BNE fringe in Manchester last night Stewart Wood, a close advisor to Ed Miliband, said “The likelihood of David Cameron being able to renegotiate a significant number of policies with the EU is a real red herring” and that “people in the UK Representation to the EU and the Treasury say that where the UK used to have some power, we now have nothing, certainly not sufficient to satisfy the demands of the Tory right.”
At the panel on 2 October, Business for New Europe, in partnership with Aviva, asked the question, ‘Is Europe part of the problem or part of the solution?’ Using electronic voting pads BNE polled the audience before and after the event to gauge their views on Britain’s place in Europe.
The panel consisted of Lord Wood of Anfield, Shadow Cabinet minister and adviser to Ed Miliband, Austin Mitchell MP, member of Labour Euro Safeguards campaign, Glenis Willmott MEP, leader of Labour in the European Parliament and Rafael Behr, Political Editor of the New Statesman. The panel was chaired by Will Tanner, Vice Chair of Business for New Europe. Will Tanner opened the event with a series of questions designed to gauge audience opinion on Britain’s relationship with the EU. They were:
1. Is the European Union part of the solution or part of the problem to the UK’s economic and political challenges?
2. Thinking with your HEAD should the UK be in the EU?
3. Thinking with HEART should UK be in EU?
4. Should this party commit to holding a referendum on the UK’s membership of EU in its next manifesto?
5. Do you think Britain will be in the EU in 5 years’ time?
Austin Mitchell MP said that Brussels was part of the problem. He raised concerns about Britain’s EU membership, in particular the costs: “at a time when local government is facing cuts, the Commission wants an increase in the EU budget.” He said that the EU was on an “ever-permanent onward drive to ever-closer union,” run by a “plutocracy” which did not have the support of the European electorate.
Austin Mitchell said that the single currency was a flawed concept from the outset and that the huge divergence between members in terms of competitiveness and productivity made it impossible to carry on in its current form. He said that “redistribution from richer to poorer parts” was needed and that devaluation would help struggling countries recover, but is obviously impossible in a single currency.
Mitchell said that the “prescribed orthodoxy of the EU” was to “force” these countries to “deflate, cut public spending and make people suffer” and that there was a limit to how long people in these countries would put up with such measures. Austin Mitchell said that around 20 to 30 Labour MPs shared his views, adding that he believed most people approached their view of the EU like a “religious belief.”
Glenis Willmott said that eurosceptics “wrongly” blamed the Eurozone for the current economic crisis when in fact “many Eurozone economies are performing better that the UK,” adding that in “2012 growth in Spain has been better than that of the UK.”
Glenis Willmott said that Britain’s access to the single market and enormous benefits to trade offered by EU membership were undeniable and that car manufacturers she had spoken to said that they would not be happy were Britain to no longer have access to 500 million customers.
She added that, the proposition that Britain could withdraw and “be like Norway, with all the benefits and none of the problems”, was “utter rubbish” and that “In fact they have to pay all of the money but get no say in the rules.” She said that Norwegian MPs come to lobby her to try to get their view represented, as they are unable to change the rules themselves.
Glenis Willmott said that with further Eurozone integration on the horizon it was vital for Britain to be at the centre of decision making and not on the sidelines. The aftermath of David Cameron’s “veto” at the December European Council, she said, had been “really worrying,” with colleagues from other member states coming to ask her: “why don’t you leave if you don’t want to be here?”
Glenis Willmott added, when questioned, that the Labour government had not made a positive argument for our membership of the EU: “When something went well it was the government that had won it, and when it went badly it was ‘those idiots in Brussels.’”
Stewart Wood said that the Euro was a project with serious design flaws from the outset, and that during his time at the Treasury, although they had a series of tests, they had not predicted the problem of not having fiscal policy alongside monetary policy which had now proved to be so much of a problem.
He said a further problem was that there was insufficient legitimacy in the European institutions to take the necessary steps out of the crisis, and the democratic crisis posed by enforcing rules on struggling members was different to the challenges of the past. He alluded to one of the EU’s founding principles of functional legitimacy, where voters would accept the EU on the grounds that it supported “global public goods and infrastructure.”
He said that the Eurozone’s current solution, the fiscal compact, “will not work,” because it is “functional, not democratic.” The problem was, he said, that it constrained national governments and electorates without appealing to the public.
When asked about a possible referendum, Stewart Wood said he did not believe David Cameron would hold an ‘in-out’ referendum’ and that if he were to hold a referendum on some kind of renegotiation, that could not be done before any renegotiation was complete.
Finally, he warned that currently “all of the intellectual energy on Europe seems to be coming from the eurosceptics,” and that he believed the positive case for the EU needed to be made more strongly. Eurosceptics, he said, were able to attack on an emotional level; he agreed with Austin Mitchell that Europe is like a “religious belief.” Pro-Europeans had to “try to induce people about what the next 50 years in Europe will look like,” not go down the path of “assembling a dossier” to make a purely rational, factual case.
Rafael Behr described himself as a “despairing pro-European.” He said that there was a problem in the way that the pro-European case had been made, and that what Mitchell had said about ‘elitism’ and a ‘cultural arrogance’ in the EU institutions was right.
He added that Britain is “clearly on a trajectory to be in the outer tier of the EU” and that so far there is no convincing evidence current changes will not affect the single market and Britain’s place in it.
ELECTRONIC VOTING RESULTS
1. Is the European Union part of the solution or part of the problem to the UK’s economic and political challenges?
BEFORE: solution 91% / problem 9%
AFTER: solution 91% / problem 9%
2. Thinking with your HEAD should the UK be in the EU?
BEFORE: yes 97% / no 3%
AFTER: yes 97% / no 3%
3. Thinking with your HEART should the UK be in the EU?
BEFORE: yes 90% / no 10%
AFTER: yes 97% / no 3%
4. Should this party commit to holding a referendum on UK’s membership of EU in its next manifesto?
BEFORE: yes 26% / no 74%
AFTER: yes 26% / no 74%
5. Do you think Britain will be in the EU in 5 years’ time?
BEFORE: in 95% / out 5%
AFTER: in 100% / out 0%
