No Eu Veto On Britain's Budget
17th June 2010
The following is a Yorkshire Post piece by Conservatives in the European Parliament Leader Timothy Kirkhope MEP printed in the paper today.
Amazingly the EU has now sought broad new powers to vet Britain's budget figures under the auspices of worrying that a Greek-style crisis could be on its way in the UK. They also want to step up surveillance of our economic calculations and statistics. Sorry gentlemen, but NON!
Mr Van Rompuy, President of the European Council, wants the EU to have first refusal on the British budget: he wants to see it before it is put to MPs and the British public. Even though the plans are still yet to be adopted, I understand Mr Van Rompuy actually asked George Osborne for a copy of the emergency budget before anyone else.
Of course European countries do need to ensure that the principles of sound monetary policy, fiscal responsibility and honest government accounting are never flagrantly disregarded again. However, I think we can learn the lessons without resorting to another extension of EU powers.
This was tried before five years ago and we were vigorous in rejecting it then, but sensing weakness in many EU capitals, and in the wake of the economic downturn and the threat to the Euro, they tried again.
In Europe, the Conservative Party has pledged to play a constructive role. We want to engage positively and frame the European debate. We want to be a key player on the European stage after many years of relative anonymity under Labour.
For our part, we fully support global and European reforms that strengthen markets, promote confidence and transparency and produce better results for businesses and households here.
But some decisions are best taken at home, by us, for us. As our Chancellor George Osborne and the Prime Minister have shown this week, we certainly won't shy away from the difficult choices needed to reform banking and financial regulation. If we don't act it is estimated that in five years time the interest we will pay on our debt alone could be around £70 billion - that’s more than we currently spend on all our schools in England, on climate change and on transport combined.
This is the awful Labour legacy left to Britain after their spending, borrowing and empire-building. Their quangos, all their bureaucracy, and all their needless waste has cost Britain dearly.
We know that the previous Government made many mistakes in its economic policy for the whole country, but Yorkshire & the Humber was particularly hard hit in terms of economic growth and unemployment. The financial services and manufacturing sectors were very badly hit, with tens of thousands of job losses.
We must work hard to restore morale in our region and Labour’s neglect must not be allowed to destroy the future chances of Yorkshire people.
I was in the last Conservative government when we had to clean up a previous Labour administration's mess. We will now have to do it again. It will not be a pleasant task but we need to cut spending and we need to get on with it urgently.
We are determined however to do it in a way that protects the poorest and most vulnerable. We must safeguard our economy and get things back onto an even keel. There are some very tough decisions ahead and non-one is saying that it is going to be easy.
This does not mean though that we can allow the EU to have the final say on Britain's tax and spending decisions. Letting them do so would have been a major victory in stripping away a key plank of our sovereignty: our right to determine what Britain needs to do to steer itself out of the treacherous economic waters that it currently finds itself in. I absolutely do not believe that this is what my constituents in Yorkshire want to happen.
The coalition government has wisely agreed that Britain will not be part of the single European Currency for at least the lifetime of this Parliament. That means that we will retain and hold on to our fiscal independence. This is a power that our neighbours across the Eurozone are, for the most part, envying in the current economic climate.
Our national parliament in Westminster is also a sovereign parliament. Whilst we don't mind sharing some information along broad parameters with our colleagues in the EU to give them a strong sense of our plans and which direction our economy is heading, as the Financial Secretary to the Treasury said this week, "There is no question of anyone other than MP's at Westminster seeing our budget first".
The EU must not be given a veto over Britain's budget.
