John McDonnell
Wokingham Times 16.3.7 Rt Hon John Redwood MP
How many of you feel like wishing the EU a happy fiftieth birthday? Judging by my post bag and the polls, many of you think the EU would do us all a favour by interfering less, wasting less, and leaving us freer to get on with our own lives.
Some say that the EU has been good because it has kept the peace in Europe over the last half century. I find that difficult to understand. I don’t think a democratic and largely disarmed Germany after 1945 would have invaded France without belonging to the EEC. Nor was democratic France likely to make military claims on Germany that they had not made when Germany lay at the allies feet in 1945 with the fall of Berlin and the effective occupation of the country by the victorious powers. Plucky Luxembourg and Belgium never wanted to attack their bigger neighbours.
The peace has been kept in western Europe by the western European countries themselves no longer wanting to go to war, backed up by the presence of very powerful US forces keen to keep the peace. The peace was kept with the east by NATO. In the last fifteen years since the end of the cold war EU forces have intervened in wars in the Balkans. Some say they have helped stabilise the area, others fear they were part of the problem.
Others say the great rise in prosperity since 1945 owes much to the EU and the common market that underlies it. This would be easier to accept if EU countries had grown more quickly than non EU countries and were now richer than them. Instead we find Switzerland and Norway, outside the EU, and the USA are all richer than EU countries and have been growing faster in recent years.
It is time the EU’s leaders started listening to the people of Britain who want a different model, and to people of Holland and France who rejected the constitution. We are happy to trade with our partners, and to be friends with them, but we don’t want to be ruled by the EU. We want less regulation. The UK does not want to join the common currency, the common army, the common foreign policy or the common criminal law code, because it does not make sense for us. If the EU got this message on its birthday, it would be happy day for us all.
