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		Better Off Out Campaign for an Independent Britain - Saturday, 28th April 2005 - Emmanuel Hall, Westminster Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen I am delighted to be here today at this meeting, and sitting along side this distinguished panel that we see here. I am particularly happy to be on the same platform as Doug Nicholls, because Doug Nicholls is a trade unionist, and I'm sure that Doug and I would disagree over many, many issues. But ladies and gentlemen we agree about the big issue. We agree that the British people have the capacity, and the right, and the duty, and the manifest destiny to govern themselves in a free and independent nation. Now I was first elected in 1999, and casting our minds back those 7 years, the big issue that seemed to be facing us then was the issue of the Euro currency. There were many people who said we ought to join. Indeed, they issued dreadful warnings of what would happen if we failed to join the euro currency. Poor little Sterling would be volatile, and would bob about on angry seas between the dollar on one hand and the euro on the other hand. Britain would lose inward investment, and all those people building car factories and so on would go and build them in Europe. And of course, our financial services business, our city of London which is so important to our economy; it would lose all its business which would migrate to Frankfurt. Of course the good thing about warnings like that is that you can only make them once, and we now have the privilege of looking back with 20/20 hindsight, and we see not only that those predictions were wrong, but they were diametrically wrong. In fact, Sterling has been more stable against a basket of foreign currencies than the euro has been, to the benefit of British economy. Far from losing inward investment, Britain continues to be the most popular destination in Europe for foreign direct investment. And far from losing financial services to Frankfurt, the City goes from strength to strength. The euro currency in fact is a slow motion rail crash, and we are privileged to stand outside it and watch it happen. And it does look rather as though the first carriage to hit the buffers is going to be Italy. Now do you know that the European Union's own Commissioner on monetary affairs, Mr Joaquin Almunia, has actually said that he doubted Italy could survive in the eurozone. Think about it: a European Commissioner saying that Italy may not survive in the eurozone! That's like the Pope expressing doubts about God! It's an extraordinary fact that the Hong Kong Shanghai bank, one of the biggest banks in the world, has expressed the view that Italy would be better off outside the euro. I think they're right, and I think we're better off outside the euro as well. In fact if you look at our unemployment figures in Britain they're running at half the level of those in France and Germany. So much for the euro's beneficial economic effects. And yet, John Prescott was reported in the press recently as saying he wants to resume preparations for Britain to join the single currency! Now which planet is he on!? I tell you, I have a message for John Prescott: We've been there, we've seen the movie, and we know how it ends! And like most European projects, it ends in tears. And we ain't gonna vote for that! Now the title of today's meeting is "Better Off Out". Why is Britain better off out of the European Union? Well I believe that the European Union is prejudicing our prosperity, it is undermining our democracy, and increasing-ly it is threatening our security. Now I'd like to take those points one at a time: Prosperity I've got a confession to make. I have changed my mind. I know that politicians aren't supposed to change their minds; they're accused of U-turns, aren't they? But back in 1999 I recognised many of the problems and difficulties with the European project, but I thought at the very least, we got a benefit from free trade in the Single Market. Indeed I remember during the euro-campaign, one of my co-candidates from the East Midlands came to me and said: "Roger I've got a problem, can you help me"? So I said "Of course, if I can". And she said "I was at a Conservative meeting last night, and gave a robust Eurosceptic speech, and they loved it. They lapped it up, and they clapped and clapped afterwards. But then somebody got up and asked: If the European Union is as bad as you say, why are we still members?" And she said "Roger, I didn't know how to answer them". I said at the time "Well it's easy", (glib answer), "You say, well we understand all these problems within the European Union, but at least we get the benefit of trade in the Single Market". But I have changed my mind on that, and let me tell you why. Let's take a very simple scenario, and it's a worst-case scenario in economic terms. Imagine we were to leave the European Union, and make no special arrangement at all in terms of trade. Now as I say that's a worst-case scenario. If we leave the European Union (or should I say when we leave the European Union!), we will very readily, in my view, negotiate a free trade agreement. But imagine the worst-case -- that we didn't. We would then have to pay duty, the common external tariff, on all goods that we exported from Britain to Europe. But in fact the total duty we would pay under that arrangement in the course of a year, would be less than our net contributions to the European budget. So even in those simplistic worst-case terms, we should be Better Off Out. In reality of course we should negotiate a free trade agreement, so there would be no duty penalty at all. Now beyond that, there is of course the cost of regulation. We all know about the welter of regulation (if we had more time I could talk about it for an hour and a half), the torrent of directives which is garrotting the neck of the British economy. I'd like to quote somebody to you who doesn't have a strong reputation as a eurosceptic, and that's Mr Peter Mandelson. Mr Peter Mandelson, who as you know is now our British Trade Commissioner in the European Commission. He was addressing the CBI recently, and he gave an estimate for the benefit of trade access to the Single Market. He reckoned the benefit was worth 1.8% of GDP. And in the same speech he talked about the costs of EU regulation. He said that the costs of over-regulation were about 4% of GDP. Now Ladies and Gentlemen, it's some 40 years since I got my mathematics degree, but I can still work out that 4 is bigger than 1.8! So even in those terms, we are worse off as members. And again we talk about free trade in the Single Market, but the Single Market is not a Free Trade Area, it's a Customs Union, and without getting too technical on the macro-economics, I can tell you that all round the world there is overwhelming evidence that Free Trade Areas work extremely well, while Customs Unions, which are a very old fashioned 19th century concept, work much less well, and the result of that is that we are locked into an old fashioned system. And because we are locked into this system, our economy is unduly focussed on one area of the world which is in relative economic decline. This is by no means an extreme eurosceptic position. The OECD and the EU Commission itself agree that, looking 20 or 30 years ahead, the EU loses share of world trade and slips back relative to America and to Asia. This is for a whole range of reasons, mainly demographics, but also the negative effects of the euro and the European social model. We are choosing to link ourselves exclusively, or at least preferentially, to an area of the world which is in relative economic decline. Does that sound like a smart policy? Of course not. And I want to make another point which again is slightly technical, but please bear with me. This is about the pattern of the EU's trade agreements. The EU has free trade agreements with many countries all around the world, and is negotiating with others. Indeed it is easier to give you a list of countries with which the EU is not developing free trade arrangements. And that list is very interesting: I'll tell you who's on it: There's America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Sri Lanka. Do you notice a pattern here? It is what we like to call the Anglosphere, or former British colonies. Now does that matter, you may say? Well yes it does, because for a whole range of historic and linguistic and cultural reasons, we do a disproportion-ate amount of our international trade with the Anglosphere, with former British colonies. So if we find that the EU's trade structure is biased against those very countries, then it is working against our interests. I am convinced therefore that the EU trade arrangements are bad for our economy and bad for prosperity. It's very interesting, by the way, that if you look at EU countries which are not in the eurozone, you find that on average they are doing substantially better than those that are in the eurozone. And if you look at European countries (and there are some of them) that aren't in the EU, they are overwhelmingly doing better than the average of EU countries. Countries for example like Iceland, Norway and Switzerland, which are not in the EU, are doing very much better than the EU average. Now of course the apologists to the EU say "Well of course you can't talk about Iceland, they've got fish". And so did we have, until we gave it away to Brussels, and let the Spanish rape our North Sea fisheries. They say you can't compare us to Norway; Norway's got oil. And so did we, in fact we've still got it, and the European Energy policy is pressing to give Brussels control over that too. And then they say, you can't mention Switzerland; Switzerland is an international banking centre! Well excuse me, what is the City of London supposed to be? We have had all of those benefits, and we could be doing equally well. It's worth noting that little Switzerland does two and a half times more exports, on a per capita basis, to the European Union than Britain does. You don't need to be an EU member in order to trade with it. Japan and America trade very successfully with the EU, and last time I checked neither Japan nor America was a member. On top of all that, ladies and gentlemen there is a series of studies by highly reputable economic commentators and think-tanks, not least the Trade Commission of the US Congress, on the cost benefit/analysis of member-ship. And virtually every one of those studies concludes that we would be certainly no worse off, and very probably better off, if we were out. By the way, I should like at this point to commend the work of a number of parliamentarians, most notably Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who have asked the government and the Treasury if they will prepare a cost/benefit analysis of our membership, and of course they won't. What reason do they give? They say "Well the benefits of EU membership are self-evident". I say to you today: if the benefits are self-evident, why will they not tell us what they are!? In fact of course the reason they won't do the cost/benefit analysis is because they know perfectly well that the result will be negative, from their point of view. That is why I believe that in terms of our national prosperity, we are Better Off Out. Democracy We then come to the question of democracy. I believe that the EU is undermining our democracy. Do you all remember the story of the Emperors New Clothes? The crowd was watching the Emperor, and each member of that crowd individually could see that the Emperor had no clothes, but each individual thought that all the others could see that clothes. So nobody would admit that they were unable to see the clothes, until the innocent young boy put up his hand and shouted "The Emperor's got no clothes!". And suddenly they realised that they'd been had. It's a bit like that in Europe. In fact it's especially like that in continental countries. We in Britain at least have some eurosceptic media to provide balance. In Europe, most media are committed to the European project, so you can imagine all the Frenchmen harbouring private doubts (and French women) about the European project, but looking at the press, listening to their politicians and thinking there must be something wrong with them to have these doubts. And then suddenly the "Little Boy Moment" came, and it was called a Referendum, and it happened last year, and in the privacy of the polling booths, 50 something percent of the French voters voted NO to the European Constitution. Suddenly they realised that it was not just them privately, quietly having doubts about the European project, but the doubts are widespread. And thank heaven, days afterwards the Dutch voted and guess what? They got a very similar result. In fact they got an even stronger NO vote. But doesn't this show the contempt of the European elites for the views of ordinary people? Because as our Chairman has rightly said, they have not given up, they have not gone away, they are bringing it back by every possible means. With or without a referendum, they are determined to have their Constitution. But they've got form on this. They did it in Denmark in 1992 with Maastricht; they did it in Ireland in 2000 with Nice. If you get the wrong answer in the Referendum, you're just told to go away and keep voting until you get the right answer. There is no "democracy at the European level", to use their wretched cant phrase. And I'll tell you why. You can have elections and votes in Europe. You can count up the votes, but when you count the votes that is merely arithmetic -- it's not democracy. Democracy requires a group of people who are content to be governed together. In fact a "demos", to use the Greek term. Let me give you my favourite quotation from John Stewart Mill, from the 19th Century: "Where peoples lack fellow feeling, and especially when they read and speak different languages, the common public opinion necessary for representative government cannot exist". Now John Stewart Mill was writing in the 19th Century, but what he said is abundantly true in the 21st Century of the European Union. I said earlier that I didn't expect I would always agree with Doug Nichols. And I tell you what: I don't always agree with Tony Benn either. But I agreed with Tony Benn when he said "The test of a democracy is, can you fire the people who make your laws?" Here in Britain, we can (and I hope we will before too long!). But in Europe you can't. Voting doesn't make a difference. People know that their vote will merely change the shifting alliances and coalitions in just one of the three or four governing institutions of the European project. That is why fewer people vote in the European elections than in TV reality shows like the Big Brother house. Democracy is being undermined by Europe. So on the grounds of democracy, freedom and independence, we are also Better Off Out. National Security Do you now there are still people who tell me that the EU has kept the peace in Europe for the last 60 years? The hell it has! I'll tell you what's kept the peace in Europe for the last 60 years: it's the Trans-Atlantic Alliance, it's NATO. It was for a long time the nuclear deterrent, it was 100,000 GIs in Germany. It wasn't the European Commission that pulled down the Berlin wall and dissolved the USSR. It was the commitment and steadfastness of people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who did that...[applause] Thank you. I would like to applaud Margaret Thatcher too. What a lady! But the European Union is animated by a strong sense of anti-Americanism. It is keen to pull back from NATO and to distance itself from the Trans-Atlantic Alliance. It has a pathetic need to Grandstand, to pretend that anything the Americans can do, we can do. The euro is meant to be a European copy of the Dollar. They're unhappy about the Americans GPS -- Global Positioning System -- so they must have one of their own called Galileo, which will merely duplicate the American system, and will cost a fortune. But they can't really afford it, so they've got China and Russia involved in setting it up. Can you imagine a future confrontation, perhaps across the Taiwan Strait, where on the one side you've got the Chinese with a European GPS, and on the other side the Americans with the American GPS? I don't think that would do the Trans-Atlantic relationship any good at all. But of course when it comes to European security, the European Union is great on plans and structures and position papers and staff colleges and strategy documents. It's just not quite so good on men, tanks, guns, ships and the general hardware you need to fight a war. That's how it's undermining our security. Again, we would be Better Off Out. So are there any arguments in favour of the European Union? I hope I have demolished some of them. Those who support the project would tell us if we leave we will become "isolated and marginalised". In fact if they're feeling rude they will tell us we are little Englanders and Xenophobes. This is a classic piece of mendacious duplicity. It is a false dichotomy. They are saying either you must give up the governance of your country to foreign bureaucrats in Brussels, or else you will be isolated and marginalised. Let me briefly remind you that we are the 4th or 5th largest economy in the world; we are the 3rd or 4th global trading nation; we are the 2nd largest global investor; we are permanent members of the UN Security Council; we are influential members of the G7, the World Bank, the OECD; we are key players in NATO; we are the leading country in the Commonwealth. Yet they come to us and tell us that we will be "isolated and marginalised" unless we outsource our governance to Brussels? It would be funny if it were not insulting. It is simply outrageous.