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Open letter to Denis MacShane - Minister for Europe
House of Commons Westminster London SW1A 0AA Dear Mr McShane I was very disappointed to read your remarks on euro-sceptics, whom you said were xenophobes and isolationists, hated the French and Germans, and were replaying the Second World War. It is not so much that your remarks are gratuitously insulting to a large number of decent and fair-minded people. We have all been in politics long enough to accept gratuitous insults as par for the course. My concern centres on your wilful and woeful failure to understand the true motivation of euro-sceptics, which implies your inability to enter into meaningful debate about these issues at all. This is an alarming failing in a Minister for Europe. Euro-sceptics are the true internationalists. We recognise that Britain is a great global trading nation, that our patterns of trade and investment are far more externalised, far more international, than those of continental countries. We are keen to have strong and co-operative trading links with Europe, but we do not want to be locked-in preferentially to any one trading bloc, least of all to a bloc which (as the EU Commission itself admits) is set to decline dramatically in terms of its share of world trade over coming decades. Least of all to a bloc which is over-governed, over-taxed, over-borrowed, which is protectionist, inward-looking, self-referential. We support and admire nations all around the world which seek to establish independence and self-determination. Yet when the British people ask for no less, you accuse them of narrow nationalism and xenophobia. Shame on you. Yours sincerely, ROGER HELMER |