_____________________________

 

 

We never see our bloody MEP's!

 

__________________________________________

It's AGM time again. I'm at Winchester tonight, Maidstone tomorrow, Henley the next day (followed by a dash across country to address a dinner in Beaconsfield) and Lewes the day after that. And so on up to Easter. After that, the Euro-campaign proper begins.

"We never see our MEPs," people complain and, of course, they've got a point. Let's say I managed to speak to 100 people a day every day for a year. I'd still only have spoken to 0.06 per cent of the residents of my vast Euro-region. The others might protest, with perfect justice, that they had no intention of voting for someone whom they'd never met.

I happened to be in my office on Sunday afternoon when the phone rang. It was an irate constituent from Epsom. He'd had enough of us bloody Euro-MPs, he said. He was convinced we were all on the take and he couldn't even get hold of us when he wanted.

I pointed out that he had got hold of me at his first attempt at 4.00 pm on a Sunday, but he wasn't going to let a little detail like that put him off. "I'm not just talkin' about you, I'm talkin' about the 'ole sodding lot o' yer." Again, he had a point.

It's all Tony Blair's fault. In one of those small but irritating reforms designed to align our constitutional model with the Continental, he abolished Euro-constituencies in 1999 and replaced them with monstrous regions. Mine, South East England, contains over six million voters and, although I reckon I've spoken at more than 1200 public meetings since I was elected, most of these people could reasonably complain: "We never see our MEPs".

It's hardly surprising that some MEPs take the view that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. If everyone is going to complain about their absence anyway, why not in fact be absent?

The answer, in my case, is two-fold. First, because constituency visits are a kind of massive rolling focus group: even though you might get around only a small proportion of your constituents, if they are a representative sample, you get a fair sense of what people are thinking. Second - and I realise how priggish this sounds - because I feel I ought to.

Still, let's not kid ourselves. The underlying reason that people don't feel connected to the European Parliament is that they don't think of themselves as Europeans. Their chief affinity, their primary loyalty, is to their nation.

The European Parliament's response is to try to make people more European. But I'm old fashioned enough to believe that we should suit our institutions to the people, not the other way around. Ultimately, that will mean scrapping the European Parliament, and pushing its powers down to national or, better, local level.

 

DANIEL HANNAN, our Euro M.P. -  THERE WILL NEVER BE A GOOD TIME TO JOIN THE EURO

The slide in the pound has Euro-enthusiasts slavering with anticipation. “Calls for the euro are likely to reach fever pitch if there is a collapse in sterling,” writes Roland Rudd, chairman of a pro-euro lobby group, in the London Evening Standard. “Suddenly membership of the euro is beginning to look a very attractive escape route,” agrees Will Hutton in The Observer.

Hang on, chaps: weren’t you arguing that we should join eighteen months ago, when the pound was more than 30 per cent more valuable than now? What if we had taken your advice then? The financial crisis in Britain could not have been cushioned by the exchange rate; it would instead have been felt in output and jobs. Rather than a 30 per cent reduction in sterling, we’d have suffered a 30 per cent reduction in wages, with a cycle of strikes and sackings as people struggled to adjust to the new reality.

Happily, being outside the euro, we are able to respond to the shock with policies determined by our own needs. We have fiscal and monetary independence, and we are using both. The cheap pound means that Britain can now price itself into the market. It makes possible an export-led recovery.

I know that the decline of sterling is painful for some of this bulletin’s overseas readers. It’s no picnic for me, either: I’m paid in sterling, and I work in Brussels and Strasbourg. But there is a reason why the pound is taking a pounding. Investors can see that Gordon Brown squandered our resources, leaving Britain with the worst deficit of any advanced economy. They know that he has committed more to the bail-out than any other country. It gives me no pleasure to say this, but the sterling crisis is a market comment on eleven-and-a-half years of Labour profligacy. The Broon, to borrow John Smith’s phrase after Black Wednesday, is “the devalued prime minister of a devalued government”.

If the ERM taught us anything, it is that there is no such thing as a permanently correct exchange rate. After Black Wednesday (or, rather, White Wednesday), Europhiles toured the studios telling anyone who would listen that “we joined at the wrong rate”. But the idea that 3 DM to the pound was too high a rate is hard to reconcile with it having been too low a rate two years before; and, sure enough, we had reached that rate again within five years.

The Hutton/Rudd arguments for joining the euro are terrifyingly similar to the arguments for joining the ERM. Then, as now, Europhiles claimed that membership would boost business. In fact, more than 100,000 firms went bankrupt during our 23 months inside the system. Then, as now, they promised that membership would create jobs. In fact, unemployment doubled to just under three million. Then, as now, they claimed that it would bring lower interest rates. But interest rates were in double figures for most of our time in the ERM – despite inflation at barely three per cent – and 1.75 million homes were overtaken by negative equity. Then, as now, they assured us that participation would bring stability. In the event, our trade-weighted exchange rate was less stable during membership than before or since.

Is there any circumstance in which these zealots would not advocate euro membership? If the pound bounces back on the basis of a recovery, will they still be whistling the same old tune? How many times do they need to be proved wrong before we stop listening?