Commission Work Programme 2013

Chris Heaton-Harris Excerpts

Monday 7th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

As a member of the European Scrutiny Committee, I am partly responsible—I suppose—for bringing this document to the House, so it is important that I say a few words.

The word “work” will have great appeal to the millions of European citizens currently without work, but that is the problem, because none of the many initiatives in the document addresses the immediate economic crisis in the EU or the eurozone and will not solve the problem in the longer term either. We have mass unemployment and we have economic contraction in a number of countries, and more austerity is being inflicted on Greece. Apparently, Greece’s economy is expected to contract by another 10%—God knows what is going to happen in Greece after that. Spain is in serious difficulty and Portugal is going to inflict on its people a fire sale of public assets; it will simply be selling off the family silver at the pawnbroker’s and that will solve nothing in the long term once the money is spent, as it will be. Other countries are in difficulties and there is worse to come.

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

Action 58 in the Commission’s work programme deals proposes a

“Comprehensive Approach to Crisis Management outside the EU”.

The document says:

“The European Union more than any other international actor, has a unique array of tools at its disposal to promote the resolution of complex external crises.”

It is said that experience can be learned from, and I guess that the European Commission does have a lot of experience and a lot to teach here.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for intervening. The document talks about solving external crises, but what about solving the internal crises? The European Commission has not shown much ability to do that. The problem is that it has inflicted supply-side measures—most of these are supply-side measures to try to deal with the economic problems—whereas the real difficulty is a serious lack of economic demand. That is the deficiency and macro-economic policy is the problem, as it is failing and is, in most cases, completely misguided. Item 1 in the document refers to an “Annual Growth Survey”—perhaps that ought to be re-titled the “Annual Contraction Survey”.

Item 6 makes the only reference in the whole list to the

“importance of a sound macroeconomic framework”.

I absolutely agree with the importance of that, but there is no sign of such a framework as yet. Indeed, we have the opposite: co-ordinated deflation driving the EU towards deeper recession. Thank goodness this country is somewhat to the side of that. We will of course lose if—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mark Hendrick) is intervening from a sedentary position, but I cannot quite hear what he is saying. The euro is the primary problem; Greece, Italy, Spain and a number of other countries ought to be able to recreate their own currencies, to depreciate and to reflate behind that.