Transcript
Damian Chalmers (0:00)
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming to this, the latest in the LSE European Institute ACPO Perspectives on Europe series. I'm Damian Chalmers, head of the European Institute here at the lsc and for today's event it's a great pleasure to welcome Chris Bryant, the British Minister for Europe. Now, it's a particular pleasure because it's wonderful to welcome a Minister for Europe who not only has a Europe in hinterland but other hinterlands. And Chris was Head of European affairs at the BBC. He was also chair of the Labour movement for Europe. So he's had an interest and a passion for this topic way before his ministerial appointment. But he also has, and I think this is equally important, other hinterlands that are particularly significant. He spent time in the Church, has also spent time on the Culture and Media Committee and has had a particular interest in constitutional reform, particularly working on reform of the House of Lords. He will be speaking for, well, probably about half an hour and then we'll take questions. Happy to welcome him to the platform. Thank you very much for coming here.
Chris Bryant (1:20)
Thanks very much. I'm a bit disturbed by having this blue light pointing directly at my eyes. I could at least have a Labour red light. And I'm always a bit embarrassed when I hear about my past life because it feels a bit as if my. I've never managed to hold down a job for more than two years really, but I'm hoping to hold this one down for a little bit longer. I should apologize for the title which. The Traitor's Kiss. I think it's because I was reading a book called the Traitor's Kiss, which is a biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who was the first person who held my post in 1782. He wasn't minister for Europe, obviously, because there wasn't a European Union and all the rest of the time. But he was the first Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He wrote a blockbuster play called Pizarro which earned him, I think something like £13,261 in 61 performances which made him the kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber of his era without the terrible music and the awful politics. So I apologize for the title, I'm not going to talk about the title at all. But what I am here to do is to talk about the profound and irremediable damage I believe that British Euroscepticism does to the British interest and to argue for a far more ambitious British approach within the European Union to our trading and political relations with the growing World economies. Now, I fully accept that that's not quite how the Eurosceptics see it. They believe that they are the sole doughty defenders of the British interest and that it is successive British governments under Brown, Blair, major and even Mrs. Thatcher who signed up to the Single European act who have betrayed Britain. They argue that we have destroyed a thousand years of British history, that Europe draws up 90% of our legislation, that membership of the European Union was sold to us in the UK's 1975 referendum as merely an economic free trade association and never as a political union, that our membership of the union is inordinately expensive and that Westminster, the ancient seat of English liberties, is completely neutered by Brussels. So they say. What is genuinely distressing about these Eurosceptic arguments is that they are so historically inaccurate. Some of you in the room may remember the book 1066 and all that from the early 20th century, which was a kind of version of British history, which was everything that you could remember about British history. And it feels to me that this is the kind of history that the Eurosceptics have gone for in 1066. And all that kings were either a good thing with a capital G and a capital T or a bad thing with a capital B and a capital T. At the end of the book, the United States became top nation again, Capital T, capital N. And my favorite moment was the description of the Reformation and the creation of the Church of England was. And the Pope and all his followers seceded from the C of E. So let me just put some facts straight for our Eurosceptic friends. Britain is no less British by virtue of being a member of the European Union. Nor is France less French, or Italy rather less Italian. Barely a tenth of UK legislation actually is a direct transposition of EU law. Our Parliament still determines how to incorporate every single element of EU legislation into our own laws. And our courts determine how the European Convention on Human Rights applies in the UK under the Human Rights Act. Our contribution to the European union amounts to 1% of our national wealth. And the Union increases EU gross domestic product by approximately 2%, equating to a UK boost of 25 billion pounds a year. The Foreign Office estimates that the single market is worth the equivalent of £300 per person in terms of added value, which is nearly five times the amount per head the UK government contributes to the Union. And our membership of Europe was always sold, if that's the right word, as an economic and a political union, for the simple reason that you can never divorce economics from Politics and because at the heart of the Union lies a political belief that democracy, freedom and the pooling of national sovereignty will bring peace and prosperity to a continent that has been marred by centuries of vicious bloodshed and gross inequality. Incidentally, it's worth pointing out in parenthesis that Parliament, the British Parliament, has something of a self aggrandizing habit. We tend to think that we are the oldest representative assembly in the world. Wrong. Just in case anybody's wondering, it's Iceland's Althing, which first sat in 929. Second, we tend to think that it was the English who dreamt up the idea of an elected Parliament for England. Again, wrong. It was a Frenchman who first suggested it, Simon de Montfort. Though we tend to call him Simon de Montfort to make him sound more English. Thirdly, people suggest that the lines on the carpet in the House of Commons have been there from time immemorial to make sure that they are two swords lengths apart. So you can't draw your sword on another member. Complete and utter tosh. The first time a carpet was introduced was in 1950 and there have been never lines on the floor previous to that, as members were not allowed to bring a sword into the parliament since the 16th century. That's why we have little pegs in the coat room for us to leave our swords. Nor do the phrases toe the line, it's in the bag or on the fence come from the House of Commons. Most of them actually come from naval terminology. Ignorance, I would suggest, is no excuse in law or in politics, or for that matter, in foreign affairs. So let me try and deal with a few more urban myths. First, Britain's membership of the EU does not dismantle our history or Noosa parliament. Second, just because one supports the UK's active engagement with the European Union to does not mean that one is unpatriotic. I am every bit as proud of being British as the next person. I may have spent a few years living in Spain and in Belgium, but I like being British. I like our historic defence of personal freedom against arbitrary government. I value our peculiarly British way of doing things. And I feel a lump in my throat when Brits win medals and for that matter, in particular expectation of Saturday when Wales beats England at rugby. I just happen to believe that Euroscepticism, that the euroscepticism that is prevalent in parts of British society and which seems to have seized hold of Her Majesty's opposition like a severe bout of influenza, undermines the British interest at every single turn. It's an act of false patriotism. Third, Euroscepticism is nowhere near as dominant in the UK as many people presume. When my father first went to work in Spain in the 1950s, he was virtually a working class pioneer. Hardly anybody else from South Wales had been to Spain. Now roughly a million Brits live in Spain and 17 million visit every year. That's in a normal year. This last year because of the recession, it's been something like 11 million. Another 3 million visit Greece. My constituents in the Ronde in South Wales, many of whom work in the aeronautical industry, will travel quite happily to Germany or to France when their skills are needed there. Even our food has been transformed over the last 30 years with pizza and pasta, a mainstay of every student's life. We may sound Eurosceptic, but actually we've become steadily more European over the years. And on enlargement of the European Union we have undoubtedly been the most passionate supporters and and the most effective campaigners. There's a fourth wrong headed, but I'm sure, well, maybe well intentioned Eurosceptic argument that instead of binding ourselves to the European Union, we should spend more time building our relations with the Commonwealth and the English speaking countries. This is an argument that is regularly advanced by some of the dimmer members of the House of Commons. Of course, the Commonwealth and the English speaking world matters to us economically and politically. Over a million Brits live Today in Australia, 600,000 live each in the United States of America and in Canada and 200,000 in New Zealand. We do £12.6 billion worth of bilateral trade with India and £1 billion with Pakistan. But I just don't see this as a zero sum game. The insular mentality that constantly refers back just to the old British Empire is completely and utterly mistaken. It's mistaken historically, apart from anything else. Yes, we do more trade with the USA than our European Union neighbours do individually, but France is the single biggest, it is the second biggest investor in the uk. Yes, we have historic ties with India which we should build on, but we do also with other fast growing economies which were never part of the British Empire. We were the first country to recognize Mexico's independence. Around 300,000 British tourists visit Mexico annually and over 3,000 Mexicans come here to study each year. And at the moment in 2010, we're just celebrating the 200th anniversary of when Simon Bolivar came from Latin America to the UK to try and find finance for his liberation movement to liberate Latin America from Spanish oppression. Likewise, almost all of Brazil's 19th century inward investment came from the UK. That's why the Sao Paulo railway is nicknamed Ingleza the English, because it was constructed and run by a British company to bring coffee from the inland plateau to the Atlantic. Sadly, the son of a British railway engineer who worked on Linglese, a man called Charles Miller, introduced football to Brazil, which probably wasn't a good idea. Indeed, this influence of Britain in Latin America is true for much of the region. In Peru we didn't only receive Paddington here, but we also were the second largest investor. Indeed, we are now the second largest investor. And it was an English family, the Flemings, who developed Inca Cola, one of the few soft drinks that outsells in its native country, Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. And the Subte, the underground in Buenos Aires still runs on the British side of the road. Guess why? Because it was built by British people. So the UK should, I believe, be far more ambitious in its global pretensions. But our membership of the European Union, far from undermining that ambition, I believe gives it free reign. Let's look at the facts. In each of the four BRIC countries. The EU is the largest trading partner in Brazil and India. The EU accounts for over a fifth of total trade and Brazil is the single biggest exporter of agricultural products to the eu. The EU is also China's biggest trading partner and China is now the EU's second largest trading partner behind the USA EU. India trade doubled between 2003 and 2007, with EU investment to India tripling in the same period. And the EU is by far Russia's biggest trading partner, accounting for over half of Russia's overall trade turnover in 2008. And with three quarters of all Russia's direct foreign investment coming from the member states of the European Union. That is not to say that all in the union is rosy. Despite its many advantages, the EU has systematically, I would suggest, failed to make as many inroads into these growing economies as it could or it should. So for instance, agreements reached between Russia and the European Union on World Trade Organization accession sit unimplemented while Russia continues to introduce new, more protectionist measures. China is very hesitant about discussions on human rights, whilst EU citizens who care passionately about human rights consume hundreds of billions of euros worth of Chinese goods every year. India has so far been unable to break down both tariff barriers and non tariff barriers to trade. And we're working hard with the Indian government to improve the prospects for developing business and investment opportunities between the EU and India, but so far have not achieved much And Europe failed to get China, India and others to agree to the EU's proposals for a sustainable global deal on climate change in Copenhagen at the end of last year. So there are questions that the European Union has to face up to. We cannot afford to ignore the shortfall in the EU's ambitions. I think the problem is threefold. A when it comes to exercising harder power around the world, the EU is only as strong as its most reluctant member. So it only takes one member state to say no, or even maybe for there to be no action at all. B there's an immense temptation for each member state to pursue its own private economic or commercial interests to the exclusion of others. And C non EU states know this. So when faced with the EU trying to project its interest, countries outside the EU will focus on individual EU members and try to pick off the easiest one, the one whose commitment to the policy in question is the wobbliest. That's why the EU not only struggles to be more than the sum of its whole, but can end up sometimes being less than the sum of its whole. This is not an argument, I should say, for us to move to a system of qualified majority voting for external policy, fiscal autonomy and the right to determine one's own foreign and security policy must remain with the member states. But the EU must get better at convincing its member states of the power of a united front when it comes to external relations. And the member states, all of us, if we have a genuinely global ambition, must develop a much greater sense of discipline. We know this is possible. Faced with the global economic crisis, every member of the EU took concerted action over the last two years. And that concerted action achieved far more than action in any one country could hope for. We need a similar approach, I would argue this year, to tackling the deficits and building growth across the Union. But we also need concerted action in relation to the emerging economic giants like Russia, China, India, Brazil and Mexico. Top of the list is Russia as a whole. This the EU imports around a quarter of its gas needs from Russia. That amounts to around 118 billion euros a year and is a sizeable proportion of Russia's total exports. But different EU members import vastly different amounts. A number of EU countries import all of their gas needs from Russia, while the gas we use in the UK contains a minimal amount of Russian gas. That's why EU members such as Bulgaria, with 98% of its gas from Russia, so suffered so badly when Russian gas via the Ukraine stopped flowing into the EU in January 2009, while we in the UK were largely unaffected. Concerted action across the EU can help to mitigate the risk to individual members, but as I said, it will require real discipline. So we need to continue working on gas interconnection across the eu. We need to fully liberalize the EU energy market and we need to diversify energy supplies. This is an urgent problem and one we cannot continue to evade. That's why at the EU Russia summit in Stockholm in November, the EU agreed to an early warning mechanism on energy with Russia. It's an agreement that allows the EU to monitor developments in the Russia Ukraine gas relationship and therefore be in a better position to know of and react to any future problems. The summit showed that the EU can work better when it can work together when it comes to Russia for the benefit of both the EU and Russia. But it needs to do so more resolutely and with determination, not turning a blind eye to the very significant human rights problems there are in Russia. At the same time, at the same summit, the EU also announced a new initiative to support Russia's modernization agenda. President Medvedev has said that Russia needs to diversify its economy so that it isn't so heavily reliant on oil and gas exports. He's absolutely right. Such diversification would also benefit the eu, as it would make Russia a more stable, less asymmetric trading partner. And as the EU is Russia's largest trading partner, we're in a position to help them achieve their aims. I'm going to Russia in a week's time and I hope that part of what we can achieve over these next few months, with different visits from my counterparts as well to Russia, is a unified approach. Always making the human rights argument, always making the argument for greater openness and transparency in Russia, but also always making the argument for a better and more significant trade relationship. Second, China and India. 2008 saw China's economy growing grow larger than Germany's in nominal terms this year. It is expected to eclipse Japan within the next 15 years. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that China's economy will overtake the US to become the world's largest. China and India are now the most and the third most preferred location for inward investment around the world. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and EU. India trade doubled to over 55 billion euros between 2003 and 2007. The EU is already China and India's largest trading partner. But we cannot rely on our historic dominance. Today, Asia, not Europe as a whole, produces over 80% of all the Computers and over half of all the textiles and electronics in the world. Every time you ring a call center, there is a greater than 50% chance you'll be speaking to someone in India. And when you buy something made of plastic, the odds are that the plastic came from Malaysia. That is why 70% of recent global growth has come not from the older developed world, but from developing and emerging nations. The trend is absolutely clear. But the European Union has not mastered the business of dealing with either China or India. All too often it veers between, on the one hand, rather patronizing neocolonial attitudes and on the other, virtually supplicant messages. So if Europe wants to continue to be a key player in the world trade, it has to adapt. Third, Mexico and Brazil. Brazil is the largest beef exporter in the world, accounting for 32% of the world beef exports and expects its production and export to increase by 30% in the next seven years. It is also the world's largest exporter of coffee, sugar, soy and grain, and the second biggest exporter of poultry and pork. But Brazil remains a very protected market with many tariff and non tariff barriers to free trade. Likewise, Mexico has enormous economic potential, not least because of its northern border with the us. But many of its assets remain locked behind old legislation. In particular the petrocarbons that are probably underneath the Gulf of Mexico and need to be extracted. For Mexico to be able to succeed economically over the next 10, 15, 20 years, need inward investment from the West. But whilst they retain the legislation which ensures that everything that is underneath the ground in Mexico belongs to the State of Mexico and cannot be owned by anyone other than the people of Mexico, it will be impossible for external investors to make that long term investment. There has been a tendency in European thinking to leave Latin America to Spain and to Portugal. I believe this is a profound mistake. We need a whole Europe approach to the region and especially to the growing powers of Mexico and Brazil. It needs to recognize the specific challenges of the region, especially in relation to minerals and petrocarbons, as well as the problems of endemic poverty and violence. But it should be on the basis of open, free and fair trade. So, a few suggestions. One, the European Union should continue to seek new annual economic dialogues with countries to be taken forward by the High Rep. Representative for Foreign Policy. A new creation of the Lisbon Treaty, Cathy Ashton. Second, the new Commission should step up activity to identify and act on protectionist measures and barriers to trade and investment that harm Europe's businesses under a new EU market access strategy. 3. The EU should continue to pursue free trade agreements offering substantive opportunities to EU business. 4. The EU must do all it can to conclude the Doha Development Agenda, which is likely to deliver around US$170 billion in global growth annually. 5. The EU must prioritise the removal or reduction of tariffs to free up trade in low carbon and environmental goods and services to complement the agreement reached in Copenhagen. 6. The EU should secure further extension of free and fair trade in Latin America with an accompanying reform of the common agricultural policy. I'm looking forward to saying that sentence in France. 7. The European Union should push for a new energy law in Mexico to release the economic potential of petrocarbons in the Gulf and for reform in Brazil to provide greater legislative certainty and economic stability for EU investors. 8. The EU should play a key role in binding the growing economies in the G20 into strong global concerted economic and financial action to ensure there can be no repeat of the worldwide economic crisis. There's just one thing that I'd say in addition, about the tone in which I think that we have to approach these emerging economies, because there was a time when we spoke, when we saw a humbled Russia, when the Soviet era was passed, when I think we adopted a rather patronizing attitude with India. All too often we've been patronizing with China, we've been patronizing with Mexico and Brazil as well. And I was sitting in the theatre a couple of years ago and there was a couple sitting in front of me who'd had a terrible row. And just as they, as the play was about to begin, the woman said to the husband, and the worst of it is that you are so bloody patronizing. And he turned to her and kissed her on the forehead as he said, it's patronizing, dear. Now, I think that that style of attitude has all too often pervaded our approach to the emerging economies. And that's one of the things that we have to avoid. Let me end with a growing economy on our own doorstep. Turkey, now the 16th largest economy in the world. The Bosphorus Tiger, as I like to think of it. Europe, I believe, will make one of the biggest mistakes imaginable if it does not ease the way to Turkey's accession in the Union. Yes, it is absolutely right that much reform is needed in Turkey. But a Turkey that looks west is undeniably in our economic and our political and our security interests. I've tried to argue two things this evening. I hope you noticed them. First, that Euroscepticism is a false patriotism because it fails the political eye test. It fails to see that the British interest, our standard of living and our influence overseas is not undermined by our membership of the Union, but is enormously enhanced by it. And second, that the EU needs to be far more imaginative, disciplined. Europe doesn't tend to like the word disciplined and resolute in its approach towards the growing economies of the world. If we fail, Europe will languish and the UK with it. If we succeed, I think we stand to build a new era where the EU and the UK play a pivotal role in ensuring sustainable growth based on free and fair trade. It's a prize of ultimate worth. Thank you very much.