News from Richard Howitt MEP

Richard Howitt MEP: “never forget this is a crisis created by the banks not by the Euro”

This is full text of the speech by Richard Howitt MEP to the Labour East Regional Conference yesterday:

So the whole of the Eurozone is imploding. Europe including Britain is plummeting into a 1930s-style recession and Tory Eurosceptics actually get as far as forcing a vote in the House of Commons which in reality is about Britain leaving the European Union… I think I’d better start by saying that if there is anyone left who doesn’t think Europe’s an important part of our politics, it really is time to think again.

So what’s really going on?

On the Euro, never forget this is a crisis created by the banks not by the Euro. The value of the Euro has actually held up in currency markets. As Ed Balls said this morning, growth and inflation are better in the Eurozone’s powerhouse economies than in Britain. Despite the problems, overall debt is less in the Eurozone than in America or Japan. I don’t hide those problems. But for me and for the Socialists in the European Parliament, the biggest problem in the Eurozone is exactly the same problem we’re fighting in Britain: Conservative austerity policies that are putting too much emphasis on cutting deficits and too little on growth, and which are failing to engender economic recovery. One-in-ten jobless Europe-wide, one-in-five young people out of work.

Meanwhile Greece is the mirror-image politically of Britain. Here the Tories are lying about the Labour economic record they inherited. In Greece our Socialist sister party took over from a disastrous Tory Government, which had consistently lied about ITS economic record. The common lesson is one of Tory lies.

Look at the cuts the Greeks have been forced to make: a 40 per cent cut in all pensions, 30 per cent cut in wages for all public sector workers, 2,000 schools closed, mass privatisations. Think how we’d have felt if we’d have been in their position? And that at each stage the markets punished not rewarded them for the cuts: Cutting the country’s credit rating, driving up the cost of borrowing and making their debt problems worse not better.

Then perhaps you will think as I do: that having solidarity with those fighting for jobs and services in Greece and in other EU countries as we do in ours, is the proper Labour response.

Which brings me back to the Tories.

The hypocrisy of them this week – in effect pledging an extra sum of up to £25billion of UK taxpayers’ money to bail out the Eurozone, and over several months to advocate Eurobonds and other measures to create a fiscal as well as a monetary union – despite the fact they’re completely against both – is breathtaking.

They’ve been forced to admit that something politically they won’t support for Britain is nevertheless absolutely in the British economic interest. Which is entirely indicative of their hypocrisy on just about every European issue.

But we do have to look at their political motives too. Because a closer European core for some of them is just the excuse they hanker for, to try to manoeuvre Britain in to some sort of arms-length or associate status in the European Union, which for many is their true political ambition.

In this context, the vote on a referendum two weeks ago doesn’t draw a line under the call, but instead is simply a staging post in a continual Tory battle to detach or semi-detach Britain from the rest of Europe.

So what are the lessons for Labour of all this?

First, we were right to take a robust stance against a referendum. The Tories can say it’s the wrong time; we have to say it’s the wrong question. Hindsight and I think just about every Labour MEP would tell you that offering a referendum on the constitutional treaty was a mistake. And the experience of Greece this week shows you can never know the political consequences when you let the referendum genie out of the bottle.

More than that, the referendum question was a wake-up call to our party that we have let Euroscepticism go far enough, perhaps too far. It is time to bite back.

And that includes shattering the dangerous Eurosceptic illusion that some sort of half-way house is possible or desirable. The Eurozone countries are not going allow Britain to trade freely with them with a full say in how that trade is regulated, if Britain wants all of the benefits but to pay none of the costs. Already the European Union charges Norway more per head to trade with us than Britain pays itself to the EU. So the semi-detached solution is one which would yield in reality all of the cost but little of the benefit.

And I believe the events of two weeks ago have fired Labour up to make the case for Europe. Ed Miliband was right to say Cameron brought the troubles on himself by failing to take on Eurscepticism. And he was right to say that when the Tories talk about repatriating powers, in reality they mean taking away your right to be treated fairly at work, to get paid holidays and for time-off for your children.

Labour has shifted its policy to unapologetically advocate for European rights at work. And we have to start being similarly robust on regional policy, the environment, international development and a whole host of areas where we can achieve things through Europe that we can’t simply do alone.

Although never just defending the European status quo, always wanting to do more and better.

Now I’ve spent a lot of time on these issues, because they are the issues of the moment, and I think I have a duty to try and help the party understand how we can integrate them in to our politics.

I would love to talk longer about Labour’s advances in elections – I hope we’ll be able to do that later in the conference – about all the constituency activities which I’m proud to undertake on your behalf. Taking the cases of the Cambridge killer doctor, the Great Yarmouth building site tragedy, the need for proper regulation of mobility scooters after fatal accidents in Harlow and Stevenage – all direct on to the floor of the European Parliament. About the anti-cuts campaigns from trees to lollipops, from coastguards to care homes. About this Government’s destruction of regional support which is endangering tens of millions of pounds of EU funding to the East of England, more than 60% of our region’s European funds this year at risk of being returned to Brussels – just at the time we need it most and because the Government itself abolished the organisation which enabled us to claim it.

But there are three more stories from my work which again I feel it’s my duty to share with you in my report this year.

First, this has been the year in my role as Labour Foreign Affairs Spokesperson of the Arab Spring. On behalf of the Socialist Group to be meeting opposition activists from Bahrain and Syria, who are risking so much and for whom we can never do enough in response. Of being in Egypt for the referendum, seeing the burnt-out shell of the former governing party headquarters. The former presidential palace, shuttered and abandoned, just like the tanks that used to defend it, just left empty and unmanned outside. To be with the democracy protesters in Tahrir Square after Friday prayers and to see the joy of the Egyptian people casting a free vote for the first time in their lives. This really was and is a revolution. A revolution not yet won, but one where the consequences for the peoples, for Europe and for the world are as fundamental as those that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago.

And this has been the year when I’ve been given the enormous task on behalf of the European Parliament to be the MEP responsible for bringing in to EU membership a whole new country: the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, a role which it is a deep honour for me to undertake.

Second, this has been the year, I am deeply sad to say, of the rise of the far-right English Defence League. Self-proclaimed as coming from Luton, although their ideas come from another time and another place. And in Peterborough, in Luton and in Cambridge, I joined Labour members to say their presence was not welcome here.

I felt a special responsibility as the EDL sought to exploit case of the suicide bomber who spent some time studying in Luton and then launched a terrible terrorist attack on Christmas shoppers in Stockholm, late last year. And the joint statement of response that the Swedish MEPs and I agreed, not only I hope calmed a potentially volatile situation. But taught me – and I think can teach us – about values of tolerance, a refusal to succumb to incitement, in Sweden and in some other European countries, towards which we could aspire too.

I pay tribute to our Labour Council in Luton and of course to our two MP friends and colleagues for their intelligent response to this threat. I asked for their help and cooperation in bringing a group of MEP colleagues to Luton also this year, to study responses to extremism. We suddenly found ourselves subject to threats from the EDL requiring an entire police operation just to protect five MEPs. It taught me another lesson: that this is a group which essentially trades in fear. And to be successful in combating them we have to think carefully about how we can stop that fear from spreading. I pay tribute not just to our Luton political colleagues but to the faith communities, the police and the different institutions in the town for the way they are doing precisely that, and I’m doing everything I can to help them.

All of which makes my third example all the more ironic – what happened just recently at Dale Farm in Basildon.

You might expect to be physically threatened by what essentially is a group of football hooligans. You don’t and you shouldn’t expect this by representatives of a public authority, supposedly exercising its statutory duties.

I want to be clear that this wasn’t and shouldn’t have been about me.

It was about a Conservative Council about which the Labour councillors of Basildon and myself as their MEP together came to a conclusion. That the way the Council was choosing to deal with what everyone accepted was an illegal travellers site, was by seeking an approach which seemed to involve obstructing rather than pursuing alternative solutions. By committing an astronomical and disproportionate sum of money to the operation which could ill be afforded. And by being prepared to sell-off six green spaces across the town for bricks and mortar to fill a hole in their own budget, but not to allocate one for travellers’ pitches – which does look like discrimination.

Our political response was to call for mediation, to achieve a voluntary resettlement of the travellers, and I believe now what I believed throughout: that ours was the reasonable and the responsible argument.

Which brings me to my own personal ejection.

Let me be clear too. We all know of situations where politicians are sometimes looking for trouble. This has never been me and wasn’t on this day.

I had informed the council in advance, had written police permission to be present, and was not at Dale Farm at all, but at an adjacent site in a designated media area set up by the council, to honour an explicit and open invitation to be interviewed about what was happening, on the regional evening news.

When Tory Basildon Council explicitly ordered two of their security staff to physically seize me, to lift me and to drag me away, it was from a live radio interview that was just starting and literally the effect was to stop me speaking.

Subsequently I have lodged a complaint with the council, and the European Parliament has backed me by writing to the Government asking why my freedom of expression was restricted?

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to all Labour colleagues, many in this room, who have also backed me with your messages of support.

I want to say to you today:

I will not criticise mis-treatment of Roma or travellers in other countries of Europe and stay silent when we see it happening here in our own.

If a Labour Council had done to a Tory MP or MEP what Basildon Council did to me, the Tory press would never let us hear the end of it.

And in the end this was simply about being prevented from talking to the press, which any attempt to restrict in Britain or across Europe we should never tolerate, without the most stringent protest in response.

Colleagues.

I know I’ve chosen to be very serious in addressing you today but I’m afraid that’s how I’m feeling.

But my message to you is a political message, a message for the future, a message for our party.

It has been about seeking cooperation not confrontation.

It has been about supporting hope over fear.

And it is about saying that the freedoms we fight for abroad, we can never be complacent about protecting here at home.

Thank you.

Other news from Richard Howitt MEP

• MPs call on Basildon Council to apologise for mistreatment of MEP - 16 November 2011
• MEP calls for finance watchdog to investigate Southern Cross directors - 7 June 2011