Vote Conservative Tomorrow for Europe

Tomorrow, Thuesday 22nd May, we have the 5-yearly European Elections. 

You should vote Conservative for our MEP's.

 The European Parliament is an important body that has major influence over the large proportion of our laws that originate in Europe. We need MEP's who will fight for the best deal for Britain and the best policies for the European Union as a whole.

 European Unity is a noble ideal and the European Union itself does have benefits but as it currently exists it is a deeply flawed organisation. It is too undemocratic, too bureaucratic, too distant from the people and too resistant to change. To give just some examples of culpable EU stupidity:

 1. The Common Agricultural Policy, the largest item of EU spending, tens of billions of pounds every year that is still biased towards supporting inefficient farming methods and harming 3rd world producers, rather than research in efficient farming methods and vital R&D of renewable energy and other important technologies.
 2. Due to a decades old agreement the EU parliament moves every month from Brussels to Strasbourg. This totally pointless activity costs over £100 million a year and produces many tons of totally unnecessary carbon.
 3. The Euro: sceptics warned 15 years ago that any system that used the same currency and interest rate in Athens and Berlin would lead to disaster unless the weaker economies became fundamentally more competetive first. The sceptics were 100% right,the EU cheerleaders like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems allowed their political bias to blind them and now the people of Greece, Cyprus, Spain and Portugal are paying the price.
4. Even after the Euro crisis broke out further incompetence caused an entirely unnecessary recession in 2012 because the rich countries refused to sacrifice to help the poorer ones and the European Central Bank was negligently slow to act to stop the crisis.

 I could go on.

 The EU is also not democratically accountable enough. Unelected commissioners and the anonymous civil service wield large amounts of power too far away from any scrutiny or visibility from the people of Europe. If you dislike the unelected nature of the Monarchy or tthe House of Lords then the unelected power of the EU is far worse. This causes the kind of complacency and arrogance that leads to the mistakes like those I mentioned above.

 The EU is also constantly trying to attract more power to itself. It is natural tendency for every person to think they know best, and for every political body to think it should have more power to decide things. And this applies to the EU as well. But Brussels is for many things the worst body to be in charge because it so much more distant from voters than local councils or their national governments. Of course some decisions are best made on the EU level. But the logic of european institutions is explicitly that of 'ever closer union' and without a counterbalancing force that can only lead to power and decisions being accumulated in Brussels that have no business being there.

 The Conservatives understand all this.

They acknowledge the usefulness of the EU in some cases, and the fundamental nobility of its driving vision of european peace and co-operation, but they realise that it needs deep and significant reform, so it supports economic efficiency, political and cultural diversity and doesn't accumulate powers and take decisions that could be better taken closer to the people they effect, by national states or local councils.

 The Conservatives take a sensible middle-ground between mindless cheer-leading of Brussels and mindless fear and hostility: Sensible, intelligent, experienced, hard-working representatives who support EU measures when they benefit British and other european citizens, but who fight against complacency and for significant reform so the EU offers better value for money, fulfils its potential in terms of benefits, and who fight for greater democracy in the EU and decisions taken closer to the people. The Conservatives also recognise the deep public doubt about the EU and promise a referendum on our membership so ultimately the public can decide, 40 years after anyone in Britain last had a chance to vote on our membership of the EU, as is right in a democracy.

 But this will not be decided by our MEP's, but in parliament. Our MEP's have no say on whether there is a referendum.

 The other parties simply don't offer this.

 1.The Lib Dems are too instinctively pro-EU to properly scrutinise or reform the system. They can barely help but cheer-lead most Brussels measures regardless of content. Until 2010 Lib Dems in the European Parliament and in the House of Commons were still waxing lyrical about the wonders of the Euro and how Britain should join, just as they were 15 years ago. That would have been a disaster for Britain and the same blindness affects their decisions in the european parliament all the time.

 2.Labour have never met a government regulation, or piece of bureaucracy, or governmental power-grab, or tax-hike they didn't like. All the instincts of the modern labour party are in favour of ever-more interference and bureaucracy by 'experts' and against moving power closer to the people. They won't reform the system to make it more streamlined, efficient with money or democratic because they fundamentally don't really believe in any of those things. One only has to look at the Blair and Brown governments to know that is true.

 3. The Greens make good noises about reform but their plans are too often misguided at best and delusional at worst. Their stance is excellent on environmental issues but the EU parliament must consider many other areas and on these their ideas are generally economically illiterate and reflexively statist. To give an example, their manifesto in 2010 supported raising taxes by £170 billion a year, in other words increasing all taxes by a quarter, something that would have devastated the economy and hit all families, including poorer families with a massive tax increase.

 4. UKIP have an irrational hatred of the EU that is out of all proportion to its actual problems. They want to isolate Britain from the world, reject valuable european-wide co-operation on many issues. Even when elected their representatives have the worst record for actually turning up and fighting for Britain. And when they do they vote down every single measure, regardless of benefits to Britain out of spite just because it comes from Brussels. Nigel Farage apparently even dislikes eurovision. The party is also stuffed at the highest levels with rape apologists, racists and homophobes. A party that tells us we should be afraid of people because they are foreign has no place in Britain, and certainly not representing us for the next 5 years.

So vote Conservative tomorrow, Thursday 22nd May 2014, to give our country the best possible MEP's fighting for a better EU for Britain and everyone in Europe.