Engage and lead: Labour’s approach to the EU

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982

Ahead of this evening’s debate on international affairs, Labour’s foreign secretary David Miliband has given a speech on Labour’s approach to the European Union at Gloucester College.

On the Labour government’s role in Europe, Miliband said:

“So, on May 6th there is so much on the ballot paper. There are jobs on the ballot, with Labour locking in the growth and staying on the road to recovery, while working with our European partners for increased prosperity and European finance to create new jobs. There is security on the ballot, with Labour defending our internationalist approach and extending stability and peace through the EU. And there is influence on the ballot, with Labour’s record of leading Europe on the world stage and delivering when it matters most, like with the global financial crisis and the coordinated response that followed.”

And on the Tories, Miliband says:

“They are isolated and therefore weak in Europe. Their party is unreformed on Europe – 72% of candidates want a fundamental renegotiation or withdrawal “as a priority”. There is now a Conservative Central Office clampdown on their candidates, banning them from publicly declaring their real politics on Europe. Their leadership is afraid of their membership. And since they have failed to change themselves they have little hope of changing the country.”

Read the full speech below:

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Tonight the three leaders of the main parties will debate foreign affairs. In our country, that means a heated debate about Europe, and it is Europe that I want to address today.

The argument is simple. It is that Europe is a good litmus test for whether a party is in tune with the modern world, and able to stand up for Britain’s interests. In the Labour Party, we resolved our bout of europhobia in the 1980s. We took on the disease, rooted it out, and became a strong, modern party as a result. It was of a piece with our social, economic and politics reforms. In government it has delivered higher living standards, better working conditions and a stronger political voice in the world for the British people.

As I will show, the contrast with the Tory party is stark. They are isolated and therefore weak in Europe. Their party is unreformed on Europe – 72% of candidates want a fundamental renegotiation or withdrawal “as a priority”. There is now a Conservative Central Office clampdown on their candidates, banning them from publicly declaring their real politics on Europe. Their leadership is afraid of their membership. And since they have failed to change themselves they have little hope of changing the country.

So this debate about Europe is about Britain’s power in the world, and whether the Conservative claims to have changed carry weight.

Today the Prime Minister and Peter Mandelson visited Airbus. Airbus has developed from being a consortium of the four separate French, German, British and Dutch aircraft companies – joined a year later by the Spanish – into today’s single integrated company. With plants spanning Spain, France, Britain and Germany and more than 50,000 employees around the world, it’s a great example of why cooperation with our European allies has to be hard-wired into key parts of our economic policy for the future.

I came across a quote about Airbus, which goes:

“Your A300 is a good plane but you’ll never make it. What is Europe? You are nice people, but it’s difficult to have faith in your cooperative programme.”

No, it wasn’t David Cameron, it was Franck Kolk, from American Airlines, speaking in the 1970s. He was wrong, and his sentiment was wrong. Like the people who said computers would never catch on. European cooperation has worked, and right now it has never been more important.

It’s easy but lazy to lapse into casual British parochialism. The Tories try to summon up images from the past that suggest that Europe is ganging up on us. We say we visit Europe, when we live in it. We say we need to defend ourselves fro m an encroaching super state, when nobody is even arguing for one.

The effort is to run down the rest of Europe; the result is to leave Britain behind.

John F. Kennedy badgered Harold MacMillan to get into Europe; but we said no. Trade unions argued with Mrs Thatcher to sign the Social Chapter in the 1980s; she said no, no, no.

Today, the issues we face, from the economy to climate change to foreign policy, demand European cooperation. And the country faces a choice. The Conservatives say: Europe is a threat to us. We say: Britain can engage and lead in Europe.

The Conservative way of looking at Europe is not just defensive. It is defeatist, isolationist, declinist. It led the last Conservative government to fight a Beef War with Europe, and lose it; and to abdicate leadership when it came to the slaughter of 10s of 1000s of people, and 100s of 1000s of asylum seekers, in the Balkans. It was born not from pride in Britain but lack of faith in Britain. Lack of faith in our ability to lead, persuade, build alliances.

But in this case there is an alternative.

When the economic crisis hit, the Prime Minister did not say that Europe, our most important trading partner, the largest single market in the world, 27 countries with a population of almost 500 million producing an output of trillion, was a threat to Britain: he said it was a group of allies who would follow British leadership.

When Europe faced the question of whether to lead on climate change, we did not hide behind the old argument about environment being a diversion from business, we have led Europe on climate change, and businesses here in the UK welcome the certainty and leadership we have shown. The EU has adopted a common position and offered to increase its emissions reduction to 30 per cent by 2020, from the previous target of a 20% cut.

On foreign policy, we don’t say that the way to augment UN sanctions on Iran, or our own aid to Pakistan, or Nato efforts in Kosovo, or G8 efforts against piracy in the Gulf of Aden, is to ignore Europe. We say the right response is to lead it.

Strong European foreign policy makes British foreign policy stronger. EU countries provide almost 40% of the UN’s budget and almost two thirds of the world’s development assistance, so it would be crazy not to seek to lead it. We can lead Europe when we try. And now we need to lead reform to build a better Europe.

The structures are there. The Lisbon Treaty ends the wrangling and navel gazing that had become synonymous with the European Union. We now have a framework in place to make the EU a leader, rather than a collective of spectators in a G2 world shaped by the US and China – if we get our act together.

I want to highlight three areas today where we need to engage and lead.

The economies of the future

It has become a cliché of modern political thinking that Brazil, Ru ssia, China and India are vital to Europe’s destiny, but it is nonetheless true. 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 2nd largest trading partner behind the USA. And the EU is by far Russia’s biggest trading partner, accounting for over half of Russia’s overall trade turnover in 2008.

However, records in trade and the global economies are not kept for long. Britain, at the forefront of Europe, must drive forward solutions to the problems we already face with emerging economic giants. Too often the EU hasn’t spoken with one voice, member states have been picked off to come to individual agreements, and for soft power in Europe to fail it only requires the nod of one dissenting voice. For that matter – all too often individual member states have picked off the BRIC economies to short-c ircuit their way round difficult EU-wide issues, doing bilateral deals that undermine the common endeavour.

Tinkering with the mechanics is not the answer and a move to qualified majority voting is no panacea. Instead it comes down to leadership and discipline, leadership that I believe Britain is poised to provide. This is the kind of economic agenda that we should be pursuing:

– with India European drive on high technology

– with China European drive on climate change

– with Brazil European drive on trade

– with Russia European drive on energy

When faced with the global economic crisis, Britain proved leadership was possible, and we need to deliver again with the emerging economies.

Enlargement and Foreign Policy

A persistent thread and enduring achievement of Labour’s European policy has been enlargement. We have always been passionate believers in enlargement as the means to extending stability, economic regeneration, peace and good governance to our continent.

Our current focus must be to the Western Balkans.

Membership of the European Union holds unique advantages to a region that must overcome vested interests and entrenched views. All 27 EU member states have made clear that EU membership is the future for all the countries of the Western Balkans, when they are ready. Some – like Slovenia – are already among us. Some – like Croatia – are soon to join. Others – like Macedonia for example – are ready to start negotiations. We have to sustain this momentum. Benefits of membership can have particular pertinence in the Western Balkans, with Schengen visa liberalisation creating freedom of movement in a region that was formerly a country. Families having the freedom to travel in this way would be a significant step forward.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has to overcome some problems before it can begin its journey to membership of the union. There has to be agreement on how to allocate state and defence property, to ensure the state has the assets it needs to function properly. Bosnian leaders also need to commit to a genuine process of constitutional reform.

The other crucial enlargement project is Turkey. If we want to show that being European is not about race or religion then having a Muslim country with a secular state is crucial to Europe’s future. Turkey is an emerging giant, it’s the gateway to the Middle East and it offers the European Union a source of energy and leadership in the East. There is still work for Turkey to do, reaching the standards we have set on human rights and the role of the military and the Government. But when this is achieved, Britain will continue to fully support membership for Turkey.

Security

Security is and will be an enduring theme for the European Union. We need cooperation internal to the EU, and externally as we face the world.

Cooperation between member states on justice and home affairs has seen tangible results. The European Arrest Warrant has been used to fast track the extraditions of over 350 fugitives from British justice since 2004, which includes the rapid extradition of Hussain Osman from Italy after the attempted London bombings on 21 July.

One vital element has been the advanced cooperation involving the sharing of criminal record databases when citizens from within the EU want to work in another member state. So for instance, if an EU national wants to work in another member state, perhaps at a school, it’s possible to check the record for that person to ensure the school is happy to take them on.

Labour negotiated our opt-ins to justice and home affairs cooperation because we want Britain to lead the efforts to improve our security. It is at the borders of the European Union where we want to prevent the trafficking of drugs, and of people. It is through Europol we want to catch the criminal gangs working at these border points. It is these organised gangs that are trading in other human beings.

Backing up all of our opt-ins and work with our European partners is British common sense. We don’t have a monopoly on it though. Indeed the French call it ‘la sagesse des normands’, the wisdom of the Normans, though I gather that when this was recently translated in a European Parliament debate it was rendered as ‘we need more norman wisdom’.

It’s this pragmatism that Europe needs to move forward and work for its members, rather than its members working to fix an institution. And we need it too as we think about security beyond Europe’s borders.

The most important country in this respect is probably Pakistan. A fascinating country that I have visited six times in three years, is at the centre of global insecurity, and has strong links to Europe, with a diaspora of over 2 million.

The Pakistani government’s efforts to stabilise its western provinces and take military action against insurgents has had a direct effect on Europe’s security. But there’s no question about it, the European Union needs to step up its efforts to support Pakistan. The EU spends just half a euro per person in Pakistan compared to five to ten times as much in other parts of the world that are not only more developed, but less crucial to our security.

We need Pakistan to have more access to European markets, to help fix its economy. We need to be partners in tackling terrorism and improving security, as well as working on intelligence and maintaining stable Government in Pakistan.

And Britain can lead this drive in Europe too.

The Tories

So Europe it is not becoming a super state; but it can become more effective; and British engagement can help make it happen.

But there’s a political elephant in the room. It’s blue, it doesn’t really like the EU and it’s out for your vote.

The Conservative Party’s approach to Europe is the opposite of the one Labour have taken. It’s dangerous, completely wrong-headed, and would damage the British interest at a key moment for this country.

They want to retreat and defend, not engage and lead. They have outlined a policy plan that envisions Isolation, confrontation and weakness.

The isolation is simple to describe. In 1999, William Hague took the Tories into the European centre-right grouping, led by Jacques Chirac and Helmut Kohl. In 2009 David Cameron withdrew from this grouping, now led by Nicholas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, on the grounds that it was too pro-European, and formed a new grouping in the European Parliament.

David Cameron co-founded the new group with Mirek Topolonek’s ODS Party from Czech Republic. He paid repeated tribute to him In launching the party. Of the other half a dozen small parties In the Parliament, repeated concerns were raised about anti semitic and homophobic views, never mind climate change denial.

We said the new grouping was far right and fringe, including people who the Tories would not be seen dead with in Britain. They said we were scaremongering.

Yet last month Topolonek hit the headlines after being forced to resign after reported comments about the Jewish Prime Minister and a gay Minister In the Czech Republic.

And all the while the Tories are simply not in the room when the governing parties of the centre right in Europe gather to make their policy and decide their approach.

So the isolation is clear. And the policy agenda is defensive and negative:

– launching a fruitless mission to reopen European Treaties to repatriate employee rights, when William Hague could not name a single other government that wants to do so, and all 26 other countries would need to agree

– putting a bill through Parliament which confirms the sovereignty of Parliament, when no one has ever disputed that if Parliament wants to rescind British membership of the EU it can do so

– a promise of referenda, at £80m a throw, on treaty changes; Tory MEP Daniel Hannan wants a referendum on the number of MEPs Germany is allocated; yet the European Council agreed in December 2007 that there should be no more institutional reform

On justice and home affairs cooperation, which I spoke about earlier, the Conservatives are committed to pulling back from these measures. This would be damaging both for our ability to prevent crime, and our reputation as an advocate for cooperation to combat international criminal gangs.

Withdrawal from the European Arrest Warrant, for instance, would see Britain become a place where criminals go in the knowledge they will be safe from European justice. It would also prevent our police and security services from quickly extraditing fugitives from British justice.

On top of this, the Conservatives would forgo Britain’s authority to shape crime and immigration policy at the borders of the European Union, which is key to preventing the trafficking of illegal drugs, contraband and people into Britain.

Conservative failure in Europe would have a human face in more victims of crime, more fugitives from British justice, and a weakened security presence.

The Conservative agenda of petty squabbling and retreat from the big issues would be damaging to Britain.

And just as it’s fantasy economics to suggest you can cut the budget deficit faster and deeper, and cut taxes, it’s fantasy foreign policy to be strong in the world and weak in Europe.

So, on May 6th there is so much on the ballot paper.

There are jobs on the ballot, with Labour locking in the growth and staying on the road to recovery, while working with our European partners for increased prosperity and European finance to create new jobs.

There is security on the ballot, with Labour defending our internationalist approach and extending stability and peace through the EU.

And there is influence on the ballot, with Labour’s record of leading Europe on the world stage and delivering when it matters most, like with the global financial crisis and the coordinated response that followed.

The Conservatives are wrong on jobs and the European economy, they are wrong on our international security; and they are woefully inept at securing British influence in Europe and the wider world.

How the electorate decides on May 6th will decide on Britain’s role in the world at a crucial juncture. It is my responsibility between now and election day to show how truly stark that choice is, but it is your responsibility to take Britain down the right path.