VERBATIM REPORT OF SPEECH MADE BY JOHN CRYER MP Secretary, Labour Against The Euro to the EIGHTH CONGRESS FOR DEMOCRACY held in London on Friday 1 November 2002

THE LABOUR CASE FOR AN INDEPENDENT POUND

I am very pleased to be here today, partly to be able to tell you something about LATE - Labour Against The Euro. There was some doubt as to whether we should adopt that acronym, but we decided to do it because it is absolutely straightforward. There were a number of reasons why we decided to form a group in Parliament which is specifically for members of the Parliamentary Labour Party. There are lots of cross-party groups, which is fine, but we thought we needed a group which was specifically Parliamentary Labour.

The Labour Party in Parliament falls into three distinct groups. First of all there are people like me, who probably number maybe 30 or 40, who are completely opposed to the Single Currency in principle whether it's now, or in five years or ten years or whatever.

Then of course there are the euro zealots and there are probably about the same number of those.

In between there is the great mass of the PLP in Parliament, who keep their heads below the parapet but when you talk to them privately, they say things like, "Well, I’m not happy about Maastricht and I have this doubt and that doubt", but basically they are keeping their heads down. Now LATE has been formed to put pressure on them. We don’t exactly put their arms up behind their backs or anything like that, but we try to persuade them that it would be in their interests and in the interests of the Labour Party to join Labour Against The Euro and take part in the campaign. Secondly, it also serves the function of putting pressure on the trade unions, the vast majority of which are, as you know, affiliated to the Labour Party.

My view is that the unions are going to be absolutely key in the future of this debate and this argument and if we ever come to a referendum, they are going to be the key movers in the referendum because of all their membership. In 1975 my view is that one of the many reasons why we lost - I was only 11 years old at the time, by the way, but I remember it extremely clearly and with some bitterness - was that the unions became split because of Harold Wilson publishing Britain’s New Deal in Europe. This claimed that we would have a veto on anything we did not like and we would not join any kind of exchange rate mechanism, so there would be no threat of unemployment. Both of those things have gone, but that document, in my view, and Wilson’s U-turn just a few weeks before the referendum in 1975, split the Labour Party and the trade union movement down the middle. There were a lot of trade union members and leaders who, frankly, did not know what to do and thought "We had better support the Labour leadership, I suppose".

We don’t want to be in that position again. We want to make sure that the trade unions and, more importantly, the trade union leaders actually do what their conferences tell them to do. There are a lot of trade unions which have conference decisions against Maastricht, the Single Currency, the Stability Pact and all the rest of it. The problem is that their leaderships in many cases do not seem to take that much notice. They send along representatives to the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party who just vote for anything the leadership suggests. That happens month after month: they go along and they vote for anything. If the leadership suggested that we go into the Single Currency without even a referendum, some of those trade union representatives with conference decisions against the Single Currency would be quite happy to go along and vote for it. I think that that is despicable and LATE has been formed to put pressure on organisations like trade unions and their affiliates to make sure that we do not have the kind of situation that we had in 1975.

I think it is important that we have a mature, adult debate. The other side are always saying we need a terribly mature debate, we need to grow up, and then they engage in the most vicious, vitriolic, personal politics and attacks on individuals. I’ll give you an example. When we formed LATE a few months ago, we had a press conference to launch it. I was there as the Secretary and Ian Davidson, who is a Glaswegian MP, was there as Chairman, and we had about 8 or 9 other MPs there. Gwyneth Dunwoody, for instance, was there. As we came out of the meeting we found that there was somebody there from Britain in Europe, who was giving out leaflets. Do you remember a film called The Usual Suspects? It had a police line-up and they superimposed on the bodies of the film still the heads of certain Labour MPs, for instance Dennis Skinner, Austin Mitchell, Ian Gibson, Harry Cohen. Below it said: "The Usual Suspects - Any issue, same line-up, no surprise".

That’s the kind of pathetic, immature, student approach which tells me that the supporters of the Single Currency must be extremely worried. On the same subject we now have Denis MacShane as Minister for Europe. Now, that’s an interesting appointment. My abiding memory of Denis is a few years ago, before I was an MP, when Alan Simpson - who has always been a very strong critic of the European Union and the Single Currency and he has a very good record on that - wrote a booklet. This was basically about the Single Currency and he launched it at a press conference at Westminster and if any of you remember it you will recall that when the news of this launch was broadcast on Radio 4 it was a fairly peculiar news item. Denis MacShane launched a one-man invasion squad of the press conference and started shouting and screaming from the back of the hall. It sounded like some Trot had got in at the back and was shouting and screaming, as they used to do and probably still do. And he is now Minister for Europe. That is an extremely interesting appointment and I will be very happy to tackle Denis on all sorts of questions when he comes to his first Question Time in Parliament, if I can get called.

The first point I want to make this morning is that my view is - and this was raised by Marc Glendening - that I am opposed to the Single Currency not despite being an internationalist but because I am an internationalist. I would be opposed to the Single Currency whether I was French, whether I was German, whether I was Belgian, whether I was Spanish, whether I was Irish. Because it is about taking democracy from people, the democratic rights that are vested in the people: the right to elect your own government and the right to have a hand in your own fate and your own destiny. It is vesting it with bankers who sit around a boardroom in Frankfurt and make decisions that can send thousands of businesses belly-up and can sacrifice millions of jobs and condemn millions of people to the dole queue and they are not accountable to anybody.

We cannot hold them to account. We can hold Gordon Brown to account and if people don’t like the Labour government’s record they can sling us out at the next election, as they did to the Conservative government before.

Once we move into the Single Currency, that’s it. Elections become irrelevant, because power is vested in a tiny, unelected elite forever. We might have gone into the ERM and come out of it - although there was a big sacrifice to be made to come out. Once we go into the Single Currency my view is that that will be it. That really will be the end. And what they will do then, is that they will come back for taxation. There is no way that they will not come back to some power over rates of taxation.

There has been no currency anywhere in the world at any time that has ever existed without some kind of central tax-gathering mechanism. And to deny that, as the pro-Europeans do in this country - not on the continent - is simply a lie. It cannot work without a central tax-gathering mechanism. It cannot work without some kind of power over taxes.

And what will happen then when we get to the position where the Central Bank has control over interest rates and control over taxation? What will political parties - whether Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat - say to people during election times? "We would rescue the economy, we would lower interest rates, we would take other action over taxation rates, but we can’t, because all that power is vested with Wim Duisenberg and the European Central Bank."

If you want to hear about their attitude to democratic right and democratic accountability, listen to an interview with Wim Duisenberg. I heard an interview with him a while ago, just before the Single Currency was launched, and he was asked the question, "Will you publish the voting records of the individual members of the board of the European Central Bank?" He said he could not do that "because they will come under pressure in their individual countries, perhaps to lower rates of interest or raise rates of interest, from various sections of the community, whether business or trade unions or the other voters, or whatever".

Now that is the essence of democracy. That was an absolute denial of the essence of democracy. If you are going to be elected, you are accountable to people. You have to put forward your record, you have to say what you have done during the period that you served, and then people have the right to either sling you out or keep you in. That is what democracy is all about.

Wim Duisenberg in that statement is making an absolute direct denial of democratic rights and accountability. If that is what the European Central Bank is about, then it is no accident that somebody with those sort of repellent views is appointed to be its Chairman because it fits in absolutely with the euro project and all the plans that they have in store for us.

I think that what we should always remember the five tests that should be applied to the Single Currency - and I am not talking about the Treasury’s five tests, I am talking about the five tests that Tony Benn always puts forward, which are far more relevant.

The Treasury’s five tests I think are far more about the government being in a pretty similar position to the Major government and I am pretty sure that the Major government thought, and I am pretty sure this government thinks to itself, "I wish this Single Currency would go away so we don’t have to make a decision about it. I know, we’ll come up with five tests and we’ll tell everybody that when these five tests are met then we will make a decision." But all this is is a delaying tactic.

The five key tests that Tony Benn always puts forward are questions he says you should ask when you meet somebody who has political power. You should ask "What power have you got?" "Who gave it to you?" "To whom are you accountable?" "On whose behalf have you exercised it?" And the most important question is, "How do we get rid of you?" And that is the key question we should apply to the Board of the European Central Bank and the answer is: of course we cannot get rid of them, only the Council of Ministers can, and that meets in secret and is completely unaccountable itself.

So it’s a web of unaccountability and secrecy. We cannot do anything about removing the members of the Board of the European Central Bank, any more than we can do anything more about removing the members of the European Commission. And we are already seeing the European Commission and the ECB interfering with the British economy and with the British government.

In February the European Commission told Gordon Brown to cut £10 billion off public spending. As if it had anything to do with them! It is our decision, it is our government. And, again, if people want to sling them out because they want £10 billion cuts in public expenditure at the next election, it is their right to do it. But it is nothing to do with the European Commission. Now that was before the Budget, when he announced more public spending increases. They must have been having nightmares about it afterwards. They have not issued any more warnings about that but I am pretty sure if they ever got their hands on the British economy and our system of accountability, they would be cutting public spending left, right and centre.

The idea that the European Union is somehow this cuddly, liberal institution which smiles benignly on the world and is terribly inclusive is absolute fantasy. Look at the way they have behaved in the Third World. They constantly come up with suggestions about ways to attack the Third World and lay open Third World economies, whose governments are already in a very weak position. They lay them open to even greater exploitation by multinationals largely based in Europe.

Look at the reports that have been produced about the Lomé Convention. The Lomé Convention governs the EU’s relationship with the Third World. Report after report produced by the International Development Select Committee in Parliament has been absolutely condemnatory about the European Union’s record in the Third World - and I think their record in the Third World amounts to latter-day colonialism.

The ruling elite in Western Europe has had a few shocks in the last few decades. 1945 was a big shock, when the Labour government under Clem Attlee nationalised power, rail, steel, coal and created the National Health Service. All that would be impossible with the European Single Currency. I might think that Clem Attlee, and Ernie Bevin and Nye Bevan and all the rest of them in that Labour government of the 1940s, were great men and I may be deeply hostile to virtually everything that Mrs Thatcher ever did, but the fact is she won and we lost. I might regret that, but that’s the fact of it. If we join the Single Currency, in elections in this country we can elect anybody because they become completely irrelevant once you become involved with that.

And then you have the consequences of the rise of the far right. Again, if you cannot go to people and say that you can make a real difference to their lives, what people will do is say, "Sod mainstream politics. I am going to vote for the BNP" or something like that. We saw it in France when Le Pen gained something like 17% of the vote in the first round of the Presidential election. I am convinced that one of the reasons for that is that people don’t feel represented any more, they feel managed. They don’t feel as though they have any real stake or voice in the democratic process, and when people feel like that, when they feel alienated from the democratic process, they will drift over to the extremes, they will vote for people like Le Pen or the BNP. And this will be the consequence at some point if we go into the Single Currency. We are going to see people drifting to extremes and by then there will be nothing we can do about it.

I just want to make a couple of other points. One is that people often ask, and this question has been raised, why is the Labour Party apparently such an enthusiast for the euro these days? I don’t think it is, actually: the Labour Party is deeply divided, don’t make any mistake about that. But the appearance is of being enthusiastic about the euro, and certainly amongst the leadership there is a good deal of enthusiasm for the Single Currency. I think the reason is four election defeats. Four election defeats just drained many people in the upper echelons of the Labour Party and they lost confidence in their own ideas and their own ability to make a difference. So they thought if the economy is in trouble Europe will rescue us, if our democracy seems to be slipping away Europe will somehow reinvigorate it. I can’t imagine why they came to these conclusions. I think that the British political leadership, not just in the Labour Party but in other parties as well, needs to rediscover its self-confidence and believe that they don’t have to attach themselves to Brussels in order to make decisions. They can make decisions that affect people’s lives on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis without attaching themselves to Brussels or any other institution. What this is about is making decisions for ourselves.

 

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