European Union Bill

This amendment gives the British people a referendum on the economic cost of our EU membership. This would discover whether they want to go on paying through the nose to be bossed around by an organisation which is of absolutely no use to them. The amendment is targeted on the net cash we send to Brussels every year. It does not address the gross cash we send, which is roughly double, although many Eurosceptics argue that we should concentrate on that gross amount because so much of what Brussels sends back to us of our own money goes on projects designed to enhance the EU’s image which we could certainly spend more fruitfully elsewhere. This amendment requires that when our net contribution reaches £10 billion per annum, or nearly half the current spending cuts of £21 billion, there must be a referendum to see whether the British people want to go on paying such tribute. For clarity, and to show how reasonable this amendment is when set against some of the wider costs of our EU membership which are more difficult to define, it is worth spelling out some of those other costs. This amendment does not include the huge liabilities to which we are now exposed from bailing out that cruel failure, the euro. At the moment, these include the £3.25 billion we have underwritten for Ireland and the further £7 billion to which we have been illegally signed up under the financial stability mechanism. I suppose there may be more on the way for Greece, Portugal and even Spain, but so far that is £10.25 billion, which we are unlikely to get back. Again, I would point out that that is nearly half our current spending cuts. Nor does the amendment cover the billions we have thrown away by surrendering control of our fishing industry to Brussels and its iniquitous common fisheries policy—a cost that seems to be estimated at about £2 billion annually. Beyond its financial cost, whatever it is, it is perhaps worth reminding your Lordships of the EU’s own recent estimate that some 800,000 tonnes of fish are thrown back dead into the North Sea every year. To get this statistic into everyday proportion, I invite your Lordships to imagine a 40-tonne articulated lorry that fills most of your Lordships’ Chamber from the Throne to the Bar, although it is not quite as high. Then I ask your Lordships to stretch your imagination further and to think of 20,000 such lorries, all full of dead fish. Some environmental bodies put the annual discarded fish at 2 million tonnes, which comes to 50,000 articulated lorries. To get all these lorries into understandable perspective, it perhaps helps to think that their contents would fill the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall several times over with dead fish every year.