MEPs and national parliaments discussed economic governance in a debate held at the European Parliament yesterday and today, Bill Cash made the following intervention:
I think it is important for me to speak my mind on the occasion of this importance and I am going do say very briefly, I hear Mr Van Rompuy and Mr Barroso talking about democracy and I hear them speaking about democratic legitimacy, but I have to say that this is one of the things which, we in the United Kingdom parliament are deeply worried about. The treaty of the 25 is itself on the evidence that I received from the inquiry that we are holding in the House of Commons on this, breaches the European rule of law. This is a very serious matter.
Furthermore, when I hear that national parliaments, according to Mr Van Rompuy, had become European institutions, I am afraid that is just not the case. When you are dealing with questions of taxation and spending they belong to electors who make these decisions on the basis of national manifestos. You can’t in one hand say we want more and more Europe and repeat the mantra like a Tibetan prayer wheel, which as about as much effect when, in fact, is perfectly obvious to anybody, given the European crisis at the moment, that the real problems lie in the lack of democratic legitimacy and they also lack in the respect for the decisions of national parliaments.
Furthermore, and I would simply conclude by saying that the question of national identity and the question of national decision making is not a matter of abstract ideology it is a matter of practical day to day freedom, is about the freedom of the voters to decide for themselves what kind of government they want. And talking about more and more Europe when the cause of the problem, and I say this as somebody whose father was killed in the last war fighting for freedom, that what we believe in is freedom which comes from the individual voter as express in the general elections.
This is not a matter of ideology is a matter of affecting peoples daily lives, and the cause of the problem, which no one seems to be prepared to recognise, is that these treaties require renegotiation in order to get back to that first principle of freedom and to give us back the democracy which has been taken away from us.
Bill Cash was quoted by the BBC and by the EuObserver.
You can watch the debate below. Bill Cash’s speech starts at 1:07.40 into the debate.
