Reject the Euro and renegotiate

My experiences as Single Market Minister confirmed my analysis of my earlier years. I had to spend most of my time trying to stave off laws and regulations we did not want, seeking to dilute, delay or derail. It meant constructing qualified minorities of states sufficient to force change to a badly drafted power grab, or to secure delay.

As I reported to the Lords I discovered the promised Emergency brake to stop them imposing very bad laws on us was never going to be used and in due course lapsed through never being applied. As single market Minister I saw just how far the EU had got with its power grab, how powerless the UK was unless we could muster some support from other countries. The proposals were usually carved up by the Commission with German and French backing, and too many of the smaller states just went along with everything for fear of getting a bad reputation as trouble makers.

Press and public were excluded from our debates about all these new laws. The press usually declined to publish my read out of what had happened as they feared the EU Commission would cut them off from their briefings if they dared report what had actually happened in a Ministerial meeting. Apparently other Ministers often said different things in the meetings compared to what they reported back home. I had no problem with the press knowing what I said and what I was doing in the meetings as it was the same as the account I gave to Parliament and press back home.

I was moved on from the job at the time the EU decided on a major push to get every country to sign up to the Euro. This was a massive power grab which would change everything. I began my fight inside the UK government against it, and with others persuaded the PM to negotiate and secure an opt out from joining. When the PM refused to promise to use the opt out to ensure we would  never to go in  to the Euro I took up his challenge when he resigned the leadership and made the case against the Euro and for other changes of policy.

The leadership election did secure the  promise from the PM that he would hold a referendum before entering the Euro. More importantly this extracted from Mr Blair the same promise. I knew then the pound was saved, as polls showed the UK public were so much wiser than many of their MPs with big majorities against the Euro.  They also showed a Labour government was inevitable. John Major had badly crippled the UK economy by his EU zealotry putting us into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which predictably gave us both boom and bust, ending badly for many businesses and homeowners and destroying the Conservatives as an election winning party for more than a decade.I had failed with Nicholas Ridley to stop ERM membership despite writing a report before joining the government forecasting boom or bust from ERM participation.

In the Shadow Cabinet and on the backbenches in the Opposition years I was one of the voices that persuaded the party to oppose each of the centralising power grabbing Treaties Labour signed up to.  We wanted the incoming Conservative government in 2010 to renegotiate, pointing out that we did not agree with the big Treaty changes and many of the extra EU laws of the 1997-2010 era. Having Liberal democrats in the coalition 2010-15 prevented anything serious being done about the EU.

I and my friends ran campaigns and organised votes from the backbenches to secure a referendum on continued membership, as we had by then decided the EU was so changed from the EEC on the UK prospectus in 1975 that the people should be allowed to cast their judgement on our membership of this Federal governmental body. It was when I and a few friends at a meeting with the PM explained we were close to half the Conservative MPs being willing to defy a 3 line whip to vote for a referendum that the PM agreed to include one in our next Manifesto. It was the most important change I had ever helped  secure. I always assumed the public would vote to leave as it was such a crippling deal being in the emerging superstate.