Commission Work Programme 2015 — House of Commons, 2015-03-09
Topic: Immigration
Kelvin Peter Hopkins (Labour, Centre-left): I shall curtail much of what I was going to say. I had a lot to say, and I greatly agree with the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) about the crisis in the eurozone. I personally feel very angry as do many people in those countries. The so-called socialist party has disappeared in Greece to be replaced by Syriza, while Podemos is now in the lead in Spain. Working people are getting very angry about the appalling state of their economies and the impact on their people Let me speak briefly about the amendment moved by the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, of which I am pleased to be a member. I support the amendment, and I am pleased that the Minister intends to accept it, although I hope this is not going to take the place of a proper full debate on free movement and some declaration of what Government policy will be on free movement and what they are going to do about it. It matters greatly to our constituents I spent some six hours knocking on doors in my constituency on Saturday and Sunday, and the issue that cropped up the most was immigration and free movement. We cannot run away from it. We have to reach a position. If we want to say that free movement is fine and we are not going to do anything about it, then we should say that, although I think it will bring about a degree of anger from people. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), the Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee that this matter has not been taken seriously. He mentioned Frontex, which is an administrative and policy organisation; it does not have a border force What we really need is a European border force to help out countries such as Greece—a relatively impoverished country, with a big land border with Turkey—and Italy, with its enormous sea border and islands close to the north African coast. If we are serious about the problem, those areas have to be helped by a border force that is European in scope. When we visited Frontex in Warsaw some two or three years ago, it could not say that free movement was a shibboleth that it could not talk about, but that is what it hinted at in its speech. I think we have to take these issues more seriously As the right hon. Member for Wokingham said, unemployment in some of the euro countries is quite appalling. If we had Spanish levels of unemployment in Britain, we would have 7.5 million unemployed instead of about 1.9 million. Ireland has overcome its unemployment problem by exporting 300,000 people. That is the pro rata equivalent of 4.5 million Britons leaving. Just imagine if we had 7.5 million unemployed and 4.5 million emigrating to find work. That is the situation that faces these European countries and no one should gloss over the fact that this is all the result of forcing a single currency on these countries, which then prove unable to adjust to it After the crisis, we in Britain devalued and depreciated sterling by 27% against the euro and by 31% against the dollar. That was a major factor in helping us to avoid some of the extreme stresses that happened elsewhere. Even in Europe, we are seeing a country such as Switzerland pegging its currency to the euro for a little while, but when the peg was taken away, the currency appreciated by 30% overnight. There are great distortions in currency values right across Europe Denmark has pegged its currency to the euro and it is taking desperate measures to try to hold its currency down. I do not call it the euro; I call it, privately, the deutschmark because that it what it really is. Other countries are effectively pegging their currencies to the deutschmark. Desperate steps have been taken to hold it down. We are in trouble now—the Government are right that this is a problem for Britain—because the euro is depreciating pretty rapidly against sterling, which will cause serious problems for our economy, too. All these problems are caused by the foolhardiness of imposing a single currency on different economies, which should be able to flex their currencies, choose their own interest rates and create demand in their own economies so that they can give jobs to their people.