Mark Pritchard : We’re Fed Up with Europe, So Give Us a Vote

September 19, 2011

Daily Telegraph
By Mark Pritchard

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Over the first year of the Coalition, the Conservative Parliamentary Party has restrained itself over European issues. In part this is because it has recognised the need to focus on tackling the huge public deficit left behind by Gordon Brown and his protégé, Ed Balls. This break-out of impassiveness has also been helped, although to a lesser extent, by the Government’s EU Bill, which has made the Conservative Party look and sound far more Eurosceptic. Many colleagues have also reluctantly accepted that, with the Europhile Liberal Democrats as the Coalition’s bedfellows, banging the Eurosceptic drum would be unhelpful and could be destabilising. But, with Europe’s ever increasing bail-outs and international loans – many drawn on the backs of struggling British taxpayers – it is no longer tenable to separate the economics of Europe from British domestic politics.

Whatever the economic justification for past European bail-outs – such as with the Republic of Ireland – any future “back-door” interventions through multi-billion-dollar loans distributed via the IMF are a clear and present danger to the Coalition’s period of European serenity. Moreover, recent Europhile comments by senior Liberal Democrat ministers have not helped matters.

Bail-out fatigue was always going to be a danger for the Treasury; but, mixed with the heady cocktail of falling living standards at home and the self-inflicted Mediterranean origins of Europe’s financial crisis, unquestioning political support from the Conservative backbenches can no longer be taken for granted. Conservative MPs will not continue to write blank cheques for workers in Lisbon while people in London and Leicester are joining the dole queue…

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Mark Pritchard is the Conservative MP for The Wrekin and is the secretary of the 1922 committee.

 

To read the full article please click on the link below:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8772776/Were-fed-up-with-Europe-so-give-us-a-vote.html

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