Daniel Hannan MEP: Is a referendum on EU membership right in principle?

Dan Hannan MEP blogs for The Telegraph. You can follow him on Twitter.

Humour me for a moment. Instead of deciding whether you favour an EU membership referendum on the basis of which way you think it would go, ask yourself whether it is right in principle.

If this isn’t a suitable question to put to the country, it’s hard to think what is. It’s a major constitutional issue, of the kind that Bagehot, Dicey and Erskine May would have seen as suitable for a plebiscite. It divides the parties internally, and so can’t easily be settled at a general election. And – not least – all three parties were recently promising one.

People used occasionally to argue that referendums were un-British, that they might do for hot countries whose leaders wore sunglasses, but that they were incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty. That argument has been overtaken by events. Before 1997, the United Kingdom had held four referendums: one each in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the 1975 poll on EU membership. Since then, we have had a further 47, mainly at local level.  It is asinine to insist that Britain needed a vote on the method by which we elect our MPs, but not on whether those MPs run the country.

Daniel Hannan MEP: David Cameron has gone further than any previous Tory leader in proposing a shift in power from Whitehall to town halls

Today is the last chance to book a place at the ConservativeHome/ ConservativeIntelligence conference on the Tory 2010 manifesto. Contributors to the conference include Michael Fallon MP, Daniel Finkelstein, Paul Goodman MP, Jill Kirby, Oliver Letwin MP, Peter Lilley MP, Neil O'Brien and Ian Taylor MP. A full guide to the Tory manifesto will be published including essays on Cameron's big themes. One of those essays is the piece below on localism from Dan Hannan MEP. Click here to book a place at the conference or a copy of the manifesto.

Localism is more easily proclaimed in Opposition than delivered in office. It’s all very well to demand the devolution of power when Conservative councils want to escape control from Labour ministers; but things look different when you’re handing power away to loony Left boroughs. It’s easy to demand a bonfire of the quangos when they’re stuffed with socialist placemen, but not so easy when your own supporters are clamouring to run them.

Do you remember the very first episode of Yes, Minister? As an Opposition MP, Jim Hacker had set up a Freedom of Information petition. By a quirk of timing, the general election intervened just before it was delivered, and he now finds himself as the minister who must receive his own petition. Suddenly his attitude is very different.

“Are you accepting it or rejecting it, minister?” asks a journalist.
“Yes,” replies Hacker carefully.
“Yes you’re accepting it or yes you’re rejecting it?”
“No.”

How would an incoming Conservative Government measure up against Hacker? We’ll know within the first three months of the administration.

David Cameron has gone further than any previous Tory leader in proposing a shift in power from Whitehall to town halls, from standing bureaucracies to elected representatives and from the executive to the legislature. He has adopted large chunks of the Direct Democracy agenda: open primaries, referendum mechanisms, more power for local councils, the devolution of social security, parental choice in education, scrapping quangos, democratic control of policing, abolition of Crown Prerogative powers, fewer MPs, secret ballots for select committee chairmen.

Daniel Hannan MEP: We can be very proud of our new leader in the European Parliament

Daniel Hannan MEP blogs here.

British Conservatives can be proud today: ours is the first Group in the European Parliament to elect an MEP from an accession state as its leader. None of the Groups which drone on about their commitment to the European ideal can claim as much.

Michal Kaminski, of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, is my age. We went into politics at the same time, when we were in our mid-twenties. We each have two little girls of similar ages. We’re both conservatives: Euro-sceptics, free-marketeers and Atlanticists.  But we might have spent our early lives on different planets. I grew up during the réveil national of the Thatcher years. Michal’s early life was spent in an occupied country. Every day, he lived with the moral shabbiness, the material squalor, the thousand petty lies of Jaruzelski-era Poland. When Michal was small, his father defected to Canada. They met once, in Michal’s teenage years, in Cuba – the only state to which they could both get visas. Michal’s father urged him to defect, but Michal replied that he wanted one day to sit as a conservative in a free Polish Sejm. A few years later, he did, although his father was sadly no longer alive to see it.

That such a man, having led such a life, should now lead our Group, does more for European unity than any number of federalist declarations. The Europe that Michal and I believe in is one united by the spread of freedom and democracy, by commerce, by the actions of independent citizens. This is a world away from the Europe they want in Brussels, united by rules and regulations, by institutions and bureaucracies, by anthems and flags.

Dan Hannan MEP: Four pro-EU "Charities" got £34,597,219.16 last year

Dan Hannan is an MEP for the South East and blogs for The Telegraph.

Is there anyone out there who just happens to support deeper European integration? Without being paid to say so, I mean?

I ask the question perfectly seriously. When he introduced the Bill to ratify the Lisbon Treaty, the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, made a song and dance about the fact that it wasn’t just Labour politicians who backed the wretched thing. A whole range of NGOs, he told MPs, had also come out in favour.

“The NSPCC pledged its support, as have One World Action, Action Aid and Oxfam,” he said, looking typically pleased with himself. “Environmental organisations support the treaty provisions on sustainable development and even the commission of bishops supports the treaty. This is a coalition, not of ideology, but integrity”.

Integrity, eh? Within a few hours, Eurosceptic blogs were pointing out that every single organisation he had cited received money from the EU (hat-tip EUReferendum.blogspot.com).

Most of them, it turned out, also got bungs from the British government. Hardly surprising, then, that they should dutifully endorse a treaty supported by their paymasters.

What is surprising is the extent of their financial dependency. When Miliband sat down, I fired off a written question asking the European Commission how much money it had paid these organisations. I have just had the answer. In 2007, ActionAid, the NSPCC, One World Action and Oxfam received, among them, €43,051,542.95. (I’ll come to the bishops in a moment.

Daniel Hannan MEP: Seven reasons why Conservatives must leave the EPP

Daniel Hannan is an MEP for the South East and blogs at Telegraph.co.uk.

Some of you may find this hard to believe, but I’m going to miss Christopher Beazley. The pro-euro MEP has decided not to seek re-nomination – mainly, he says, because he disagrees with the Conservative Party’s commitment to leave the European People’s Party (EPP) in 2009 and form a new, anti-federalist group in the European Parliament. All Euro-candidates have been asked to sign a statement in support of party policy. A lesser man might have held his nose and signed, or signed with his fingers crossed behind his back; but Chris has behaved with edifying principle. Heaven knows he and I have disagreed over the years. But he has never sought to disguise opinions which he knows to be unpopular with his constituents. Not every politician can make the same boast.

Now is a good moment to remind ourselves of why David Cameron has promised to leave the EPP, and why candidates are being asked to support him.

(1) The European Parliament lacks an Official Opposition
At present, every political alliance in Europe – the Communists, the Socialists, the Liberals, the Greens, the Christian Democrats – supports the euro, the constitution, a common foreign policy and an EU criminal justice system. Indeed, the EPP goes further than the others, demanding a single EU seat at the United Nations, a European army and police force and – my particular favourite, this – a pan-EU income tax to be levied by MEPs. Once there is a mainstream conservative bloc positing a different kind of Europe, the cartel will be broken. From that moment, Euro-federalism will cease to be inevitable, and become one among a series of competing ideas.

Daniel Hannan MEP: Time for a British Agricultural Policy

Daniel Hannan, MEP for the South East and a blogger, criticises the EU restrictions on livestock exports as being for commercial rather than scientific reasons.

At long last, the EU is to lift the restrictions imposed on British livestock exports: a campaign I have been worrying away at for weeks. So far, so good. But, as is often the case when dealing with Brussels, there is a price to be paid: in return for allowing the rest of the country to resume its sales, the EU has insisted upon widening the exclusion area to cover most of my constituency.

Have a look here to see where exports animal movements are now restricted. The territory has not been chosen on any epidemiological basis. Not is it even a question of drawing a 50 kilometre circle around the Pirbright laboratory. That would have been far too logical. Instead, any local authority whose territory falls within such a circumference, if only by an inch, is obliged to impose the restrictions. The whole of Buckinghamshire is covered, for example, even though most of it is far from the original outbreak. The whole of Hampshire ditto, although the New Forest is remote from the afflicted farms. Even farmers who have no export trade now find themselves hampered by restrictions on their domestic activities; and all to pacify the rest of the EU.

The restrictions, in short, are commercial rather than scientific in inspiration. Long after the eradication of foot and mouth, the EU was unwilling to readmit British cattle or sheep exports without exacting tribute. That tribute is being paid by farmers in the South East.

Daniel Hannan's memo to Gordon Brown: There is one way the English might accept a Scottish Prime Minister

Daniel Hannan is an MEP and one of the founders of Direct Democracy.

I have found it: the philosopher's stone of politics, the elixir of life. There really is an answer to the West Lothian Question. Twenty nine years have passed since Tam Dalyell, the stony Old Etonian who then sat for West Lothian, set the conundrum before Parliament. Scottish devolution, he observed, would lead to a constitutional anomaly, as Westminster MPs with Scottish seats would be able to vote on matters affecting English constituencies, but would have no say over such matters in their own constituencies.

Today, the problem is no longer academic. On two occasions -- over foundation hospitals and again over tuition fees -- the votes of Scottish MPs secured the passage of contentious legislation that did not apply north of the border. And the signs are that the English are becoming miffed. An opinion poll in The Daily Telegraph showed that nearly half of English voters object to the idea of a Scottish Prime Minister -- a finding that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

What, then, is the answer? The only two solutions so far hazarded - a separate English parliament or a wholly independent Scotland - have understandably failed to win widespread support. But there is a third option: localism.

There is no power exercised by the Holyrood legislature under the 1998 Scotland Act that could not, in England, be devolved to a lower level -- either to counties and cities or, better still, to individual citizens.

Daniel Hannan MEP and Tim Kevan: Localism in the NHS - reducing the democratic deficit

Daniel Hannan is a Conservative MEP and regular ConservativeHome contributor.  Tim Kevan has been a barrister for just under 10 years and was national chairman of the Conservative Students from 1993 to 1994.

As we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the passing of the original legislation for the NHS and the institution stumbles from one crisis to another, a timely poll has been carried out by YouGov which shows a two to one majority in favour of the government withdrawing from the NHS.  This poll highlights one of the major challenges for the NHS in the years to come:  reducing the democratic deficit. 

Unfortunately, the only elected representatives so far introduced into the NHS have been to foundation hospitals which would seem to be a case of putting the cart before the horse.  It is the commissioners in the primary care trusts (PCTs) rather than the providers of health care that most need accountability if local people are truly to be empowered.  They make the decisions as to what resources are given to primary care and in what form and also what resources are allocated to secondary care such as hospitals.  The major difficulty with these bodies is that they contain no directly elected representatives.  Further, there is nothing to stop its current membership of, for example, GPs, simply allocating resources in a way that suits themselves without sufficient reference to the local needs of patients and of hospitals and other services.

Given the significance of the decisions which the trusts make in terms of resource allocation, we suggest that PCTs should be abolished in their present form and replaced by an independent Commissioning Body consisting of directly elected representatives.  These would be under a duty to consult all stakeholders as to how resources should be allocated.  These would include GPs, hospital and community doctors, private sector providers of health care and patients.  National targets and centralised decision making could then be left behind in favour of local people being trusted to make the decisions that most suit their own communities thus invigorating community involvement in health care.

Alongside this, we also suggest that the whole structure of the NHS needs to be revisited and simplified down to as few layers as possible.  It would be hoped that primary care trusts and other health organisations could be given boundaries that coincide not only with each other but also with local authorities.  This would facilitate the provision of directly elected representatives in that the new commissioning bodies could then consist of locally elected councillors.  With this democratic safeguard, there is no reason why decisions which are currently made centrally should not be made at the more local level of the new commissioning body.  This could include, for example, decisions as to which drugs to make available with the National Institute of Clinical Excellence simply taking an advisory role.  Further, national targets could be abolished in favour of this devolution of power.

The You Gov poll is therefore a timely reminder that the NHS is in need of invigorating and entrusting back to the people it serves in order that a new flame of civic pride will be lit which will guide the institution through its next sixty years.

Daniel Hannan MEP and Tim Kevan are contributors to a new book published this week entitled ‘The Future of the NHS’ edited by Dr Michelle Tempest and published by xpl Publishing.

Related links: Ten point briefing on localism and Dr John Crippen recommends A fair contribution at the point of entry to the NHS.

Daniel Hannan MEP: Leaving the EPP will be truly revolutionary

Don’t be distracted from the real story, guys. The Conservative Party is on the verge of doing something truly revolutionary. We are about to establish, for the first time in the history of the EU, a dissident group – an alliance of mainstream parties opposed to political integration. All week the news has been reported in the most hackneyed way as (yawn) “a revival of Tory splits over Europe”. David Cameron, we read, was bounced during the leadership race into promising to take his MEPs out of their alliance with the Euro-fanatical European People’s Party (EPP); yet he now faces a rebellion from his own Left unless he backs down.

In other words, a recondite issue about where the Tories sit in the Strasbourg hemicycle is now of interest only to the extent that it involves bickering or broken promises. But this is wholly to underestimate the magnitude of what is being proposed.

Ask yourself why Angela Merkel and Mariano Rajoy and Nicolas Sarkozy and all the other Euro-bigwigs are lining up to criticise David. Ask yourself why Tony Blair has suddenly come over all solicitous, determined to save the Tories from their own folly. I’ll tell you why, my friends. Because Euro-federalists can see what it would mean to lose their ideological monopoly.

At present, every political alliance in Europe – the Communists, the Socialists, the Liberals, the Greens, the Christian Democrats – favours the so-called finalité politique. They all support the euro, a common foreign policy, an EU criminal justice system, a phasing out of the national veto. They all want to push ahead with the constitution, despite the recent “no” votes. Indeed, the EPP goes further than the others, demanding a single EU seat at the United Nations, a European army and police force and – my particular favourite, this – a pan-EU income tax to be levied by MEPs.

Once there is a mainstream conservative bloc positing a different kind of EU, the cartel is broken. From that moment, Euro-federalism ceases to be inevitable, and becomes one among a series of competing ideas. That is what the leaders of Old Europe fear. That is the prize within our grasp.

Let me address one or two of the points that have come up in the comment threads on this site. First, there has never been any question of our sitting with extremist parties. The persistence of the notion that “Tory MEPs may end up with Italian fascists” is one of the most successful pieces of black propaganda I’ve ever encountered. No one has ever proposed such a thing and, for what it’s worth, the party that is descended from Mussolini’s, the Alleanza Nazionale, is currently applying to join the EPP.

It is true, of course, that people have different definitions of extremism. Things are sometimes said in the heat of election campaigns that, when coldly quoted afterwards, can look unpleasant. Would readers of this blog automatically disqualify a party that ran election posters showing a gay couple with the slogan “Daddy and Papa? Say No!”? What about a party which had had hundreds of its MPs and councillors convicted in fraud cases? OK, then, what about a party that had campaigned against the immigration of some computer programmers from India under the slogan “Children Before Indians”?

Well, here’s the thing: all three of these parties are currently in the EPP. They are, respectively, Forza Italia, Chirac’s UMP and the German CDU. So why don’t we see Gareth, Justin et al demanding our instant separation from the EPP? Could it be because their real objection to our new partners is that they are Euro-sceptic? If so, that is a perfectly honourable position, but for Heaven’s sake be honest about it.

Let’s also deal, briefly, with the idea that David was somehow tricked into making a foolhardy promise when his leadership campaign was at its nadir. This is, as George Bush might say, to misunderestimate the man. David disagreed with going into the EPP when Chris Patten took that unhappy decision back in 1991. He disliked the notion then for the same reason he still does: that it is wrong for Conservatives to say one thing in Britain and do another in Brussels. And to point out that he made this pledge when his leadership campaign was in the doldrums is another way of saying that the campaign took off from that moment.

But let’s not get bogged down in the detail. This is about lofty ideals, not tactical manoeuvres. Unusually – indeed, almost uniquely – the leader-writer’s view of what is going on is more instructive than the lobby correspondent’s. What matters is not whether Boodle or Coodle will defy the leadership, or whether Doodle thinks the Ruritanian Farmers’ Party unsound, or whether Foodle only voted for Cameron because of what Hoodle told him. What matters is that we are creating, after 50 years, an organised and properly resourced vehicle to advance the Tory vision of Europe. Creating a conservative bloc is the biggest, boldest, brightest thing we have done on the EU front since the budget rebate deal in 1984. Raise your eyes to the big picture, my friends. It’s worth looking at.

Daniel Hannan MEP: A case for a decentralised Conservative Party and open primaries

Daniel Hannan is Conservative MEP for South East England, and writes columns for The Sunday Telegraph and the German newspaper Die Welt.

Any idiot can identify the problem: voters think the Tories are out of touch, in it for themselves, irrelevant to ordinary people, prepared to say anything to win. The diagnosis is easy; it’s the prescription that’s hard.

I mean, there are plenty of things that the Tories could do to correct these impressions if they were in office. But they won’t get into office as long as voters refuse to give them the benefit of the doubt. Catch-22.

Indeed, almost the only thing that is within the gift of an Opposition leader is reform of his own party. Tony Blair understood this, which is why he made such a big deal out repealing Clause Four. He wasn’t picking a fight for the sake of it. Rather, he was trying to give the country a token of his good faith, indicating in Opposition how he would behave in Government.

What is the Conservative equivalent? How can the party demonstrate that, rather than snatching at the levers of control, it would use office to push powers outwards and downwards? How can it show that it really is a party for everyone, and that its promise to empower the citizen is more than just rhetoric? Well, it can start by opening up its selection procedures.

Plenty of people have observed that the Conservative Party ought to look more like the country it aspires to govern. This is surely true, and has implications that go well beyond head-counts of female and ethnic minority MPs. A genuinely representative party would also more closely resemble the electorate in terms of age, professional background, geography, accent and – above all – outlook.

Here we come to a paradox. Those who have been arguing loudest and longest for diversity often go on to demand that party managers be allowed to impose candidates on constituencies. There is, of course, a logical flaw here. You do not make any organisation more representative by restricting the admission criteria. The 300,000 party members may not be typical of the country as a whole. But how much less so would be a small committee of party officials?

It would strange indeed for a party committed to decentralisation to micro-manage its own affairs from the centre. If we truly want pluralism, we should widen, rather than narrow, the selectorate. When a seat becomes vacant, local activists should present their short-list to all registered voters in that constituency.

Open primaries? In Britain? Could it really work? Yes. Indeed, it has already worked, with results that speak for themselves. At the last election, two Conservative Associations, Reading East and Warrington South opted to choose their candidates through open hustings meetings. Reading East was not a seat that the Tories ever really expected to win: it lay well outside the party’s top hundred targets. Yet, to everyone’s surprise, it is now represented by a first-rate Conservative MP, Rob Wilson. Warrington South was a no-hoper and, despite a swing of five per cent above the regional average, it remains in Labour’s hands. But its brilliant candidate, Fiona Bruce, gave Tony Blair his worst day of the entire election when she revealed that one of her residents, Margaret Dickson, had had an operation cancelled at the last minute six times. (The story had a happy ending: although Fiona didn’t win the seat, Mrs Dickson got her operation within hours of Michael Howard raising her case, public criticism being one of the few things that quangoes fear.)

The arguments for open primaries are, when you think about them, pretty obvious. They ensure that you have a candidate who is liked by a decent chunk of the constituency, not just by your activists. Those who participate in the selection process come to feel proprietorial about “their” candidate, and have a stake in his or her success: the Warrington South Conservative Association has 200 active new members as a direct result of the selection process. And, of course, the very fact of the primary generates an enormous amount of local media interest, thus giving the candidate a head-start.

True, primaries favour applicants with a strong local profile: both Rob and Fiona were well-known in their respective towns. But is this such a bad thing? The idea that a politician might aspire to a national career without having first proved himself in his home region would be bewildering to most Europeans, or most Americans – or, for that matter, most Liberal Democrats.

The US precedent is an interesting one. Like us, the Americans have a first-past-the-post voting method and, in consequence, a two-party system. But, for a long time, these parties used regularly to be displaced: a procession of Federalists, Whigs, Know-nothings, Anti-Masons and others trooped through Washington. From the moment that open primaries were introduced, however, the existing two parties were fixed in place, anchored by guy-ropes to public opinion.

Britain is in an anti-politics mood. No one who canvassed at the last election can have failed to spot it. Turnout is falling and, of those who do vote, record numbers are deserting the established parties. In other countries, Right-of-Centre parties benefit from anti-politician feeling. The problem for the Tories is that, despite having been out of power for eight years, they are seen as more Establishment than Labour. They are the party of London clubs, of public schools, of black-tie dinners, which makes it hard for them to tap into anti-government resentment.

In the middle years of the Twentieth Century, the US Republicans had the same problem. Since then, they have transformed themselves from an East Coast, preppy, country club party that kept losing into a Sun Belt, anti-government, populist party that keeps winning. How? By championing individuals against the government, and local traditions against Washington. It was their espousal of states rights that began their revival, serving to convince voters that the GOP was with “us” against “them” – with, that is, the people against the government.

I and a group of “localist” Tories spent the recent conference in Blackpool urging our party to commit itself to the wholesale devolution of power – to individuals where possible, but otherwise to towns and counties. A majority of delegates, including dozens of MPs, signed up to our agenda: pluralism in healthcare, elected sheriffs, self-financing local councils, school choice, the repatriation of power from Brussels and much else. But all of this is academic as long as the party is in Opposition. And no one will believe its promises unless it can convincingly demonstrate, though its own procedures, that it wants to decentralise power. That is why primaries matter. And, in case you think I am urging a policy on others that I would not accept myself, let me end with this suggestion: in advance of the 2009 Euro-elections, the Tories should allow all registered voters, not just party members, to rank their Euro-candidates as they please.

Click here to read about Daniel's 'We Must Quit The EU' article -  written for The Sunday Telegraph in August.