Chancellor calls for root-and-branch EU reform
Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown last night delivered a wake-up call to European leaders, describing economic dogma across the EU trading bloc as anachronistic and counter-productive.
The Chancellor said a fundamental rethink of the assumptions governing market reform and liberalisation across the 25-member EU was vital if countries were to meet the challenges presented by quickly growing economies, China, India and the United States.
Delivering his annual Mansion House speech in London, Mr Brown said Britain was not for moving in its demand for reform of the “inefficient and counterproductive” Common Agricultural Policy.
“With 40 per cent of the European union budget spent on agriculture, only two per cent of Europe’s economy, the budget issue itself is a symptom of an even greater issue about the future of the European economy,” he said.
On the ramifications of globalisation, he said: “The same global pressures that force tax competition and economic reform on to the European agenda also force Europe to rethink the most basic of political assumptions that have underlain 50 years of development.
“As Europe enters the second stage of its history as a union it is finding that as a result of globalisation the agenda relevant to its first phase – the era of a trade bloc – has changed utterly. The challenge for Europe now is that of global competition.
“It is because global competitive pressures bearing down upon Europe are so intense – Chinese exports to Europe 100 per cent up in just three years, up to five million European and American jobs potentially out-sourced by 2020, and today nine per cent unemployment – that Europe must reform and reform quickly.
“And the question for us is how Europe can move from the older inward-looking model to a flexible, reforming, open and globally-oriented Europe – able to master the economic challenge from Asia, America and beyond.”
Mr Brown’s intervention comes ahead of Tony Blair’s speech at the EU parliament in Brussels today, where he will outline how Britain intends to direct the EU during its upcoming presidency.
