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Bill Newton Dunn's questions answered
January 5 2004 East Midlands Lib-Dem MEP Bill Newton Dunn has published "A few questions to put to Conservative MEP Roger Helmer",(see www.libdemeuro.com/pages/conservatives.html). The pulling power of BND in the East Midlands can perhaps be judged from the fact that not a single member of the public -- NOT ONE -- has ever put one of these questions to me. However I am happy to answer them -- and to suggest a few questions that BND might like to answer. (A little background for anyone who may be unfamiliar with BND. He served as Conservative MEP for Lincolnshire for three terms, 1979/94, before losing the seat to a Labour candidate in 1994. He was out of parliament for five years, but in 1998 offered himself as a Conservative candidate for the East Midlands under the new Regional List system. Although well known as a europhile, he deliberately set out to deceive his selection meeting in July 1998 by insisting that he was fully behind William Hague and the Conservative policies on the euro and the EU. He was selected as Number Two on the list, and was duly elected. But he found his subterfuge increasingly untenable in the new Conservative delegation in the EU parliament, and in November 2000 he crossed the floor and joined the Lib-Dems -- a party that opposes just about every policy in the Manifesto on which BND was elected). Bill's questions: Which party's policies do you support? Answer: The Conservative Party. Bill quotes from a letter he claims to have in his office, which reads: "My reason for putting my name forward as a candidate was certainly not that I wanted to become a politician or an MEP, and not primarily that I wanted to promote the Conservative Party". This is true as far as it goes, but it is so selectively quoted that it amounts to another deliberate deception. The whole point of the passage was the final sentence, which BND omits: "I stood as an MEP to protect the independence and self-determination of my country". (I am quoting from memory. BND is more assiduous than I am about collecting my correspondence -- perhaps he's planning a biography!). Surely no-one joins a political party for its own sake. They join because they agree with its policies. I am a Conservative because I am proud of the party's past achievements, because I want to be part of its future achievements, and because it's the only party with any chance of resolving our relationship with the EU. Unlike BND, I don't intend to stand for election on one party's ticket and then jump ship sixteen months later. Do you stick to your principles? Answer: Yes. BND quotes a letter to the then Tory Shadow Foreign Secretary in which I protested against Conservative MEPs' affiliation with the federalist EPP in the EU parliament. Ever since I was elected I have campaigned actively and publicly against the EPP affiliation. I believe that the Conservative Party's position on this narrow issue is wrong. So I faced a choice: either to leave the EPP unilaterally, or to stay and fight. Unlike BND, I chose to stay and fight. The issue of the Conservative MEPs' relationship with the EPP is very much in play, and I have high hopes that it will be resolved this year. Are you tolerant about how other people lead their lives? Answer: Yes. BND quotes an article I published some time ago entitled "The language of gender politics", in which I said "Many people find the idea of homosexual behaviour distasteful if not viscerally repugnant". This seems to me to be a simple statement of fact, and anyone who denies it is clearly out-of-touch with the views of large sections of society. I also said in the same piece "what people choose to do behind closed doors...is up to them", although BND did not see fit to quote that bit. Some people find haggis viscerally repugnant. To make that statement is not to stigmatise people who don't like haggis -- merely to observe that not everyone shares the same tastes. What is your opinion of the far-right Freedom Party in Austria? Answer: on the whole, not very positive. Again BND gives us a very selective quote: "there was very little to which I felt we could take exception". Here he actually omits the first half of the sentence -- so the reader cannot see what I was referring to. What I said was, "I have read the Freedom Party manifesto, and there was very little to which I felt we could take exception". In a classic effort to create a political smear, BND goes on to quote some egregious comments from Jorg Haider, the former leader of the Freedom Party, to which any decent person would take exception -- and which I certainly did not endorse. Anyone who doubts my comments on the Manifesto of the Freedom Party would do well to read it. I doubt that BND has. What do you actually do in the European parliament?. Answer: a great deal. In recent months I have worked on issues including live animal transportation, multiple sclerosis, stem cell research, tourism in the Peak District, threats to the British sugar industry and the chemical industry, and many others. I have a well-above-average voting participation record. I sit on no fewer than three committees (Unemployment, Industry and Regional Affairs). I am spokesman for the British Conservatives on research, and the EU's 6th framework research programme. I have spoken on European issues to meetings up and down the East Midlands. I have written extensively for regional papers and other publications. And I have campaigned tirelessly against European integration and in favour of Britain's democracy, independence and self-determination. For more details, with copies of articles, press releases and so on, see my web-site at www.rogerhelmer.com Do you enjoy working in the parliament? Answer: Yes, or I wouldn't be standing for re-election in 2004. Having previously worked in industry for over 30 years, I can honestly say I have never worked so hard, or enjoyed my work so much, as I do now. With staggering irrelevance, BND quotes me as saying that I found Singapore and Kuala Lumpur less "foreign" than Brussels or Strasbourg. So I did, but what's that got to do with the question? Do you share the views of the religious fundamentalists, the Brethren? Answer: No. I doubt if I agree with any of them. BND is bizarrely obsessed with the fact that my parents, now long-dead, belonged to a mildly eccentric non-conformist denomination. The truth is that I publicly and expressly rejected their rather narrow religious outlook in my mid-teens -- more than forty years ago! (For example, see my letter in the Southern Evening Echo, probably 1959) I have publicly campaigned on issues which directly conflict with positions my parents would have taken, for example in favour of evolutionary theory and against Creationism (extensive correspondence, Korea Herald, Seoul, 1992/3); in favour of the responsible use of embryonic stem-cells in medical research, and against a restrictive and dogmatic religious approach to the issue (EU parliament, 2001 -- current). Nothing illustrates the bankruptcy of BND's politics better than this: that his preferred line of attack against a political opponent is to bang on about the views of that opponent's long-dead parents. Do you agree with your local Tory MEP colleague, Heaton-Harris, who says he does not want the UK to share the same political system or laws with other EU countries? In other words, should the UK leave the EU? Chris Heaton-Harris has never called for Britain to leave the EU. That is a figment of BND's imagination. In 1972, the British people were sold the then "Common Market" on the basis that it was all about trade and jobs. No one told us then that we were joining a political union where the great bulk of our laws would be made in Brussels by unaccountable foreign institutions, over which the British people would effectively have no control. No one told us that our Westminster parliament would be reduced to little more than a rubber stamp for Brussels. I support Conservative policy, which is that while we favour continued British membership of the EU, we do not want further integration, we do not want an EU Constitution, and we want to re-negotiate key areas of the relationship to ensure that Britain remains an independent, democratic, self-governing nation. For example, we are committed to repatriating fisheries policy, and ending British participation in the disastrous CFP. I want to see Britain's relationship with the continent based on free trade and intergovernmental co-operation -- which is what we thought we were voting for in the 1975 referendum. BND challenges me to "be brave" and "just for once" say that Britain should leave the EU. Sorry, Bill. I won't say that, because it's not my first preference. But if after a sincere attempt at renegotiation, a future Conservative government finds it impossible to achieve satisfactory terms of membership, then in those circumstances I believe that there would be a demand for withdrawal. I would certainly rather be out than to stay in on the current terms. Some Questions for Bill: A. Would you agree that your list of questions, with its deliberately deceitful selective quotations, and its confusion of real quotations with your own gloss, is an excellent example of the Lib-Dems campaigning policy, as set out in your booklet "Effective Opposition"? Where you said "Be wicked, act shamelessly, stir endlessly. Don't be afraid to exaggerate"? B. Do you still stick to the ridiculous sophistry that you were elected as an individual, just because your name was mentioned on the ballot paper? Even though voters put their crosses in the box marked "Conservative Party"? Who do you think you're kidding? C. If you disagree with your party on one issue, should you:
D. You ask me to "be brave", which do you think requires more courage in the EU parliament?
E. Do you think it is clever, or honourable, to attack an opponent through the views of his long-dead parents? Even though he repudiated those views forty-plus years ago? F. Do you agree with your regional colleague Nick Clegg, who attacked East Midlands voters for their "ignorance, distrust and contempt" for European institutions? G. You have expressed your hostility to hare-coursing, but you say you support beagling. Can you explain why it is OK to hunt and kill hares with beagles, but not with greyhounds? Or is this just another case of the Lib Dems saying one thing to one audience and the opposite thing to another audience? H. Where do you stand on the proposed EU Constitution? Both your old party and your new party favour a referendum on this major constitutional step. You have opposed a referendum. Will you now defect to Labour, the only major party opposed to a referendum? |