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		Speeches & Articles Click on the headline to see the text in full. Cool thinking on Climate Change - Jaguar Driver - September 2012 The Rio Summit failed utterly, as did Copenhagen and Cancun before it. We have to ask why. The truth is that no one believes in climate change any more. There has been no global warming for fifteen years. Sea levels are not rising significantly. Countries like India, China and the USA will not sacrifice economic progress for a speculative and alarmist theory of climate change. And our European taxpayers will no longer pay for it. "Green jobs" destroy real jobs - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 5th July 2012 The Rio Summit failed utterly, as did Copenhagen and Cancun before it. We have to ask why. The truth is that no one believes in climate change any more. There has been no global warming for fifteen years. Sea levels are not rising significantly. Countries like India, China and the USA will not sacrifice economic progress for a speculative and alarmist theory of climate change. And our European taxpayers will no longer pay for it. Cameron "best federalist outside eurozone" - Guy Verhofstadt - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 13th June 2012 Mr Verhofstadt, surely it is time to realise that the Euro has failed, the European Union has failed and the solution is to start to dismantle both. why do you call for more Europe when you are surrounded by the ruin of Europe? Why are you trying to reinforce failure? Commissioner Tajani's lack of insight - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 10th May 2012 Can I ask the commissioner whether all this talk of growth is not just a panic knee=jerk reaction to recent elections in France and in Greece and can I ask whether the commissioner has any realistic ideas for addressing the problem. Women and Climate Change - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 19th April 2012 This report represents an heroic attempt to link two of this parliament's main obsessions, womens' rights and climate change, but sadly it fails to achieve that objective. Green Economy - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 15th March 2012 All over Europe we are sacrificing perfectly good coal-fired and nuclear power stations on the altar of environmentalism. We are trying to replace them with renewables. Wind turbines are blighting homes and communities and landscapes. Yet they deliver only an intermittent trickle of very expensive electricity. What do local Tories think of Louise Mensch MP's love of The Guardian? - Conservative Home - Wednesday, 9th November 2011 Louise Mensch (née Bagshawe) has achieved a huge amount of airtime recently. She is of course the very model of a modern Conservative MP. Young(ish), a woman, a successful author, sitting on a small fortune made from her chick-lit ventures, married to the manager of a successful heavy metal band. Meyer Report - Spanish Property Rights - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 13th September 2011 This otherwise excellent report omits any mention of the issue which has generated the highest number of petitions in recent years. This was the Spanish property issue. Hundreds of EU citizens from many countries have spent their life savings on dream properties in Spain, only to wake up one morning to find an eviction notice on the mat and a bull-dozer at the gate. Making an Idol out of the Earth - Sunday, 9th April 2011 This is a sermon by Edward Spalton on the topic of climate change. The politician mentioned in the fourth paragraph is of course myself, and the panel discussion took place in Leicester Cathedral. Croatia as a Candidate for EU Membership - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 16th February 2011 I have spent some considerable time in Croatia and also taken pains to follow developments there. Croatia is a country which is characterised by endemic bribery, corruption, crony capitalism and unexplained wealth amongst the political classes. It lacks the basic infrastructure of a free society. Climate pre-Cancun - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 24th November 2010 Speaking in a personal capacity, let me remind colleagues that the public have lost faith in man-made global warming. Voters are sick of being blamed for climate change, and they're no longer prepared to pay for it. The "Dear Leader" and his paranoid psychopaths - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 16th June 2010 I have lived and worked in Korea, and last week I was in Seoul with our European parliament delegation. I heard the account of the Cheonan sinking from our Korean hosts, and it is abundantly clear that North Korea was responsible. Investing in Low Carbon Technologies - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 11th March 2010 We have heard a lot of nonsense today about green jobs. The fact is that our obsession with renewables is already driving up the cost of electricity and forcing European citizens into fuel poverty. We need nuclear and coal fired power stations - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 24th February 2010 We are still concerned in this House about CO2 emissions, even as the theory of man-made climate change collapses before our eyes. If we really want to reduce CO2 emissions, then we need nuclear power stations. We demand a public enquiry on climate data - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 21st January 2010 I have good news for the House. In common with many scientists, I personally have concluded that there is no crisis. Global sea levels are not rising significantly. And as the IPCC has been forced to admit, Himalayan glaciers are not in rapid retreat. Confused and essentially cosmetic - Conservative Home - Thursday, 5th November 2009 Yesterday I joined a phone-in programme on the Lisbon Treaty on BBC Radio Northampton. I am well aware of public attitudes to the EU, yet even I was taken aback by the relentlessly hostile flow of comment about the Lisbon Treaty, and the way that it has been rail-roaded through in the teeth of public opposition. Many speakers were also very unhappy about the withdrawal by the Conservative Party of its commitment to a Lisbon referendum. Stern Warning to go Vegetarian - Conservative Home - Tuesday, 28th October 2009 Lord Stern, the pin-up economist of the climate hysteria movement, and author of of the Stern Report on the costs of global warming, has delivered himself of a new gem. He predicts that "eating meat could become as socially unacceptable as drink-driving". “Isolated and Marginalised”? - Tuesday, 9th June 2009 Amidst the rout of the left across the EU, and especially the rout of Labour in the UK, the lefties have scored one minor success. Labour, and their fellow-travellers in the media, have repeated their mantra about “Tory MEPs sitting with extremists and fascists” and Tories being “isolated and marginalised in Europe”, until it has started to seep into the public consciousness. The Lisbon Treaty - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 6th May 2009 I am sorry that Mr. Poettering is not in the Chair tonight, as I had hoped to thank him publicly for giving me the opportunity to leave the EPP group a few years back. I am delighted that my Conservative colleagues will all be leaving the EPP shortly -- an objective I have worked towards for ten years. The EPP: Cameron delivers - Thursday, 12th March 2009 Yesterday (March 11th) at a meeting of the UK Conservative delegation in Straz, William Hague and Mark Francois, fresh from a meeting with EPP Group President Joseph Daul, announced that they had given formal notice to the EPP that Conservative MEPs would leave the EPP group at the end of this parliamentary term, in three months' time. Emissions trading system - Heartland Conference (New York) - Monday, 9th March 2009 I think all of us here are climate sceptics. But I will be arguing that even if you accept climate alarmism, the EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS) is a disastrous policy response. It is profoundly wrong even in its own terms. British Education: destroyed by Labour - Tuesday, 3rd March 2009 A recent newspaper headline reads: “Universities are filtering out the middle classes”. Ed Balls is master-minding an unprecedented social engineering campaign, driven by class envy and hatred, which is designed to undermine private education by creating barriers to tertiary education for privately educated students. The Florenz Report (Global Warming) - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 4th February 2009 Five hundred years ago, there was a consensus amongst scientists that the World was Flat. They were wrong. In the 1970s, after three decades of global cooling, there was a consensus among scientists that we were facing a new Ice Age. They were wrong. The Euro – a slow motion train crash - Plenary Speech - Tuesday, 13th January 2009 In the last two hundred years there have been at least half a dozen attempts to create monetary unions and fixed exchange rate systems. All have failed. All have damaged the participants. So it is with the euro. The imbalances long predicted by sceptics are starting to bite. Should Britain join the euro? No, no, no! - Essay by Theo Casey - Fleet Street Letter - December 2008 On 17 November, we raised our concerns that a fresh wave of pro-euro rhetoric would soon be making its way into the mainstream. Two weeks later, the European Commission president put the cat among the pigeons, impishly announcing that unnamed senior British ministers have expressed interest in joining the single currency. President Václav Klaus deserves an apology - Plenary Speech - Monday, 15th December 2007 I understand that a meeting took place last week between the heads of the political groups and Mr Václav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic. It has been widely reported that, at that meeting, several of our colleagues, in particular Mr Daniel Cohn-Bendit, addressed the President of the Czech Republic in insolent, insulting and intolerant terms, in such a way as to bring this House into disrepute. The economic naiveté of Gordon Brown - Sunday, 7th December 2008 Gordon Brown urges the banks to pass on to borrowers in full the Bank of England’s recent Base Rate cuts. There are two implicit assumptions here: first that this will put money in folks’ pockets, get the tills ringing and rescue the economy from recession. Second, that the banks have a moral obligation to pass on the cuts, and are simply wicked profiteers if they fail to do so. Wrong on both counts. Climate Change - Plenary Spech - Thursday, 4th December 2008 I have no doubt that we are facing the greatest threat we have seen in my lifetime. That threat is posed not by global warming, but our policy responses to it. The world has certainly been warming, slightly and intermittently, for the last 150 years. But that warming is entirely consistent with well established, natural, long-term climate cycles established over thousands of years. Name the guilty men! - Monday, 1st December 2008 The President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso has said that Britain would be better placed to face the global credit crunch if we had joined the euro, and that serious people in the UK are defying public opinion and thinking in terms of British membership. He says he will “respect the confidentiality of private conversations”, but that prominent British politicians have told him we should be better off in the euro. A New Tragedy in Ulster - Tuesday, 26th November 2008 We are accustomed to horror stories from Northern Ireland, although thankfully they have been a bit less frequent of late. But now we read of a new one. Catriona Ruane, the ideologue Sinn Fein Education Minister of Northern Ireland has scrapped the eleven plus exam in the province, on the grounds that it is “an outdated and unequal education system”. She is wrong. EMRA: Full Assembly Report: Roger Helmer MEP - October 2008 I have been actively involved in a range of work related to my membership of the parliament's Unemployment Committee, the Constitutional Affairs Committee and the Temporary Committee on Climate Change, and on other issues. Market failure? Or policy and regulatory failure? - Thursday, 16th October 2008 The conventional wisdom is that the current financial crisis marks the failure of markets, possibly the end of capitalism. Even the very sound Roger Bootle of Capital Economics has been saying that perhaps banks are rather like public utilities, and need more government involvement. Stop worrying about global warming - Tuesday, 14th October 2008 The idea of the “tipping point” is fashionable, cogent and attractive. It is a concept that applies in many walks of life. But like any compelling concept, it is sometimes applied inappropriately. What Conservatives want in their euro-manifesto - Wednesday, 1st October 2008 In the Freedom Zone at Party Conference, on Monday Sept 29th, I chaired a debate on the 2009 euro-manifesto, with a range of euro-candidates, plus major Party donor Stuart Wheeler.  The Candidates were John Flack from Eastern England, Jean-Paul Floru from London, Therese Coffey from the South East, Zehra Zaidi from the South West and our own Rupert Matthews from the East Midlands. Obamania comes to Britain - Friday, 25th July 2008 When I was in business, we had a saying. “You hire an articulate manager, and after six months you realise that all he can do is to articulate”. Well Obama is top-notch at articulation. He is a great orator. He promises hope and change, and heaven knows we could do with some of that. But perhaps we should recall that “change” is a value-free zone until we start talking about just what change, progress to just which destination, we have in mind. What's the worst way to cut CO2 emissions? - Conservative Home - Sunday, 20th July 2008 Put ten economists in a room, and they'll come up with eleven different opinions.  But there's one thing they'll agree on, and that is that taxes (if we must have taxes) should be clear, fair, predictable, easy to understand, cheap to collect, and above all, non-discriminatory. They should not distort markets and economic activity. Lisbon Treaty - Plenary Speech - Tuesday, 24th June 2008 President Sarkozy is reported in the London Times as saying: "The Irish are bloody fools. They have been stuffing their faces at Europe's expense for years, and now they dump us in the s**t". His word, not mine.Last week we all said we respected the Irish result. But we do not respect it. We are treating the Irish with utter contempt. Like Robert Mugabe, we simply reject the verdict of the people. What will the future bring: warming or cooling? - By Hans Labohm - Wednesday, 18th June 2008 IThe fear of climate change has sometimes been called ‘the mother of all environmental scares’. We are mesmerized by man-made global warming, even to the extent that it borders on hysteria. That’s because we are exposed to an almost daily barrage of warnings from leading public figures about the imminent catastrophe of rising global temperatures. David Davis's Resignation - Friday, 13th June 2008 It is a move that has taken extraordinary courage and resolve, and I salute David for that. It is a splendid and flamboyant gesture in the cause of freedom. And both for myself, and for The Freedom Association which I chair, I salute his commitment to civil liberties. He is already broadening the issue to include ID cards, DNA data bases, surveillance cameras, the whole panoply of the intrusive Big-Brother state. Climate change - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 21st May 2008 For once I come to the House with good news. Global warming has stopped. 1998 was the warmest year in living memory. For the last ten years, average temperatures have been flat or falling. The recent modest warming is comparable to what occurred in the Mediæval warm period, and before that in the Roman optimum and the Holocene optimum. Temperatures today are below the maxima of the last 2000 years. An Appeal to Reason - 29th April 2008 Nigel (Lord) Lawson, a former very distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer (and also former MP for my own constituency of Blaby/South Leics), has written a splendid new book on climate. He held a launch and book-signing event in Leicester in April. He is also, by the way, a top-class economist. Immigration - Speech to Cambridge Union Society - Thursday, 24th April 2008 At a conservative estimate it is some forty-three years since I stood in this chamber. I was delighted to receive the Society's invitation. All I can say, Mr. President, is "What took you so long?" I was on a flight to Strasbourg recently, doing the Telegraph cross-word, and wrestling with a clue that read "Immigration policy, 4-4". The solution was "Open Door". And sadly, that reflects the reality of British immigration policy today. Galileo GPS - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 23rd April 2008 I, too, voted against the Barsi-Pataky report. This is simply a political vanity project, a bit like the euro, and like the euro it has no economic and no technical justification. It is unnecessary; it is redundant; it is already becoming obsolescent. Adapting to climate change in Europe - Plenary Speech - Thursday, 10th April 2008 I have four quick questions on climate change. Firstly, is global warming happening? Answer: no, the world has got slightly cooler over the last 10 years and the rate of cooling is accelerating. Secondly, is it caused by mankind? Answer: no, there is increasing scientific evidence to show that what climate change we see is part of natural cycles. Croatia – progress report - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 9th April 2008 Last year, I spent a very intensive week in Croatia in meetings with diplomats, academics, lawyers, businessmen, chambers of commerce and the media. I got a very clear picture of a country that does not have a proper market economy and a country that has far too much government engagement in the judiciary, in the media and in business. £600: the price of Free Speech in Strasbourg - Thursday, 13th March 2008 I have blogged previously about our demonstration for a referendum, in the parliament's plenary session in Strasbourg in December, and the subsequent disciplinary hearings for fourteen Members, including myself. I have been waiting several weeks for the Sword of Damocles to fall. The people have spoken - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 12th March 2008 The ratification of the Renamed EU Constitution threatens the democratic legitimacy of the European project itself. The peoples of France and Holland rejected the Constitution. Yet it has now come back with a new name, and with what Angela Merkel called "cosmetic changes". The Sophistry of Richard Corbett - Tuesday, 11th March 2008 During the parliament's February Strasbourg session, we voted the Corbett report on the Lisbon Treaty (aka the Renamed EU Constitution). There was an amendment that simply said "This house will recognise the outcome of the Irish Referendum" (which takes place soon). I Want a Referendum - Rally Speech - Wednesday, 27th February 2008 It's great to be here with you today, and I congratulate the organisers for an excellent event. I was heartened to walk down the line of people queuing outside the Houses of Parliament to lobby their MPs -- it was so long that I had to give up and get back here before I got to the end. The crowd in this room now speaks for itself. No democratic legitimacy - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 20th February 2008 Today, the European project abandons any claim to democratic legitimacy. Today we will vote through the Renamed Constitution, in an act that shows monstrous contempt for European citizens and Democratic values. An example of damaging regulation - February 13 2008 I am concerned about the impact that the EU's inclusion of aviation in its Emissions Trading Scheme will have, especially on budget airlines. It gets slightly technical, so I asked John Hanlon of the European Low Fares Airline Association to set out the airlines' case. Conservative MEPs in the EPP - Two down; 25 to go - Conservative Home - February 1 2008 At a "Mini-Plenary" in Brussels on Jan 31st, my good friend and colleague Dan Hannan MEP was expelled from the EPP group, in circumstances uncannily similar to my own expulsion three years earlier. Bali - Plenary Speech - Wednesday, 30th January 2008 I understand that on the day the Bali Climate Conference commenced, there were so many private jets at Bali's airport that they ran out of parking space. Thus do our achievements fall short of our aspirations. Previous articles from this section 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002