Hansard

It is a great honour to make my maiden speech in the Parliament as one of Glasgow’s two newly elected Conservative MSPs. Given that I have taught European and British constitutional law at the University of Glasgow for the past 13 years, I suppose that it is apt that I am making my first speech in a debate on the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union. On the subject of the University of Glasgow, I refer members to my declaration of interests in the register of members’ interests.

The city that I represent, which is the city that is my home, where I got married and where my four children were born, has a proud European heritage. It was the first British city to be named European city of culture, in 1990. A quarter of a century later, Glasgow is still making European waves. Just this year, it was ranked as top large European city of the future. More than 5,000 EU students come to Glasgow each year to study in the city’s three universities. Altogether, Glasgow’s 130,000 students come from 135 countries around the world. It is no wonder that we are the Rough Guides friendliest city on the planet.

On 23 June, I shall vote to remain in the European Union. That will not be with the same passion and pride with which I voted on 18 September 2014 to reject the Scottish National Party’s proposition that we break up Britain, but nonetheless with clarity that to stay is the right course for Glasgow, Scotland, the UK and, indeed, the EU itself. In my judgment, the European Union is broken and needs fixing. With soaring unemployment in southern Europe, a failed currency union—there are lessons there for Scotland, too—immiserating the lives of millions of Europeans, and a migration crisis the like of which the continent has not faced since the second world war, the EU has problems aplenty. However, the great failure of the vote leave campaign has been its complete inability to explain how our leaving the European Union would help to fix any of those problems. Just as I wanted Scotland to remain in the United Kingdom because that is in the UK’s interests as well as in Scotland’s interests, so, too, I want the UK to remain in the EU because that is in the European public interest as well as in Britain’s interests.

We should remain precisely because the EU needs fixing. We Britons can lead the way in fixing it. The Prime Minister’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership of the European Union shows how that can be done. That renegotiation secured for not only Britain but the whole of the European Union that the single market will have Conservative values at its core. It will be a more competitive and better regulated single market, with fewer administrative burdens, lower compliance costs for business, and unnecessary European legislation repealed.

Clipping the wings of the European Court of Justice is another of the Prime Minister’s achievements that will certainly benefit Britain, and it will be to the advantage of the continent as a whole if others follow where British Conservatives have led. That the UK now has a much-needed opt-out from ever closer union will mean that, in cases that concern the United Kingdom at least, the European Court of Justice will have to enforce the law as the member states have made it rather than the law that the judges would like to see. I, for one, fully share the frustration that our own Supreme Court recently expressed at the irresponsible overreach of some of the ECJ’s case law.

It was a Conservative Government that took us into the European Economic Community in 1972, and it is a Conservative Government that has now, successfully and against the odds, delivered a renegotiation of the UK’s constitutional and legal relationship with the European Union. A generation ago—yes, 41 years is a generation ago—the British people decided to remain in the EEC. We should reaffirm that decision next month, not because the European Union is perfect, but because its problems, like our own domestic challenges, require British Conservative solutions. We require solutions that get government off people’s backs and leave them free to pursue their lives; solutions that encourage free movement—of goods, of services and, yes, of workers, too; and solutions that are designed to ensure not only the redistribution of wealth, but the creation of wealth in the first place.

Those are the values of union. Economic prosperity and security for all lay at the heart of our case for a no vote in 2014, as they lie now at the core of the case for a remain vote next month. They are my values and the values of my party, and they are the values that have brought me into Scottish politics. Economic prosperity and security for all are the values that I shall seek to promote, in the interests of Glasgow and Scotland as a whole, every day, as a member of the Scottish Parliament. [Applause.]