The real question in the European referendum

 If John Redwood, MP for Wokingham and former Secretary of State for Wales was Prime Minister then I’m sure Stephen Crabb would be campaigning for us to leave the EU. Redwood, of course, is the high priest of England’s sovereignty as expressed through Parliament and an arch hater of Brussels and all its works. Stephen Crabb was of a similar persuasion when he first entered Parliament in 2005. Certainly, like most of his fellow intake into the House of Commons in that year he was firmly on the Euro-sceptic wing of his party.

However, since Crabb became Secretary of Sate for Wales in July 2014 he has adopted what he calls David Cameron’s centrist position on Europe. Last week he gave a speech to the Cardiff Business Club urging a Yes vote in the forthcoming referendum based on the Prime Minister’s renegotiation of the terms of Britain’s membership.

Yet the matters being renegotiated are peripheral to the fundamental concerns at stake over Britain’s continued membership. These are to do with the economy, trade, jobs, the future of farming and above all Britain’s security in the world. The matters being negotiated – the opt-out from the Euro, Brussels red tape, the meaning of “ever closer union”, and benefits claimed by migrants – are insignificant by comparison. They are just a smokescreen to give Cameron an excuse to campaign in favour of a Yes vote, against the views of most of his party.

Security was always the main purpose of European unification and that continues to this day. The main prize was peace following the two catastrophic European civil wars that disfigured the first half of the last century. To be fair to Stephen Crabb he acknowledged this in his speech last week. This is what he said: “My late father-in-law grew up in Nazi-occupied Paris and was a teenager in 1945 when the war ended. He and I used to argue a lot about the future of Europe back in the late 1990s just before he died. For him, and for so many people of that generation including many here in the UK, the emergence of the European Union was a matter of cementing the peace in Europe and guaranteeing economic security. And it became for him and so many others an article of faith. What they lived through and what they saw meant this faith was unshakable.”

Crabb went on to say that though he respected this view it was not how his generation thinks: “The world that shaped my own political outlook has been one which has seen the rapid internationalisation of markets and the extraordinary global digital and communications revolution which has changed forever how we work and how we live.”

But in this globalising world we still need the security that European unity offers. Just take the challenge of terrorism. Tools such as the European Arrest Warrant, the European Criminal Records Information System and the Terrorist Finance Tracking System are essential in preventing and responding to terrorist activity throughout the continent.

And the basic question still remains, which is at the heart of the referendum debate and which Stephen Crabb is wrong to think is now just part of history and not relevant to the present day. Do we want to see a continent in which there is German roof over Europe, or one where there is a European roof over Germany? I know the answer to that question.