Christine Jardine: Let’s be grateful for the EU

As a child it was the excitement of joining Europe that I remember. For my then young parents, the Second World War was a recent memory of elder brothers away at war, family friends who did not return and the reality of a childhood in blitz-torn Scotland.

It was a picture of our relationship with Europe that I knew only from the war movies which seemed to dominate Christmas TV schedules.

For me, joining what was then the EEC was the beginning of a very different, more positive and much less life-threatening relationship with the Continent than the previous generations of my family had experienced.

In 1973 Europe was all about new money, counting everything in tens and hundreds and new equipment to learn with at school.

Yard sticks were out and metre sticks were in. No more inches. It was all centimetres, or so we thought.

And very shortly afterwards we began to feel that we were actually part of an organisation that would build a stronger safer Europe.

Forty years on it seems astonishing to many of those who have only known life in the EU that we ever considered anything else.

Oh, I know there are the naysayers in Ukip and dark corners of the Conservative party.

But for the rest of us the statistics underline, not undermine, our future with our European partners.

The eurozone is the UK’s biggest trading partner. Three million jobs are directly dependent on the EU and would be lost if we withdrew. Many more would then fall by the wayside.

European Regional Funding has helped our rural areas survive some challenging economic times.

But, with the next round of European elections now less than six months away, there is a danger that those important economic truths will be drowned out by agendas driven more by political self preservation than what is best for this country.

This election, perhaps more than any other since we joined, will demand greater effort to put other arguments aside and focus on what Europe has done, and will continue to do for us.

There is a very real danger that those with separatist agendas – both for Scotland and the UK – will try to convince us that their’s is the only argument on the table.

The SNP’s obsession with independence to the detriment of all other policies means we may spend the next six months being bombarded with their already discredited arguments about automatic membership of the EU.

And then there are the claims from Ukip – and some Tories – that really we should be renegotiating the whole EU project with David Cameron’s promised “In or Out” referendum on the horizon.

None of those arguments are what we should be thinking about over the next six months.

What they have in common is that, in different ways, they put at risk those three million jobs and undermine billions of pounds of investment in our economy.

The SNP raise doubts about Scotland’s future with their independence obsession.

But more than that they have consistently voted against new Scottish jobs at the EU.

The SNP opposed a new EU free trade agreement which has doubled UK exports to Korea. Alyn Smith MEP voted against the creation of a single EU-patent which will save Scottish inventors thousands of pounds. Meanwhile the Tories’ eurosceptic statements also risk undermining our role in the EU, and we must not allow their own internal squabbles to hijack this important debate.

That is not to say that the EU as it exists is perfect.

Of course there are aspects that need reformed. The same is true of most multi-national partnerships or organisations.

But if we look at what has been happening in the EU recently we can see that change is not impossible, far from it.

Speaking to LibDem MEP George Lyon in Aberdeenshire recently he stressed the changes that he feels we should all know about, and take into account when it comes to ranking our preferences in May’s election.

As a negotiator on the Common Agricultural Policy reform he pointed to the fact that it delivered a deal that protected farm payments for Scottish farmers.

Danny Alexander recently announced that the fuel duty discount scheme being piloted on UK islands may now be extended to rural areas of the mainland.

And on the EU budget itself, George Lyon tells me the new deal will deliver £6 billion of investment to Scotland.

All of these are reasons why we should be considering the EU on its own merits and not as punchball in an increasingly vapid independence debate.

The first time I was able to visit the European Parliament in Brussels I was surprised at the impact it had on me.

It was not the Common Agricultural Policy, or even the Common Fisheries Policy, both of which are so important, which gripped my attention.

No, as I sat looking in on the chamber listening to the translation of the day’s debate I was overcome with a sense of gratitude.

For my generation this is how we have settled our differences with, and across the continent.

It is not a long physical journey from Brussels to the Battlefields of the First and even the Second World Wars.

But it is one that has taken half a century. We have not completed it yet. What we cannot afford to do is allow ourselves to be distracted now.

• Christine Jardine is second on the LibDem party list for next year’s elections to the European Parliament