Roger Helmer, on behalf of the EFD Group. – Mr President, during the second World War, the Royal Air Force was very concerned about the losses amongst its heavy bombers, so it sought to protect its air crew, first by putting armour around the pilot and then, when they needed more protection, armour around the navigator and more armour around the bomber. Yet they found that losses continued to go up. They finally realised that they had put so much weight of armour into those bombers that they could scarcely fly. They then removed the armour, the planes flew higher and faster and the loss rate went down.

For decades now, the European Union has been loading regulation on labour markets. It has done so with the best of intentions – to protect workers – but the effect is to create a labour market so overloaded and inflexible that it simply cannot fly. On top of that problem, we are now looking at green jobs. Colleagues ought to know that there are credible studies from several European countries which show that every green job costs two or three or four jobs in the real economy because green energy is so expensive that it actually restricts growth in the rest of the economy and costs jobs. What we need for jobs is, first of all, deregulation and, secondly, to abandon our green aspirations.