European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993
Debate between Baroness Bakewell and Lord Pearson of Rannoch
Baroness Bakewell
My Lords, I wish to address a small example of what has so far been elucidated in highly theoretical and impressive terms. In the course of this austerity Budget, the Government imposed what they hoped was an unnoticed small adjustment to taxation, but it was not unnoticed. It made the headlines and became known as the granny tax—a misnomer that was joked about on several television programmes in which I took part to discuss this move.
What was interesting about the days subsequent to the Budget and the discussion of the granny tax was the implication that pensioners had done well by the Budget. One segment of the population had been treated better than the rest. I wish to challenge that; I have on record that this is by no means the situation and that the Budget missed an opportunity to improve the economy among consumers. Some 50 per cent of pensioners pay no tax because they earn so little. The increase in the pension, which the Chancellor boasted about, was £5 for each pensioner and was merely a catch-up with inflation that had gone before; 4.5 million pensioners lost out, but not by very much. It allowed Age UK to refer to the Budget change as “small beer”, by which I think it meant small sums of money. Small sums of money for people who do not have very much are far more significant than large sums of money for people who have plenty. Those turning 75 were hit more by this Budget change than the 4.5 million who had the small loss.
Pensioners are suffering and they suffered from the Budget. They suffer because VAT affects all they consume; they suffer from the inflation in food, fuel and heating prices. I simply want to make the point that 10 million people over 65 are spending all they earn and all they get from their pension because they need to. Small adjustments in their favour would have increased spending across a large segment of the population and helped to boost the economy. This was a missed opportunity and the pensioners noticed.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, I trust that the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, knows that he has my sympathy in his very difficult, some might say impossible, task. I trust he will forgive me if I start by asking whether it is not surreal, even grotesque, that we have to submit anything, let alone our Budget, to the corrupt, expensive and now pointless outfit in Brussels, which has not been able to have its own accounts signed off for the last 17 years in a row. In the background, and as a related matter, is it not even more absurd that this outfit in Brussels now presumes to tell us how to reorganise our own accounting standards, how much our banks and insurance companies should reserve and much other mischief that is actively designed to diminish the City of London and our vital financial services generally?
Could the noble Lord tell us what exactly the United Kingdom’s convergence programme is? With what are we converging and to what benefit? We are told that we are doing this in pursuit of the EU’s stability and growth pact. Surely even the Government must now acknowledge that this is a dead duck: that the whole EU adventure has not brought any stability or growth but merely civil unrest, unpayable debt and slump. The countries of the future sail on, including the Commonwealth, while we stay on the “Titanic”, with the iceberg obvious in front of us.
The European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993 was the Act that put the destructive Maastricht treaty into our national law. Perhaps the worst aspect of that treaty, at least for our friends in Europe, was that it paved the way for European economic and monetary union, or the EMU, the bird that cannot fly. It came complete with its attendant single currency, the euro, which is now causing so much havoc among its members and elsewhere. The United Kingdom was of course right to avoid that part of the treaty, and credit for this is often given to the then Prime Minister, Mr John Major, and later to Mr Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, I understand from friends in the Civil Service that neither of these gentlemen deserves much credit for this fortunate deliverance. The credit should instead go to the bureaucrats in the Treasury and the Bank of England, who disliked the EMU because it would have passed much of their power to the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. The Treasury would no longer have been top dog in the British pecking order. That position would have passed to the Foreign Office—perish the thought.
Be that as it may, it seems that our proceedings today have their justification in the failed process of European economic and monetary integration. I cannot see, therefore, why we should have anything to do with it. Why should we submit anything at all to Brussels, let alone our Budget? It is true that the Government have rightly refused the insolent demand by Brussels that they should submit our Budget to Brussels before the House of Commons sees it. They are to be congratulated on that small show of defiance. However, I come back to the question: why are we doing this at all? I fear the noble Lord’s answer will be that it is a treaty commitment, that we take our treaty commitments seriously and that we will be fined by Brussels in the Luxembourg Court if we do not do it.
I conclude with some advice for the Government, which I have attempted to give before but which I do not think has quite sunk in yet: that there is no way in which the EU can enforce a fine against a donor member state such as the United Kingdom. EU fines can be enforced against individuals and companies in the national courts where they reside. Recipient nations can have their fines deducted from the money Brussels sends to them. This, however, does not work for donor nations such as us or Germany or, dare I mention it, Holland.
Perhaps the Minister could pass this advice on to his right honourable friend, Mr David Lidington, the Europe Minister, who I learned from today’s Daily Telegraph does not want us to pay the extra £890 million now being demanded by the Commission into the bottomless pit of Brussels. A senior EU official has apparently told the Daily Telegraph that we could be sent to the Court and fined if we did not pay up. So what? Just knock the fine off the £10.2 billion in net cash we sent Brussels last year—and it is more this year. Just knock it off and see whether they dare to do it again. If Mr Cameron and his Conservative colleagues started to behave like this, they might even win the next election. So it should be with this insulting Motion before us, which I oppose.