European Union Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, my name is to the amendment. I support it and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, on how he introduced it. In doing so, I put on record some of the background to new countries joining the EU, which will apply to any new country joining in the future.

One of the arguments put forward by those who support the project of undemocratic European integration is that all those eastern European countries voted for it and signed for it, Turkey and Croatia want to join, and so there cannot be anything wrong with it, can there? This argument avoids two essential ingredients in the story of what actually happened in those countries before they joined. The first was that the yes campaigns—the campaigns in favour of the country in question joining the EU—were massively better funded than the no campaigns. For instance, in Estonia, where I went once or twice in an attempt to help the no campaign, it was estimated that the yes campaign spent 60 times as much as the no campaign could afford and Brussels felt free to dispense taxpayers’ largesse on a large scale to the applicant nations’ yes campaigns. In Estonia, I regret to report that our Foreign Office funded a yes campaign battle bus, which distributed chocolate and whisky to happy Estonians. I saw that—it did happen, but I did not get any chocolate or whisky.

The second ingredient was less easy to spot and has received virtually no comment, which is that many of the political class in the applicant nations were keen for their countries to join the EU because they wanted jobs in Brussels, or at home, on the Brussels pay scale. The Polish ambassador in London at the time told me twice that 1,400 Poles got jobs in Brussels or Poland at a minimum of 10 times their previous salaries. Most of us would do quite a lot for 10 times our present income and so one cannot blame the politicians and bureaucrats in question in those countries for seeing EU membership as a very rosy project indeed. Whether it turns out to be so in the long term for the people whom they deceived remains to be seen. That is another of the powerful hidden factors at work with all those former communist countries and their desire to join the EU, and they will apply to any newcomers.

How does it look from our end? My noble friend Lord Stoddart has mentioned the 12,000 or 13,000 people who were estimated to come into this country after the applicant nations joined. I think that the final figure was more like 1 million. I hope that the Minister will give us an estimate of the number of people who came here. The Poles are wonderful people and I admire them tremendously. They are one of the greatest people on earth but I am not sure how the general influx from the new European countries affected our UK labour force. We had Mr Brown’s mendacious promise of British jobs for British workers, which never looked like being a starter while we remained in the EU and were unable to control our borders. More widely, we now know that our borders were deliberately taken down by the Blair Government. We are told by a civil servant who was involved at the time that they did so,

“to rub the noses of the right in diversity”.

What they may have done, in fact, is to condemn a great many of our working people to unemployment. I cannot believe that the present Government want to follow that route, so I would have thought that they would support this amendment.

Finally, we come to Turkey, to which my noble friend Lord Stoddart referred. I cannot see how the Government can say that they want to limit immigration to tens of thousands per annum and in the same breath say that they want Turkey to join the EU. I have to put another specific question to the Minister: if Turkey is admitted, will there be some long-term ban on Turkish immigration to this country? Will the right to free movement of persons be withheld from Turkey for a long period? Is that in the Government’s thinking when they say that they want Turkey to be in the EU, or are the Government saying simply that, “The project of European integration is wonderful; the more the merrier; and let’s have Turkey in”? One then has to ask, if there is to be such a hold on Turkish immigration, whether the Turkish people themselves will want to join the EU if they cannot come here—particularly here, given our generous welfare system. I look forward to the noble Lord’s answers. I support the amendment.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, fascinating though the discussion about chocolate and whisky has been, I should like to return to the substance of the amendment and begin by mentioning the concerns over the figures relating to QMV. We perhaps overegg matters relating to the percentage change to the UK’s influence over further accessions. The UK currently has 12.33 per cent of the EU population. If Turkey, Croatia, Iceland and the western Balkans all joined the EU, the UK’s population would represent 10.33 per cent. Would a shift from 12.3 per cent to 10.3 per cent really warrant a referendum? Accession does not mean that we are losing our veto.

This provision is not needed in the Bill, because accession treaties do not transfer power or competence from the UK to Brussels; rather, that is relevant for the country that is joining. When a country wants to join, an Act of Parliament is required, as is required for all treaty changes. As an aside, I should say that accession of a country does not lead to the loss of the British veto in any area. We covered that at length earlier in Committee.

If the issue of a country joining were to be extremely sensitive, then of course a referendum could be called as part of the Act being passed by this Parliament. The referendum is there as a back-up on a particular issue, should our Parliament call upon it, but such a provision is not needed in the Bill.