European Union (Referendum) Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Dobbs in championing this Bill in your Lordships’ House. In the contributions today from noble Lords, who clearly hold diverse views not only on this Bill but on the wider subject of our membership of the European Union, the common theme has been the recognition that the people of this country are in the mood for a referendum on the subject. It is worth drilling down a bit to ask why that is. My own view is that people now feel so much more strongly about the need for a referendum because, as other noble Lords have already mentioned, of their lack of confidence and trust in the body politic, for which many of us—all of us perhaps—should take some responsibility.

On the specific subject of our membership of the EU, in the quiet corners of the Conservative Party, when my name is mentioned in conjunction with the subject of the EU, I might perhaps be described as one of the “usual suspects”. I agree that that would probably be the correct terminology, but I have noticed today that the language we use when discussing Europe and people’s different views on it is not the language that one would expect to find in a debate on education, health or any other big political issue. It is very personal, very subjective and, sometimes, very unpleasant. I am one of those in the Chamber—looking around, I see other noble Lords who have had this experience—who have been subject to name-calling over the years because we have taken a certain view. For example, we have warned against our membership of the single currency and of the dangers of a central European bank, and argued that we should not readily give up our gold to buy up euros in order to prop up that currency. When these things have been discussed, they have not been discussed in a very mature way across the parties in either House.

That has influenced the way in which the public no longer have any confidence in what any of us say about promises to do with Europe. Prime Ministers of both parties have successively prayed in aid their negotiations in various treaties when they have gone to the electorate in a general election. We have come up with all sorts of politics-speak about subsidiarity and things like that, which we hoped would comfort the general public and suggest that, somehow, we were still in charge as politicians. However, the nub of this, and the reason why this referendum and this very specific promise of a referendum are so important in this Bill, is that the general public out there believe that the power that they thought they had through the ballot box—not the power we as politicians have—has gradually been eroded. We have conspired across the parties to use language to defuse and to try to subjugate the real discussion that was needed so that people could have a very clear understanding of what was being done, in successive treaties, in their name. Gradually you erode from people the opportunity to hold their elected representatives in another place to account. Increasingly, when those elected representatives then quite rightly hold the Ministers of the day to account, those Ministers have to defuse matters and cannot answer straight questions.

A classic case in point before us in the debate today is the question of our borders. It does not matter what a Minister says about our borders. No Minister here or in another place can do anything to control immigration across our borders as far as EU citizens are concerned, and yet anybody who has raised that issue in the past few years has been name-called in a way to stop that debate. In the end, the general public see through that and realise that they are the loser here. The general public cannot get answers from their democratically elected representatives, who in turn cannot get answers from Ministers. That is the end of democracy as we know it and have understood it for many years. That is why we need a renegotiation to bring some balance back into what was an agreement that we voted on in 1975. I put my hand up to being one of those who voted for us to go into a Common Market, as I understood it, but over the years the EU has changed. That is why the renegotiation is needed and the British people now want the guarantee of a referendum.