European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Triesman

Friday 31st January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, this is a fair enough amendment. Were we to have been conducting this debate 25 or 30 years ago, I suspect that everybody would have thought it wholly appropriate to take the temperature of the nation as a whole, because we would not have seen the degree of change within the United Kingdom and the extent of devolution. Of course, it will still be useful to have a United Kingdom-wide picture at the end of a referendum, and it is essential that there should be—but on its own, that will not do now.

Twenty-five years on, the home nations of the United Kingdom are sufficiently and significantly distinct. People see themselves as having very distinct interests. Some of them are to do with the individual nations and some are to do with the character of the relationship that those nations have with Europe. There are distinct issues about the development of social policy, economic interests and the trajectories of economic interests. It is not just that those factors have emerged in the overall politics of the United Kingdom, but that the experience has some depth. There is real depth of experience. It is not just a constitutional formality that these things have taken place; it represents very real experience, which people generally treasure.

As with all the issues in front of your Lordships in these debates, it is very helpful to look at this from all angles. Were there to be a vote to leave—and I have said in the House before that I profoundly hope, as many others do, that there will not be—especially if it were a narrow vote, and a strong belief persisted in Scotland and/or Wales that their electorates did not want to leave, that would create stresses within the United Kingdom that unquestionably would push those home nations towards still greater devolution or full independence. If we did it as a single country, it is likely to promote the belief that the results in effect hide the way in which people in Scotland and Wales would prefer to conduct their relationship with Europe, and the fact that they wish to do so in a way that is significantly different from the approach of England. Knowing all that, there is a very good case for believing that it would put energy into further separation.

If there is an overall vote, and if people know what the votes are in each of the home nations, that does not necessarily mean that people will say, “Actually, on our own, we might very well have chosen to leave”—but there would never be an allegation that they were caught by the fact that the vote was hidden or that there was something unreasonable, unfair or deceptive about it. That argument about process is potentially the one that is most damaging, because it can never be properly addressed. It is much better to have the votes clearly and in the open.

Noble Lords will have noted that I have not mentioned Northern Ireland in this debate, not because I do not think that there would be an interest in Northern Ireland but because I do not detect, broadly speaking, among the majority of the population of Northern Ireland, a desire to move to a still greater distance from the rest of the United Kingdom. There are always nuances in the United Kingdom and in Northern Ireland as a whole.

I express my support for the points that my noble friend Lord Anderson made about Gibraltar. It was certainly my experience when in the Foreign Office that the European Union mitigates—though not always successfully, it has to be said—the character and intensity of some of the disagreements that occur with Spain. Even when other members of the EU are supportive of Spain, it none the less damps down the intensity of the discussion. Of course, Gibraltar sometimes criticises the EU, but it is without question that Gibraltar would prefer to have the armoury of the United Kingdom around it in the discussions of those issues than to have to face them on its own. For those reasons, it is particularly helpful that my noble friend made those points.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, one of the other things that we want to seek in a referendum would be transparency, as the Electoral Commission recommends. Of course, in general elections, the public know precisely how people have voted in different parts of the country because of the constituency system. So you can tell how many people are returned from which party from the respective countries of the United Kingdom, and it is very clear. In that sense, I am rather tempted by the amendment, which would allow that level of transparency to come in, not as finely defined as that but broadly, for us to be able to tell where opinions lie in one direction or the other. It would help us to reflect on what to do next and how we might best reflect the opinions of those constituent parts of the United Kingdom, depending on the outcome of the referendum, along the lines of the amendment that we have just agreed.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Triesman

Monday 23rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Richard]

My Lords, I have looked at this section and tried to construe and understand it, which was difficult. If I may say so, we are making rather heavy weather of the phrase “or otherwise support”. There is only one issue that the House ought to consider—is the legislation clear as presently drafted? If it is, then of course a lot of this argument is negated. If it is not clear as drafted, someone—almost certainly the Government—ought to put it right. I am doing my best with this phrase,

“or otherwise support a decision”,

but I am finding it difficult to understand what it means. I do not know what “otherwise support” means. Does “otherwise” refer back to the original approval, or to something less than the approval that you are minded to support? This is an extremely difficult concept to grasp. In short, is it clear? The answer to that is no. Should it be amended? The answer to that is yes. Who should do the amending? It should, on the whole, be the parliamentary draftsman. If ever there was a case in which the Government should say, “Right; we agree there is something here that we can look at again”, this is one.

[Lord Triesman]

I have the same difficulties that have been expressed by a number of noble Lords in this debate. Broadly speaking, as my noble friend Lord Liddle and I have said on several occasions from this Dispatch Box, our position is that the kind of arrangement in Clause 7(1)—the requirement for Parliament to undertake the necessary work in all these circumstances—is well understood. It would increase the amount of parliamentary work on European legislation and would inevitably increase the amount of scrutiny we placed on such legislation. That is bound to be a good thing. In our submission, it is also bound to reflect well on Parliament and its responsibility to do the job adequately, without turning to a multiple requirement for referenda.

This clause, at least in some of its wording, is not just a lock but a double lock. There are two kinds of locks in it. The first is that, apart from the matters covered in the clause, there will be a referendum lock, and there is a double lock on the political process in which a Minister might take any reasonable part in any reasonable discussion of any reasonable proposition in order to make sure that their parliamentary colleagues—let alone the public—know what the issues are and how they stand on them.

There is no difficulty with the notion of the first part, where the requirement is,

“may not vote in favour”.

That is the point on which, I suspect, there is a great deal of agreement around the House. However, I do not think that the use of “or otherwise support” is a simply a drafting or technical matter. I rely in part on the fact that those words appear in many clauses. This is not the only example. Clause after clause imposes the requirement. In general, when we have talked about these kinds of clause, the government Front Bench has indicated that in some sense—not in any sense that Ministers have described to us, and certainly not in any detail—it will be all right on the night and that it will not somehow have got in the way of anyone engaging in serious political work.

We first moved an amendment to delete that wording some time ago; I continue to believe that it is unhelpful and inappropriate. I put to the Government the following thought, which flows from ministerial experience—a good many Members of this House have real ministerial experience in this and other foreign affairs issues. Ministerial experience tells me that it is wholly impractical to try to do the political job without being able to speak on any matter of substance while you are doing it. Your processes of thought—the decisions to which you may come not instantly but as a result of discussion—must remain wholly obscure. Can you even say that you wish to deploy the knowledge you have of the issue? Can you say that you think that it is in the national interest that the issue is thought about and resolved? Can you find words in the process in which you are engaged—some of us have been engaged in these processes in much detail over the years—that are so neutral that nobody could misunderstand any word or syllable that you said as being other than completely neutral and not demonstrating any inference of support? Can you realistically anticipate that everyone will agree that what is said is so neutral that they will not claim that it is a breach of the law when they do not agree with you or the outcome? We have heard noble Lords saying in terms that they are in fundamental disagreement with almost anything. I do not mean noble Lords on the government Benches—they are just happily confused—but noble Lords in UKIP, for example, have found it almost inconceivable that anything that could be said would not represent some slippage into a greater presence of Europe in the United Kingdom.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, that it is not a matter of how she reads Clause 7(3). Of course it is all about decisions. Draft decisions are bound to give rise to the expression of a view, or nobody would have drafted them. That is precisely why you would draft a decision. I cannot believe that we do not agree on that basic proposition.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

Does the noble Lord then agree that “or otherwise support” could as easily imply assent—in other words, agreeing to support it?

[Lord Triesman]

No, my Lords, I do not agree with that. In the process of any kind of discussion, people will say something which either indicates support, or which they hope is sufficiently neutral not to indicate support but others will say that they believe that it does. The moment that anybody drafts anything, it will be seen or thought to be a clear indication of support by the very nature of going through the process of drafting it and putting it into the public domain. In real politics, that is precisely what will happen.

That is all fundamentally unhelpful, and I really hope that in their own interest—because at the moment they provide the Ministers who are taking part in discussions in Europe and elsewhere—the Government will not put themselves in so calamitous a position as to be unable to operate effectively.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Triesman

Monday 16th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, I cannot recall an occasion yet when the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, and I have been in complete accord but we are this evening. I share the view that it is absolutely extraordinary that most of us should have stood by ready to start debating this Bill at 6 pm only to find that it has started, even with a few minutes’ intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, way past 8 pm. I do not believe that that is helpful to the government Front Bench, let alone to both parties opposite or, indeed, to us. I shall not repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, said at any length, because he made the point very forcefully. It is extremely hard to understand what is so pressing as to mean that we should discuss absolutely critical issues about constitutional arrangements between our Parliament and Europe on this type of timescale. We are shoe-horning it—that is the only way that I can describe it—into tiny pockets of time very late in the day with the prospect of holding debates extremely late at night, when we all know that proper justice is not done to the matters that we need to discuss.

I take the Bill very seriously, just as the House took the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill seriously this afternoon. They are big constitutional issues by any standard. As I said, I take this Bill very seriously, although I have a very different view from that of the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, for example, on a number of its provisions. However, that is neither here nor there. We either take it seriously or we do not. I think that we are being asked to perform a serious job in a trivialised way and I cannot believe that the House will find that acceptable. I hope that the Front Bench opposite will have a credible answer and a credible timetable.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, perhaps I may detain the House for a minute or two to comment on the speeches that noble Lords have just made. As we understand it, it is the operations of the usual channels that have resulted in such peculiar anomalies—if I may call them that—in the conduct of the Bill. On the previous two days in Committee, we had extraordinary groupings. I know that Members on the Cross Benches were as perplexed as we were about how those groupings had been determined, and there was consensus across the House that they had not worked very well.

We were then told last Thursday that there was going to be an additional day in Committee—today. In other words, if the House had not sat on Friday, we would not even have had one working day’s notice. It was simply a coincidence that the House sat on Friday and that we therefore had one working day’s notice. We were led to believe that that was agreed among the usual channels and that in fact the opposition Benches of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, had requested the extra day today. However, from the tone of the debate, it sounds as though that may not have been the case.

I hope that my noble friends on the government Front Bench will bear in mind that, if we are to have serious scrutiny on the Bill, as we all want, and time to prepare seriously for that serious scrutiny, we require slightly more notice than we were given on this occasion, and we require slightly more attention to be paid to the way in which the Bill has been conducted to date.

Higher Education (Basic Amount) (England) Regulations 2010

Debate between Baroness Falkner of Margravine and Lord Triesman

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Triesman]

I can only say to the noble Baroness, for whom I have genuinely huge respect, that the reality in those families is that they have to have confidence to believe that university is for them, despite the fact that there has often never been a history in those families of going to university. They have to believe that it will work for them and that they will not, through the rest of their lives, regret having made that change.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords—

[Lord Triesman]

I think that we are coming towards the end, and I promised that I will be brief, so let me finish.

I ask the House: please study the facts, establish the evidence and take your decisions based on the knowledge that we have, not on hopeful guesses about what may take place. If you do not think that the evidence is there, set in motion a means of achieving that evidence, so that decisions can be taken on the evidence.

Many in this House with great distinction have argued over the years that we should always go for pre-legislative scrutiny and that we should spend the time to make sure that we knew what we were doing. Two and three-quarter hours is a fair time, but it is not the scrutiny that should change the university system of the United Kingdom for decades to come, without the knowledge that is essential to take that decision.

I have argued that I believe that it will be fundamentally damaging; I know that others will argue—on the supply and the demand side, incidentally—that that is not the case. That debate cannot be held until the White Paper promised by the noble Lord, Lord Henley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, and the other bits of this picture are in front of the House, so that the entire picture can be studied.

That is my final point to the House. It is about the dignity and the way in which the House deals with itself. Fundamental change—game-changing change in legislation—to be followed by the White Paper that establishes the basic arguments? That cannot conceivably be the way for a Parliament to proceed. I wish to test the opinion of the House.