EU Referendum Leaflet

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Bernard Jenkin

Monday 9th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Evans. I will not take up my share of the time for the vast array of Labour MPs sitting here! I know that many hon. Members want to speak, so I will just say a few words. I am sorry that so few of my colleagues are here and that our Front-Bench spokesperson will presumably put the case that this leaflet is a wonderful way of spending public money. I am clear that the people who signed the petition feel very strongly that it is a waste of public money and, indeed, that many of them, as I think has been said, were remainers. Many people just felt that this was not fair.

We went through the process and got legislation about referendums, and one aspect of that is that there is a campaign on each side. Each campaign is formally accepted, designated and can spend certain amounts of money and do certain things. They are the people who should be putting the arguments back and forth, apart from all the discussions that are going on anyway in our pubs and supermarkets. I think it is quite shameful that the Prime Minister has seen fit to go against what he would always personally argue about being fair and the British system of doing things—how we do things in this country.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

rose—

[Kate Hoey]

Of course I will give way to the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee.

[Mr Jenkin]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, who is a fellow member of the Committee. Will she recall that, last summer, we fought valiantly to stop the Government taking powers to limit the application of section 125 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which would have allowed the Government to carry on campaigning in this manner in the last 28 days of the campaign? Is it not now clear that they were presenting excuses to us as to why they needed those flexibilities? It was simply so that they could carry on exploiting the system, as they are planning to exploit the system and possibly even breach section 125 by keeping up their websites for the entire campaign instead of taking them down for the last 28 days.

[Kate Hoey]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. He and other members of the Committee feel so strongly about this matter that they are prepared to take very strong action if we do not get agreement from the Government to take the websites down. What is even more amazing to the public is this. When they talk about “the Government”, it is the Cabinet, and the Cabinet is actually split on this matter. If the Government were really being fair, two thirds of the leaflet would have been from one side and one third would have been from the Brexit side.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kate Hoey]

Fortunately, the people who will ultimately decide are our constituents. There is one vote for everyone. We are all equal here. Everybody will have their say and, I hope, we will not be relying on President Obama or on any other President.

[Mr Jenkin]

It is worth remembering that it is not the first time that the United States of America has misconstrued its own interests. President Roosevelt did not want Churchill to fight Hitler. He wanted us to make peace with Mussolini. Ronald Reagan pleaded with Margaret Thatcher not to take the Falkland Islands by military force but to do some kind of shared sovereignty deal with a south American dictator. Our allies may be our allies, but they are not always right.

[Kate Hoey]

Indeed, President Obama was quite wrong. When I was in Washington last weekend, we met a lot of senior Democrats and Republicans who said to us quite publicly, behind the scenes, that the UK leaving the EU would really not make any difference whatever to the United States. That is what the ordinary political person in America thinks. However, the vast majority of the American public do not even know what the EU is, so what President Obama said is not too worrying.

It annoyed me so much that one of the facts in the leaflet is:

“The UK has secured a special status in the EU.”

I have read a lot about that and have been through various documents, and I would love to see where that wording is actually included in the renegotiation document by the Heads of Government.

The renegotiation is not legally binding. The hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) has done a lot of work on that in the European Scrutiny Committee. We cannot be confident that the aim of ever closer union will, in any way, do anything other than to take the renegotiation into account. It is so ridiculous that that has been put in, and I want the Minister to respond to that point.

Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs committee

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Bernard Jenkin

Thursday 4th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to the Chairman of the Committee. The inquiry was quite a harrowing experience for all of us and he handled a difficult situation extremely well. Will he comment a little further on the role of journalists and the media in the inquiry? Incredibly detailed work was done by Miles Goslett, for example, and The Spectator was willing to publish when no one else was prepared to do so. That journalist had to go round all the media, which did not want to know because of some of the issues that have been referred to. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the role of media in such investigative journalism and the role of freedom of information are even more important now?

[Mr Jenkin]

I agree with everything the hon. Lady says. There were journalists who tried to get things published, but the editors and the publications that might have carried those messages were also scared of confronting what appeared to be a very powerful charity with very great influence leading to the heart of Government. There is a message there.

There is a message, too, for the Charity Commission. Even when things were published, why were those journalists not invited to the Charity Commission, and why did it not say, “Tell us what you think is going on here, because we probably ought to know”? I hope journalists will feel a sense of obligation, not necessarily to reveal their sources or anything like that, but where they think a big charity is in serious trouble, to offer their advice to the Charity Commission. It would be a public-spirited thing to do. They would do that in respect of a serious risk to national security; they should do so for the security of the charitable sector as well.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Bernard Jenkin

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I will endeavour to be as brief as possible in order to allow other Members to speak. I will speak primarily to amendments (a) and (b) to amendment 11, which stand in my name, but also in support of amendment 11, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). I thank my right hon. Friends the Minister and the Foreign Secretary for the positive way in which they have engaged with the entire party on these questions. We are grateful for that dialogue. I think that absolutely proves that we are not in some re-run of previous grief. This debate is not even about Europe; it is, in fact, about how to conduct a fair referendum.

I have some experience of referendums, because I set up the “North East Says No” referendum campaign in 2004, which turned around a two-thirds majority in favour of a north-east Assembly into a 4:1 defeat. We operated under the provisions laid down by the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, which worked pretty well. The purdah provisions restricted what the Government did, although they are probably not tough enough. They did not prevent the then Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, changing the Government’s policy on what powers that putative Assembly would have only a few days before the postal votes went out. When we rang up the Cabinet Secretary to complain that the Deputy Prime Minister had breached the purdah rules, we were told, “That’s a matter for the Minister, not for me.”

That underlines the argument that the purdah rules are not tough enough, rather than that we should not have them at all, because they prevented civil servants from becoming embroiled in referendum questions, or being used by Ministers to promulgate the case that the Government wanted them to promulgate, and that is the vital protection. It is principally towards the impartiality of civil servants that I want to address my remarks, particularly given that, I am proud to say, I have been elected unopposed to the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee. I very much hope to persuade my fellow members of the Committee to address some of these issues during this Parliament.

I am disappointed that the Labour party has abandoned the principled position it adopted on purdah when it implemented the 2000 Act, which is quite extraordinary. I ran into Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, this morning, and he was thoroughly disappointed to hear that the Labour party was backing off from supporting the constitutional legislation that it had implemented. Those ideas did not just come out of nowhere; they were ideas for a fair referendum that arose from the unfairness of the conduct of the first Welsh referendum, which were addressed by the Neil committee, which became the Committee on Standards in Public Life—the key is in the name. It was regarded as essential to have a period when the machinery of government cannot be involved in supporting one side or the other in a referendum campaign. The Electoral Commission would like 10 weeks, rather than just four weeks.

There are certain myths about purdah. The Government do not grind to a halt during a general election. Ministers even attend meetings of the Council of Ministers during general elections. However, during a general election a Minister cannot use their Department to promulgate information or to brief the press in a manner that is intended to affect the outcome. We want the same to apply in the referendum.

The letter from my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe, which the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) has now seen, does not actually provide the reassurance that is required. In fact, by explaining what is contemplated, it confirms precisely the opposite. For example, it states that the Government,

“having taken a position on the outcome of our negotiations with the rest of the EU, will naturally be obliged to account to Parliament and the British people.”

There is absolutely no problem about accounting to Parliament in any purdah period about any matter at all, because it is privileged. There are no purdah rules that apply to anything that any Minister would say on the Floor of the House of Commons.

But are we seriously to believe, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke) indicated, that civil servants should be used to put out press releases on matters that are being addressed by the referendum question, because that is what he is saying? That is precisely what should not be allowed. The idea that this will prevent Ministers from saying anything, and that somehow Ministers will not be able to take part in the referendum campaign, is clearly tosh. I seem to recall the Prime Minister being very vociferous in the run-up to the Scottish independence referendum, right to the last day of the campaign. However, he was unable to use his ministerial car, fly at ministerial expense or use the machinery of government to promulgate the messages he wanted to get across. There might have been a rather frustrating moment when he said, “I want to put out a statement”, and the Cabinet Secretary would have had to tell him, “I’m sorry, Prime Minister, but you can’t do that now that we are in purdah. You will have to do that through the no campaign or through your party.” That is exactly right. What is the point of the expenditure limits for the yes and no campaigns if the Government have 80 special advisers and thousands of press officers able to issue press releases, brief the media and organise media tours for Ministers? That is precisely what should not be available to Ministers during the closing stages of a referendum campaign.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I support that amendment, of course. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it would be even worse if we happened to get to a situation in which the leadership of the two main political parties were campaigning on one side? That is an even more important reason to have a proper purdah, if the referendum is to be seen as a free and fair.

[Mr Jenkin]

It is a simple matter of principle, which is why I think we would be right to press this to a vote if necessary, unless the Government accept our amendment. I really hope that they will, because it would simply put purdah back into the Bill, where it should be. I commend my right hon. Friend the Minister for saying that he wants dialogue on what the problem actually is and on how it can be addressed by amending the purdah regime, rather than scrapping it altogether and relying on assurances based on advice from civil servants who have clearly got it wrong.

I want to focus in my final remarks on the impartiality of civil servants, because this is really about what they can and cannot do. They must be in a position to protect their impartiality. They must be able to say to a Minister, “No, Minister, we are in purdah, so I cannot do that now. You must do that yourself or through some other organisation.” If they are not subject to purdah, it is the job of civil servants to support the Government of the day by carrying out the instructions of their Ministers, so they will be obliged to put out press releases, to help Ministers make the case and to use the machinery of government unfairly to support one side or the other.

I draw the Committee’s attention to the report that the Public Administration Committee produced just before the general election, “Lessons for Civil Service impartiality from the Scottish independence referendum”. The report shows that the Scottish Executive abused their position by sending out a rather political White Paper, some parts of which read more like an SNP manifesto than an objective Government document—that is always the danger with Government publications—but at least they did not send it out in the purdah period, at the most sensitive moment.

Not only that, but the advice of the permanent secretary at the Treasury, Sir Nicholas Macpherson, on currency unions was published in a completely unprecedented move on the basis that he had to “reassure the markets”. That was his excuse, and I am afraid that we regarded it as only an excuse. Are we to say that Ministers will agree to civil servants publishing their advice during the purdah period? Perhaps they might even be instructed to publish their advice during that period.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Bernard Jenkin

Friday 17th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

As a Member of Parliament who represents a port, I thank the hon. Lady for giving way. This is an example of how the single market is used as an all-enveloping pretext for Community action at Community level, whatever is the case, even though it is very difficult to argue that there is a single market between the ports of Harwich and Felixstowe and those of Marseilles or Piraeus, which is the basic premise of the argument behind the directive.

[Kate Hoey]

I am sure that all hon. Members could come up with different scenarios, but the fundamental principle is that we are losing control of our own country and of what we want to do in our own country. It is very simple and I genuinely cannot understand why people cannot see that we are losing control of what we want to do here. Of course, we want to co-operate with other European countries. I want to co-operate with all sorts of countries. I would like to see our Commonwealth countries much more involved in what we are doing, as we have treated them scandalously over the years. That is why, if there were a referendum and if we chose to leave the European Union, I would feel quite confident about this country. I want to get our confidence back. I do not want this doom-ridden approach that suggests we have to be part of the European Union because we are only a country and we need it desperately. It needs us, too, and I have confidence that if we were to leave the European Union we would be quite capable of having a prosperous future.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Hoey and Bernard Jenkin

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I have to say that there is little in the speech of the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) with which I would disagree. That immediately places me, of course, very much in a minority in my own party. I do not think that either of us is in a minority in the country, however. Many people watching our debate today will be wondering how on earth we ever got here. They will wonder why we are trying to introduce a Bill that is literally tinkering around with the real and fundamental problems of our membership of the European Union.

It is with great regret that I have to say that my party betrayed the promise it had made on the Lisbon treaty. If it had granted the referendum on that treaty, we would not be here discussing this Bill. One reason why my party and others did not want that referendum is that they knew the result would have been a defeat. In other words, we would not have signed up to the Lisbon treaty; it would not have happened.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will the hon. Lady forgive me for pointing out that if we had had the referendum on the Maastricht treaty, it is most unlikely that the European Union would be in the mess that it is in today?

[Kate Hoey]

I was new into Parliament shortly before the Maastricht treaty and I lost my position as the shadow spokesperson on the citizen’s charter and women because I voted against that treaty. I am therefore well aware of the issues. I was obviously in a minority then in my party, even though prior to that we had been quite sceptical on Europe.

I give the coalition Government some credit, because I know that they are facing great difficulties. The Conservatives said fine words before the election about how they were going to get more powers back and not allow any more powers to go. Unfortunately, perhaps because of the coalition, but also because of other pressures, most of that has not been complied with. The Government have therefore come up with this Bill, which seeks to show the country that there is still support within the coalition for getting some powers back. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has said, the Bill is unfortunately a minefield that lawyers will absolutely love.

The Bill misses the whole point. Some people continue to say that we should not even discuss whether we should leave the European Union, whether we should have that debate in the country and whether we should have a referendum. They have yet to prove to me—I have studied this very carefully—just how having that debate, having that referendum and voting to leave the European Union would be a disaster for this country. No cost-benefit analysis has ever been carried out on that. No Government have undertaken a proper cost-benefit analysis of the benefits to this country of being in the European Union. Although other countries, such as Switzerland, have carried out such analysis, every time it has been suggested here, it has been brushed away by the elite in Europe and in this country, who say that the net gains of membership are so obvious that there is no need even to think of quantifying them. That is increasingly becoming not true and the public are beginning not to believe it.

I am not a reader of the Daily Express, but its campaign, which has shown huge support for a discussion and debate on the European Union, is very much to be welcomed. Recent developments have made all of us who have doubts about this country’s involvement in the European Union queasy, because the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU is incredibly expensive for us and the benefits are becoming increasingly difficult to see. We do not need, again, to go into the cost of our net budget contribution, the increase that is going to take place and how it will be spent. Nobody wants to let the public know just how our money is spent. They are not told about the huge costs of the European External Action Service. From now on, our ambassadors will become less important than this European Union ambassador and it is shocking that we have allowed that to go ahead. I cannot understand why the new Government have done so, apart from the fact that they are a coalition.

However, I still wonder whether a Conservative Government with a proper majority would really have done all the things that they said they would. Once someone goes to Europe and gets involved in it, they somehow start almost to be part of it. They start to make up the discussions and the arguments, and somehow their attitudes change. The Minister for Europe used to say some brilliant things about Europe that I agreed with, but now that he is on the Front Bench, his words have changed slightly and become slightly nuanced. We get the feeling that once people have been going to Brussels over and over again, they change their attitude.

I am concerned that the Bill does not go far enough. I am not going to vote for the Labour amendment, which is a cop-out and a nothing amendment—it does not say anything. It does not bring to people’s attention all the opportunities that we missed when we were in government. I still have not decided whether I will abstain or vote for a Bill that we might be able to amend. I want this Bill to be used as the opportunity for people in the country to start being listened to. I want them to start having the opportunity to engage in the debate about why they feel so strongly that our membership is not giving us anything that is worth the money that we pay in.