European Union Bill

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I am sure we could collaborate with other nations that control their own waters. What we do not want to do is to go on with a common fisheries policy that ensures that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fish are thrown back dead every year and which has removed a very valuable industry. I hope that is clear to the noble Lord. While on my statistics the fish that are thrown back dead every year would fill this Palace of Westminster and Whitehall several times over, I have to tell your Lordships that there are those outside the political class who think that that might be a rather better use for them than being thrown overboard to pollute the seabed.

This amendment does not require a referendum if we are so foolish as to stay in the common agricultural policy, which is estimated to cost each family in the land around £1,000 per annum in higher food costs, or some £26 billion. On the environment, this amendment does not address the £18 billion per annum which the Government say we are going to spend on their climate change initiative inspired by the European Union, complete with all those useless and ugly windmills, not to mention the closure of our coal-fired power stations. The amendment does not include the cost to our economy when the lights go out, nor does it cover the billion or so we send to Brussels for it to misspend on foreign aid.

Finally, the amendment does not include the huge costs of overregulation which the EU imposes on our whole economy. I dealt with this in minimal detail on 3 May at cols. 398 to 400, so I will not repeat it now, but we are talking about anything between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of GDP by most estimates. Our GDP now stands at around £1.5 trillion, so we are talking about anything between £60 billion and £150 billion. If any noble Lords want to challenge these figures, they can, of course, do so, but I trust they will join me in pressing the Government for an official cost-benefit analysis of our membership if they do.

This amendment is not triggered by any of the £100 billion or so per annum of waste which I have just mentioned that is notched up by these and other EU follies. The joy under this amendment is that a referendum would be triggered only when our net cash thrown down the drain in Brussels equals £10 billion per annum according to the Government’s own figures. Mark you, the Office for National Statistics has recently put our net contribution at around £9 billion already this year, and most people seem to agree that we are looking at £10 billion for next year, so we are nearly there. I can point out that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, in his Answer to my noble friend Lord Vinson yesterday put our net contribution as low as £4.7 billion, so there is room for clarity here. I have a feeling that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, was mentioning the figures put forward by the Treasury, which are very much lower than the figures put forward by the Pink Book, but that is perhaps an argument for the cost-benefit analysis when we get there.

We are talking about £10 billion per annum. This may not sound much to our Europhile political class, but it is an awful lot of money to real British people. Ten billion pounds per annum comes to some £27.39 million every day. That would pay for 900 nurses every day at a salary of £30,000 per year each—or teachers, or policemen, or other public servants. The amendment requires a referendum when the net cash that we send to Brussels would pay the annual salaries for 900 nurses every day, or for 328,500 nurses every year.

There is another way to understand the importance of £10 billion per annum, which comes to £400 per annum for each of our 26 million families. All these costs have to be seen against the perilous state of our economy and the sacrifices and difficulties in which many of our people now find themselves through no fault of their own. Current spending cuts, as I have mentioned, appear to be around £21 billion. Which would the British people prefer?

I am sure that the Government and your Europhile Lordships will say that the benefits of our EU membership are so wondrous and obvious and that they go far beyond its mere vulgar cost to our long-suffering taxpayers. I have never understood what those benefits really are; what benefits we get from our EU membership, which we could not get from free trade and friendly collaboration with our European friends; what benefits we get, for instance, that the Swiss do not enjoy from outside the EU.

Perhaps the Minister could be more precise today about these great benefits. This Government and the previous Government—and previous Governments for some time—have said that a cost-benefit analysis would be a waste of money. The Stern report on climate change, however, cost only £1.272 million on a subject at least as complex as our EU membership. Surely that tiny sum would be well worth spending to discover whether the colossal costs of our EU membership are justified or not.

We, of course, are told that we stand taller as a sovereign nation in meetings of the international conferencariat all over the planet—because we have diluted our sovereignty into the new form of supranational government in Brussels run by bureaucrats. If the Minister is going to advance this line again today, could he give some concrete examples of the great advantages and the successes? Does he think, for instance, that the EU did a good job when the lid came off Yugoslavia, or that it is doing a good job in north Africa? What confidence does he have in the EU’s new External Action Service?

I conclude by asking the Government, yet again, to settle these matters by ordering an objective, unbiased cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. In the mean time, this amendment asks that the British people be given a referendum when our cash payments to Brussels exceed £10 billion to decide whether they want to go on paying it. I beg to move.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

My Lords, I am a little dazzled by the complexity of the millions and billions and almost trillions of pounds and euros that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, has laid in front of us. Indeed, while I was listening to him most closely, I recalled a moment of great happiness when I was begging for charity recently and I received a cheque with so many zeros that they fell off the end of the cheque. I ran around saying to someone else who could add up more closely in the charity, “Look, look, look, we have done exactly what we want to do”. He pulled me down to earth and he said, “Do be careful—this is a cheque from Burkina Faso”. When it was added up, it came to about $5.

The arguments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, while in no way impugning, by this comment, his grasp of finance and passionate loyalty to the European Union’s holding on to her old funds, make me wonder whether in fact this amendment does not belong in the Bill at all. In other words, is he offering us the king with no clothes? Surely this Bill is about the transfer of powers and competencies. It is not about the transfer of finance, which should enable the European Union to carry out the powers and competencies it already has. In other words, this is not a Bill that enables us successfully to argue various different figures about financing of the European Union. My suggestion is that this most interesting amendment does not in fact belong here at all. It is correct and proper, incidentally, that the European Union should be suitably funded for the competencies that the member states have authorised it to carry out.

There is also the problem that this figure simply does not take into account our contribution from the United Kingdom to the EU budget in terms of inflation. How would the noble Lord react if, for example, the UK goes over the £10 billion mark, but proportionately our contribution is in fact smaller? That could be the case with the growth of Germany and other economies: our proportion—our net contribution—could be proportionately smaller but might be larger than £10 billion. In the calculation of our UK contribution—the net versus the gross—the timing of the UK’s actual contribution needs to be taken into account. This amendment is impractical on timing grounds alone, because our contribution generally comes in after the event.

It is, of course, natural that I would be likely to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on his comments that we have diluted sovereignty from the United Kingdom in joining the European Union. I will disregard the temptation to go down that channel, otherwise we will not make any progress on this amendment—save to say that in foreign affairs and defence and security, if I could dare tempt him with that wicked phrase, we have greater strength, power, and a wider outreach with our European Union member state partners than we could possibly ever have standing, talking and trying to influence alone.

In fact, I suggest that this matter is in complete contrast to the measures that we, and other member states, have already introduced to make significant savings in domestic budgets. Of course, I agree with the noble Lord profoundly that we should empower our Ministers, our civil servants and our diplomats to argue as forcefully as possible against the sorts of increases that, sadly, the European Commission and the European Parliament have recently demonstrated that they want. That argument is, without question, right and proper, but to do that we need to empower our Ministers and diplomats. We cannot do that if we bring this type of amendment forward and claim that the mere transfer of money transfers competencies to the EU. It does not. That is why I suggest this amendment should be discussed in another Bill, at another time and in another place.

[Lord Tomlinson]

My Lords, the House should be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. I want to congratulate him on lightening the mood of the House after what has been a pretty dismal day. We had the attempt this afternoon to introduce proposals that amount to constitutional vandalism and there will be no proposal for a referendum on that. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, has today conducted himself in a way that is worthy of our congratulations for his fertile imagination, which I hope somebody will recognise as qualifying him for consideration for the Booker prize for creative fiction.

If we come to the substance of what the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, was saying, he inevitably gets his estimates somehow sort of right. Our membership of the European Union costs us somewhere between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of our GDP—not much of a margin; the odds are that he is going to be somewhere within that sort of range, but it lacks precision.

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[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, I welcome this modest amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. He is seeking a referendum—or at least to discuss the possibility of one —at the appropriate time, which falls within the competence of the Bill, on the amount of money the people are paying to the European Union and what they get for it. It is about time the people of this country were consulted in a far greater manner about the money which they have to pay, one way or another, across the exchanges to the benefit of other countries. After all, the taxes levied in this country are now high and are going higher. People cannot understand why on earth they are being squeezed to the extent of about £20 billion a year when we are paying over to the European Union £10 billion a year. Indeed, if we also take into account the loans, it is more than £22 billion a year.

We should understand that that money does not belong to the Government but to the taxpayers, the people who are being asked to pay more and more out of their own pockets while we pay more and more across the exchanges to other people who, in some cases, may very well be better off than ourselves. It is therefore about time the people of this country were consulted about the money they pay—not the Government—to the European Union, which, quite frankly, is not popular in this country. According to the latest opinion polls, a majority of people would be happy to come out, which is why I would like them to be consulted. The people of this country are not against referendums—indeed, they would still like a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. They showed in the AV referendum that they can respond to argument and give a proper and positive decision.

The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said that this is a small country and that its influence is improved and increased by being a member of the European Union. She implied that this country really could not go it alone. It is very odd that this little country built an empire with far fewer than 60 million people; that it has now established a great Commonwealth which unfortunately it does not make enough use of; and that it stood alone against the forces of Nazism during the last war and therefore saved the world from the ravages of Hitler. That is not a bad record.

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

I am very grateful indeed to the noble Lord. It is most courteous and gallant of him to allow me to make a brief comment. Would he not agree that our great leader who led us in that battle and standalone fight, Winston Churchill, was in fact a supporter of the Treaty of Brussels, which in 1947 would have greatly enlarged our integration into what has now become the European Union with far wider and deeper social clauses, for example, than the Treaty of Rome created?