European Union Bill

Baroness Quin Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Quin]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the entertaining and knowledgeable contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. In response to the exhortation by the noble Baroness a minute ago for brevity, I was tempted to say that I agree strongly with my noble friends Lord Dubs and Lord Anderson, the noble Lords, Lord Taverne and Lord Kerr, and others, and then just sit down. I hoped that I would receive some popularity points as a result. However, I would briefly like to add one or two thoughts.

My first objection to the Bill is on constitutional grounds. The Constitution Committee talks about the Bill breaking new ground in the UK constitution by its imposition of referendum requirements on such a large scale. Reading that, I was reminded of the earlier inquiry, in which I participated, by the Constitution Committee into referendums generally. The report published in April last year said, significantly:

“The balance of the evidence that we have heard leads us to the conclusion that there are significant drawbacks to the use of referendums. In particular, we regret the ad hoc manner in which referendums have been used, often as a tactical device, by the government of the day”.

I strongly agree with that statement in the Constitution Committee’s report.

In introducing the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said that voting had almost got into our weekly habits in the present day, particularly in relation to television programmes. With respect, a light-hearted vote on whether to keep the redoubtable Ann Widdecombe in “Strictly Come Dancing” is not really the same as referendums about Britain’s future, which should be better thought out than seems to be the case in the Bill. Nor am I simply making a party-political point in opposing this part of the Bill. I spoke against the idea of the European referendum that my party had decided to hold on the so-called European constitution and I did not like the referendum in the 1970s, which essentially seemed to have been called to get my party off the political hook at the time.

The Government are proposing referendums not just in the Bill but also via their localism agenda and in many other ways. We need to confront a choice here in whether we want to be essentially a representative democracy or a plebiscitary democracy. I would much prefer that we did not treat this subject lightly but tried to establish some common and cross-party rules about when and where referendums are an appropriate part of our political system. It may be that there would be cross-party agreement that they should be used in cases of fundamental constitutional reform, although that is not always easy to define. It is unwise to jettison our precious representative democracy and move down the plebiscitary road. The Bill makes a great mistake in the way that it tackles that issue. I also very much agreed with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, when he decried the expression “referendum lock”. It is such a negative starting point for our relationship with the European Union and it seems to pander to the view that this is always a threat and never an opportunity, as I believe it can be.

My second objection to the Bill is on political grounds. It tries to pander to Euroscepticism, although, ironically, it does so significantly unsuccessfully, as we saw in the debates in the other place and, indeed, in the debate here today. Indeed, the Conservatives in particular have repeatedly made that mistake at European elections and by-elections, where they have not been the beneficiaries of pandering to Euroscepticism. That benefit has tended to go to UKIP and other political forces.

The Minister talked a lot about public opinion. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, was barracked in a lordly way when he referred to the media and the BBC. However, he was right; it is relevant to this debate. How the public get the message about Europe, if we are talking about reconnecting them to Europe, is an important aspect. The noble Lord was right to raise the issue, although I would raise it from a very different standpoint.

It is also very much the responsibility of Ministers to be positive about Europe. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, spoke about this when he said that very often Ministers after Council meetings declared that they had won famous battles—things were seen in terms of a battle rather than co-operation. When I was Europe Minister, I would often try to point out to people that in the three Councils that I attended—on home affairs, foreign and general affairs and agriculture—very often the meetings were harmonious. Decisions by voting were the exception rather than the rule and people worked very much towards a consensus. However, it was hard to get that positive message across in the media; a battle is much more newsworthy than good news about a harmonious European Council. While I accept to a certain extent that Ministers could have been more robust, it is difficult sometimes to get that positive message across, because of the old adage that the good news is not news, whereas bad news is intrinsically newsworthy.

I echo the point made by my noble friend Lord Anderson, who said that during his time as a constituency Member of Parliament he was struck by how little the issue of Europe was raised. That was certainly my experience, too, even when I was Europe Minister; indeed, as I had previously been an MEP, I had some profile among my constituents on European issues. Even now, knocking on the doors, as I and others in this Chamber do, I know that it is seldom raised as an issue in terms of the frantic Euroscepticism that seems to dominate so many parts of the media.

Slight reference was made to this earlier. While I have no objection to newspapers crusading if they want to on particular issues—although sometimes I wish that they would simply report the news rather than crusade about it—I must say that the screaming headline of the Daily Express on 11 February, “Britain in the EU: This must be the end”, had me completely mystified, particularly when I found out that it referred to prisoners’ votes and the European Court of Human Rights. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, made an attempt at defending this by saying that in the recent treaty the EU as a whole had acceded to the European system of human rights, but we all know both that that system predates the EU and that the EU has absolutely no responsibility whatever for the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights. Presumably the Daily Express is knowledgeable enough to know that it does not have anything to do with the EU at all.

[Lord Dykes]

Further to that, does the noble Baroness acknowledge that, when an independent survey was commissioned for the last calendar year to check thoroughly and independently 125 banner headlines in the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express about wicked things happening in Europe, it was found that not a single one was correct?

[Baroness Quin]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for making that point so effectively.

This Bill ends up by pleasing no one. It does not please the Opposition, as was clear from the elegant speech of my noble friend Lady Symons; it does not please most Conservatives who have spoken in this debate, I am pleased to say, or most Liberal Democrats. I look forward with some incredulity to the closing speech by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who was teased somewhat, but quite rightly, by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I have certainly heard those who are now Liberal Democrat Ministers in this House take a rather different view from that of their colleagues in the other place on the subject of referendums and be staunchly pro-European in a way that does not square with the contents of this Bill.

I hope that we manage some changes such as the sunset clause, which my noble friend mentioned, or some kind of limitations on the scope of using referendums. Fundamentally, however, I wish that we could go back to the drawing board to have a proper think about the role of referendums in our political system and a much more informed debate across the country about our European future.