European Union: Recent Developments

Baroness Quin Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Quin]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord I pay tribute to his persistence and consistency, even though my remarks will not agree with the line that he has taken. It is difficult speaking at the end of a debate such as this as those arguments that I foolishly hoped would be most telling in my own contribution have already been made very effectively. A little like my noble friend Lord Davies of Stamford, I shall try to pick up some of the points that have been made during the debate rather than make the speech that I had originally intended.

I would like, as the vast majority of Members have done, to welcome the accession of Croatia. I applaud the arrangements that have been put in place to reinforce the progress that has been made in Croatia and the transitional arrangements that the Minister explained from the outset. I noted that in the debate in the other place some fairly well known Eurosceptic voices spoke against Croatia’s accession. I think only the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, has done so in this House. I certainly remember those same people speaking against previous enlargements in previous debates. For example, when I was European spokesperson for the Opposition in the 1990s, rather to my surprise, they expressed scepticism about enlargement to Sweden, Finland and Austria. I think the nub of it was that they disliked the EU so much that they simply could not understand anyone wanting to join, despite the fact that a large number of countries have in fact joined.

We should trumpet the fact that enlargement has been a resounding success in many ways. People have pointed to the underpinning and the entrenching of democracy, which the process has involved in these countries, and that is very important. However, it is not just a question of having free and fair elections. It is also about respecting human rights and minority rights, and that has been an important success story in the countries that have joined the EU, as has the economic performance of many of the countries that have joined in recent years. Poland, in particular, has had a lot of economic success. All those countries now see their future very firmly within the EU, not because they want to be dictated to by Brussels but because they have entered into it freely and they believe that it is very much in their interests.

In this debate much reference has been made to the Government’s policy on Europe. I am still somewhat confused about their intentions regarding a referendum. Different Ministers seem to have said different things, and certainly there are different views on this within the parties that form the coalition. I do not like referendums at all. I certainly do not like the way in which they have been introduced into our system without much thought about the long-term consequences of what they mean for our constitution. However, if we are to have a referendum, I hope that the terms of the debate will be much more informed than they have been up to the present time.

I would like to look briefly at three myths that I think are very unhelpful in terms of the current debate. The first myth, which one or two Members touched on, is that it is widely claimed these days on television, on radio and in the newspapers that we simply joined a free trade area back in the 1970s. This, of course, is not true. We were already members of a free trade association—EFTA—and it was very clear from the debates at the time, particularly when you looked at what was in the Treaty of Rome, that we were talking about a very different animal when we talked about joining the then EEC. The fact that this argument is still being put forward is very misleading. Indeed, I have heard it so often lately that I thought perhaps my memory was playing tricks on me. As I am a bit of a glutton for punishment, I looked at some of the debates held around the time of our entry, particularly in October 1971. I reread a speech by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, at that time, when he was a Member of the other place. The arguments were full of references to sovereignty and the integrationist aims that were in some of the treaties at that time. So we should not rewrite history in this way.

The second myth concerns social policy. The current Government seem to see social policy as some sort of new add-on that is not really part of Britain in the European project, yet social policy was part even of the European Coal and Steel Community treaty. Measures were there to help redundant coal and steel workers to retrain. There were also social measures to help in those particular areas of the EU. I very much endorse what my noble friends Lord Liddle and Lord Monks said about social policy.

The third myth, which is very prevalent in the press, is seeing the EU simply as a battleground all the time, mostly with Britain on one side and everybody else on the other. Indeed, in the run-up to this particular summit, which seems to have been a fairly constructive one, newspapers were saying, “This is going to be a bruising bust-up”, and “If you think the EU is about hot air and rows, you ain’t seen nothing yet”. As so often happens, these predictions turned out to be false. Those of us who have attended European Council of Ministers’ meetings on various subjects know that votes are rarely taken and normally consensus is reached without much difficulty, even in an EU of 27 countries.

I listened with great interest to the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Tugendhat, Lord Owen, and Lord Howell of Guildford. They seemed to be proposing a new way forward. However, what they said begged a number of questions. They talked very firmly about the internal market, and I agree with them about the importance of that. However, big question marks remained about whether we were still going to be part of EU environmental policy, which has had many successes; and what we would do about all the different aspects of social policy and the benefits, actual and potential, of justice and home affairs co-operation, which were referred to in a speech with which I very much agreed and which can be a real gain for all of us in the EU. I was not really clear about what the way forward was on that.

Last week, I attended a conference in the north-east of England looking at the effects of the financial crisis on the real economy and on the regions. I was struck by how many business interests there, including small businesses, were worried that a referendum on Europe, at a time of economic difficulty, would simply create further uncertainty for them in the day-to-day work of trying to grow their businesses and access European and world markets. I urge the Government to consult them rather than be distracted by short-term, probably short-lived, political considerations.