UK and EU Relations

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Tuesday 12th September 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I rise feeling a sense of déjà vu. Two years ago, after the 2015 general election, when it became clear that there was to be a referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union—which now sounds a very long time ago indeed—there was a discussion about what the Prime Minister really wanted. There was frustration in Brussels: “We don’t know what the Prime Minister wants”. Members of your Lordships’ House, particularly on the Labour Benches, were saying, “We don’t know what Cameron is asking for”.

It was actually quite straightforward what was being asked for in the renegotiation. The then Prime Minister had made clear in the Bloomberg speech what he was looking for. It was repeated in the 2015 Conservative Party manifesto. There was a broad sense of what was being asked for. To some extent, I feel the same today. There is a lot of shadow boxing going on, not just in your Lordships’ House—where I would never suggest there is shadow boxing going on—but in Brussels and in the negotiations so far.

So far, we have had six months of not very much negotiation happening. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon, suggested in her opening remarks that there is not enough progress. We are in a period when, if we were joining the European Union, we would be going through something called screening. I think that is what the European Commission calls it. In that very preliminary process, the European Commission explains what it is looking for and what it expects of would-be member states, outlines the process and explains what needs to happen. With departure, surely we would expect something similar. We need, on both sides, to identify what it is that we are leaving and how we are to go about it. Accession negotiations take many years because there is so much detail associated with membership of the European Union, so at this stage perhaps we should not expect a huge amount of progress in the negotiations, if that means David Davis can come back and say, “I have agreed X, Y and Z”.

Last week, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, who has just returned to her place, said that nobody had talked numbers yet in discussions about the budget. They have not discussed numbers precisely because at this stage we are looking at what is at stake and what are the lines in the EU treaties that we need to think about to get to the point of looking at numbers. The fact that we have not made major progress in the negotiations yet, particularly before the German elections, is perhaps not that surprising. But with the position papers and the future relationship papers, there seems to be something akin to what we were saying about the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. What is in these papers? What are we expecting? When he made his Bloomberg speech, it seemed quite clear. A year later, when he spoke to Chatham House, he said almost exactly the same things as he said at Bloomberg, but rather less eloquently. With the position papers that we are getting at the moment, there is a sense that we are hearing the same points rehearsed again and again.

The current Prime Minister, Theresa May, in her Lancaster House speech in January, may have been clear about what sort of relationship—a deep one—we should be having with the European Union. But the position papers do not seem to have got us very much further. I confess that I have not yet read them all in detail. Some of them do not take very long and will not have much detail. But what seems to come across in all the position papers bar one is that the United Kingdom wants to keep as close a relationship as possible with every aspect of the European Union that we are leaving, with one exception: the European Court of Justice. After listening to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, this afternoon when he talked about the customs union, saying, “Actually, why don’t we just stay in?”, I have got to the point of thinking, on almost every one of the position papers, that the conclusion seems that the best response is: why do we not just stay in? Clearly, however, the one difference is the European Court of Justice.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, suggested earlier that the paper looking at the European Court of Justice was rather academic. I slightly take exception to that because he was rather critical, thinking it was not a very good paper. But there is a sense in which all these papers are superficial. They are words almost without meaning, and they do not take us very far forward. Last week, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, was able to explain what has happened in the budget negotiation so far. Can she explain how much further detailed work has taken place? In the covering pages, we have a suggestion that extensive work has been done in the past year. So far, the position papers do not show us that. Greater elaboration would be most welcome.