EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report)
Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Balfe
Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)
My Lords, I will endeavour not to detain the House for too long. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, pointed out, we are already debating late into the evening. Many of us have been here debating late into the evening night after night. I note that we are missing the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean. I thought that he and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, constantly had to spend time interacting, but he and the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, seem to have been given time off for good behaviour.
Some of us are taking part night after night in the EU Referendum Bill, which is now in Committee. As preparation for that, I read the excellent report produced by your Lordships’ EU Committee on the referendum and the reform process. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, I found it a useful document and one that very much sets the scene for what we are thinking about.
However, I feel a little as if I am intruding on private grief or an internal dispute, because so much of what we have heard is from the Conservative Benches: differences of opinion, whether the renegotiation is doing the right thing, what the renegotiation may or may not be doing and whether there will be treaty reform. Essentially, it is asking what the Prime Minister thinks he is doing. There seems to be quite a lot of dissatisfaction on the Conservative Benches.
In the very insightful comments from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, there was a comment about the timing for reform, renegotiation and referendum, and the fact that we ideally need reform to come first. However, it was not this side of the House or the Cross Benches that put forward the idea of reform, renegotiation and referendum. That was the Prime Minister in his Bloomberg speech of January 2013. It may have served him and his party well until 8 May 2015, but he now has to deliver it. The triptych of reform, renegotiation and referendum is very difficult to manage in the time he suggested. The fact that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, is struggling to know whether there will be treaty reform, whether it will be legally binding and how it will come about very much depends on what the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary are asking. In response to one of the points in the report, I say that those seem to be the three key figures from the Government who are leading negotiations—that is certainly what I have been told privately—but clearly the Minister for Europe is playing an important role.
We know broadly what the Prime Minister is asking for. On several occasions your Lordships’ House has been told by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, about the four baskets that the Prime Minister is talking about. We have heard them again in Berlin today in various different iterations from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We have a sense of what is being asked for. Obviously we are all very much looking forward to the letter that is officially going to President Tusk in, we assume, the next few days.
I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. While it is a nice idea that your Lordships’ House and the other place should get a running commentary on the negotiations—that we are apprised at various stages of what the Prime Minister is doing—it clearly is not appropriate for us to try to monitor the negotiations on an ongoing basis. We see that with the Danish model of mandating; one gets a Government who are very much constrained. Negotiations of this type—the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has already said that he finds this a very strange sort of negotiation—are a complete innovation. Nobody has tried to negotiate prior to a referendum on potential departure before, so we are in unknown territory. The idea of Parliament trying to mandate the Prime Minister, to second-guess what he is doing or to ask too frequently for reports back, is unhelpful, I suggest.
The noble Lord, Lord Desai, had an interesting idea about a group of privy counsellors trying to listen to the Prime Minister and maybe advise him, but given the differences—
Lord Balfe
Is that not an extremely good idea, which would give Mr Corbyn, as a privy counsellor, something to do?
Baroness Smith of Newnham
I am not aware whether Mr Corbyn is yet a member of the Privy Council.
The thought is an interesting one—but given the differences of opinion that seem to persist, even on the Conservative Benches, in your Lordships’ House, the idea that a selected group of privy counsellors are somehow going to be able to give wise counsel to the Prime Minister when he is in the process of negotiating something that is a manifesto commitment rather than something that the ordinary man or woman on the street is necessarily demanding, and that they will be ideally suited to assisting him, is not persuasive.
On the subject of the man or woman on the street, the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, made a first-rate point. I have not declared any interests, but my day job is teaching European politics at Cambridge University, and I occasionally get funding from the European Commission. I say that so that it is on the record, and your Lordships’ House does not feel that I have misled anybody, or failed to acknowledge it. I talk about Europe all the time, but there is a whole set of jargon used in discussing the European Union, which we need to get away from. Clearly, it is hugely important to have plain speech in the discussion, in the renegotiation and in the referendum. However, a fact that we often fail to recollect is that your Lordships’ House also uses language that is not necessarily common parlance in the outside world. It is easy to assume that the European Union has too many intricacies and is too complicated, when the language of British government is not necessarily straightforward either.
I shall now turn to a couple of final points on the report. First, it mentions bilateral engagement. The fact that the Prime Minister and other Ministers have now started talking to the 27 other Heads of State and Government is hugely important. But may I ask the Minister: to what extent is the Prime Minister going beyond bilaterals just with Prime Ministers, and also talking through party organisations and with sister parties? Is there an opportunity to work on a cross-party basis as well, and involve members of the Labour Party, or the Liberal Democrats, which also have sister parties with Prime Ministers in government? Yes, it may come as a surprise, but the Liberal Democrats do still have sister parties in government in other member states, which might possibly be able to give assistance in the negotiations. As the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said, there is an issue of, “Where are our friends, and where are our enemies?”. I think that none in the 27 countries would say, “We are an enemy of the United Kingdom”—but clearly some member states are closer than others. One of the important things is to identify the countries with which we can easily make common cause, and those with which we need to work harder. For those of us who believe that Britain’s place remains within the European Union, working on a cross-party basis, or even a no-party basis, with partners across the European Union appears to be one way of dealing with that.
Reform is important. We have heard that from the Cross Benches and the Conservative Benches. However, that reform must benefit the European Union as a whole. It cannot be done on a unilateral basis just for the United Kingdom. The idea of a Luxembourg compromise that works merely to enable the United Kingdom to opt out of things we do not like will not be the way forward. To keep the negotiations going with 27 other member states we need to work on a basis of compromise and co-operation. The reforms need to be realistic and to reflect the needs of the whole European Union. Most member states want the United Kingdom to remain in the EU, but not at any price. The Prime Minister needs to remember that if he is to get the deal which he is seeking, which this country and the European Union need, it has to be done on the basis of working to a common agenda, not one that simply appears to be pick and mix for the United Kingdom.
Like noble Lords on both sides of this House and our colleagues in other European member states, I very much look forward to the Prime Minister’s letter to President Tusk, but I also look forward to the next report of your Lordships’ committee on visions of reform.