European Union: Negotiations (European Union Committee Report)

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 16th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, like the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, I need to apologise for having been temporarily absent during this debate. I was in my place for all the opening speeches, but I was absent because I am being double-hatted today. In normal circumstances, my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire would have been winding for the Liberal Democrats and I was going to play a bit part. Unfortunately, for various reasons associated with the coronavirus, he is not able to be in his place and, as I also do defence things, I was in Grand Committee, but the fact that I was in Grand Committee will shortly be relevant to my remarks.

As so often, the report of your Lordships’ European Union Committee is timely and insightful. As other noble Lords have said, we are most grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for bringing it to the House. Unlike the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, these Benches believe that many of the issues raised in the report and in the Government’s negotiating strategy are of national interest. It therefore seems wholly relevant that the report should come to the Chamber and that the Government’s Command Paper has also been brought.

Like many other noble Lords, we on these Benches have considerable concerns about the timing of not the Command Paper but the Government’s attempts to negotiate and ensure that the future relationship is agreed by 31 December 2020. It is clear that the Government won a mandate on 12 December with the clarion cry “Get Brexit done”, but on 31 January that first stage of the withdrawal agreement was reached. The UK has left the European Union. The future relationship does not have to be agreed by 31 December.

Several noble Lords, starting with my noble friend—she is a friend—Lady Falkner of Margravine, talked about John Maynard Keynes’s remark that when the facts changed, he changed his mind; what do you do? The facts that have changed since 12 December and since the Command Paper was published are precisely that Covid-19 may potentially have a catastrophic effect on this country and the EU 27. The international context has changed fundamentally. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, pointed out, the country expects us to be focused on dealing with that crisis. It is not only the country that thinks that. When I asked the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, in Grand Committee about the future of the integrated security and defence review, she pointed out that the country wanted and expected the Government to focus on the crisis, and that is what they are doing. If the Government are rightly focused on the Covid-19 crisis, do they have the bandwidth to engage in the appropriate negotiations to ensure that by the end of June we have reached a situation where we have a future trade deal?

I will not rehearse the Brexit debate. I do not wish to do that, or to test the patience of the House by rehearsing the views for or against being in or out of European Union. We have very clearly left. But it is surely in the national interest to get the best deal that we can. It is well known that the Prime Minister is of the view that if you cannot get the deal you want, you should walk away. He made that absolutely clear writing in the Daily Telegraph before Prime Minister David Cameron tried to renegotiate the UK’s terms of membership.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Does the noble Baroness agree that if you threaten to walk away, you strengthen your negotiating position?

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, as has happened so often this evening when there has been an intervention, I will say: “Ah, if the noble Lord will only wait just a moment, I might get to that point.” What I wanted to say was that when Boris Johnson was writing in the Telegraph he was always clear in his advice to David Cameron and Theresa May that they had to be able to walk away from the table. That is clearly something that as Prime Minister we expect him to do. If we get to late June and he does not feel the deal is appropriate, we expect him to be willing to walk away, and that is certainly a negotiating strategy. But there is a huge difference between the Government negotiating with the 27 as equal sovereigns, as the Command Paper suggests, in our current situation and in normal times, when the focus of negotiations can be week in, week out. We have already seen the second phase of negotiations postponed because of the current crisis that affects not just this country but the EU 27. We are not going to be focused for the next three and a half months on negotiating the future relationship; nobody would expect us do that. In that context, can the Minister confirm either that it would be appropriate to extend the deadline or give the House some indication that the Government are acting in good faith in negotiations?

As my noble friend Lady Ludford pointed out earlier, there is a question of trust. It is not always clear that Her Majesty’s Government are trusted in Europe on the question of our relationship. Issues in the Command Paper, as we have heard in so many speeches this evening, have raised questions about the Government moving from the political declaration. Could the Minister reassure the House that the negotiations will take place in an appropriate timeframe—that 31 December does not have to be do or die? After all, the Prime Minister won his election on 12 December; he has a five-year term of office, unless and until the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is repealed.

There is every opportunity for the Government to do the right thing, act in the national interest and postpone the deadline for withdrawal—not least because we do not simply have to negotiate and ratify the withdrawal agreement in your Lordships’ House and the other place, but the other 27 member states have to ratify. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, suggested that perhaps it would be a very simple agreement; if we go low, it will be simple. In that case, the 27 might not have to ratify through their national capitals. But, if we have a mixed agreement, which is what we might have expected, it will have to be ratified through all the national parliaments of the 27, including Flanders and Wallonia, and the Canadians can tell you what that might mean in practice.

We are faced with a very tight timetable, and the potential for serious divergence from the political declaration and from the future of the European Union on a whole range of areas. We have had questions about financial services. I want to raise another set of areas of participation in Union programmes, and at this point declare an interest: in my day job, I am reader in European politics at Cambridge University, where I have project funding from Horizon 2020, and I am linked to the Erasmus+ programme. So I would like to know a little bit about the Government’s thoughts on future integration in those areas, particularly because on Erasmus+ the Command Paper says that the Government might look at some possible time-limited arrangement,

“provided the terms are in the UK’s interests.”


Can the Minister explain what that might mean? Similarly, and more importantly for the research community at large, under what conditions might the Government wish to participate further in Horizon Europe?

On security questions, we have heard from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, and the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, particularly the concerns about security and foreign policy. The former Prime Minister, the MP for Maidenhead, seemed to be rather keen on the idea of close security and foreign policy co-operation with the EU 27. That seems to have disappeared from the Command Paper. Will the Minister reassure us that the Government still believe and understand that our security interests and those of the EU 27 remain as one? If anything demonstrates that, it is surely the Covid-19 crisis, which affects all of us and in which we are benefiting from the links to the European Union for ventilators and so on.

On these Benches, we strongly support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. Some of us listened with some incredulity to the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, who, I believe, said, “Parliamentary scrutiny is neither necessary nor desirable.” She may wish to correct me if I have misheard. I thought that that was what your Lordships were here for. Regarding the future relationship with the European Union, we believe that parliamentary scrutiny is both necessary and desirable. We may not be involved in the day-to-day negotiations, but we should certainly be kept abreast of what is going on to the extent that it is possible in the context of whatever limited arrangements Parliament might face in the context of the current crisis.

We are in a situation in which time is of the essence. We have seen months of negotiations with the European Union sometimes leading to the outcomes that we want and sometimes not. We are currently faced with a three-and-a-half-month window of opportunity for the future relationship unless the Government are willing to demonstrate some flexibility. In the context of the dire straits that the Prime Minister has just been telling us that we are facing and the fact that so many Members of your Lordships’ House will self-isolate and not be here, it is surely appropriate for the Government to look again at their timing and talk to the EU 27 about changing the timetable for our future relationship.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 18. Amendment 13 is to do with the EU Commission and the EU generally in terms of financing, by one means or another, this referendum. We were reassured in Committee that there are two reasons why we should not worry about this. The first was that an undertaking had been made by the EU Commission not to interfere in this referendum and the second was that John Penrose had said in another place that the EU is not so stupid as to get involved in a UK referendum.

I agree with him on one thing: the EU is not stupid. Just to give an idea of how much it is intending not to interfere, it has an EU task force to do with the UK referendum which is made up of six administrators and two assistants. In 2014, the EU spent €560 million on self-promotion. The reason why it is not stupid is because it has spent money before interfering in other people’s referenda with enormous success. It spent €1.5 million to persuade the Irish to vote for the Lisbon treaty and €3.8 million over three years to persuade Croatia that it was a good idea to join the EU.

If you judge the EU, and the EU Commission particularly, on what they do rather than on what they say, the answer is that they have moved into the former offices of the Conservative Party in Smith Square. I have no doubt that there is a very large number of people sitting there, and do we really imagine that they are going to be sitting on their hands doing nothing during a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should leave the EU saying “It’s nothing to do with us. We’re completely neutral on all this. We’re just going to sit here and answer emails and provide information where it is requested”? Come on—let us live in the real world. In Ireland it went so far as to spend a very large sum of money on issuing 1.1 million pamphlets to the Irish about why the EU was such a good idea. The problem with all this is that the EU has set itself up so that it can interfere in our referendum, and because of the total lack of democratic accountability—

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I will give way in a moment. We cannot actually stop the EU interfering in our referendum because it is written into its treaties that it is allowed to spill out information at will and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, may be conflating two different things. The first is the period of renegotiation that Her Majesty’s Government are undertaking at present and the second is the referendum. My understanding is that the task force is actually to deal with the renegotiation, which is at the request of the Government, not an initiative of the European Union, and therefore is not an interference in the referendum. I also believe that such interference would be misguided; it would not be right for the EU institutions to be involved.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

At the end of the day, the EU thinks that it is free to issue information. Information can take many different forms, and I do not see that there is anything that can be done. The Minister has already said that we cannot actually stop the EU financing activities because they are all done in the name of information—and what is the difference between information and propaganda?

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I do not believe that this amendment is necessary. It is very reassuring to know that noble Lords opposite, who were opposing votes for 16 and 17 year-olds a few minutes ago, are now so concerned to ensure that those people who may now have the vote—

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Does the noble Baroness not accept that those people who believe in democracy accept a democratic vote?

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, I am very pleased to hear that. We have all talked about making sure that this is a level playing field, so I am delighted to know that noble Lords are keen to ensure that people who will be entitled to vote can be registered. However, the issues are whether this needs to be in the Bill and whether we need to wait until the annual register, which starts in July 2016. We have a rolling electoral register. Can the Minister say whether it would be possible to look at registration at an earlier stage? Lest anyone think that I am trying to skew things by looking for a quick referendum at a later or earlier date, we do not know the date, so we have the veil of ignorance. However, we will know relatively soon when we shall have Royal Assent for the Bill. Could the Electoral Commission not set in train the process of registration as soon as Royal Assent is granted?

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I very much support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. It is important that we think about the implications for the UK of its relations with the EU, should there be a vote to leave it. Before dinner, we heard of concerns about fear and claims that the pro-Europeans wanted to talk about withdrawal and its dangers only because we wanted to whip up fear. There is a danger that comes from Eurosceptics such as Dan Hannan, who says, “You pro-Europeans invent things. We don’t want to be Norway”. That is certainly something that was suggested in your Lordships’ House at Second Reading. The noble Lord, Lord Stoddart of Swindon, has already suggested today that the UK does not want to have a Norwegian model or a Swiss model; it would like its own model. In order for the citizens of the UK, and anyone else who may be enfranchised in the forthcoming referendum, to understand the implications of what they are doing in the vote, it is important that they have an understanding, and that the Government make clear, what the implications of leaving would be for our relationship with the EU.

The noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, intervened earlier on my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire to ask whether arrangements could not just carry on as they are if the UK were to leave the EU. That strikes me as a very strange sort of club. If you say to your golf club, “I’m not going to pay my dues any more; I no longer want to be a member of this club”, it is not going to say, “That’s fine, you can come and play golf again on Sunday”.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

We were actually talking about the arrest warrant and the legal arrangements that we have. There seems to be no reason why those should not be negotiated to continue as they were before.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

I thank the noble Lord for his comment. It would indeed be perfectly possible to negotiate a whole range of things associated with access to the internal market, the European arrest warrant and many other aspects of the relationship that the UK currently has with our European partners. However, we would need to consider, and the Government would need to be able to explain, in what areas they would envisage having relationships with the EU.

The idea that things could just carry on as before, as was suggested in a previous group of amendments, is rather complacent. Legislation that the UK has on its statute books would certainly persist, and on day one it might look very similar, but with regard to access to markets there is no reason whatever to assume that the EU 27—particularly acting by unanimity on Article 50, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has just referred to—would simply say, “The United Kingdom is so important to us that we will give it free access to our markets”. There would have to be negotiations, and there is no reason to assume that our current colleagues in the EU would open up the markets without extracting some sort of quid pro quo with some sort of agreement. I know it is not palatable to everyone to hear yet again about the European Economic Area, but looking at those relationships reveals that the member states of the EEA have effectively signed up to a huge amount of the EU’s acquis but without a seat at the table. They have to accept what the EU agrees.

The United Kingdom may be out-voted while we are a member of the European Union but if we play our cards right as a member we can negotiate, we can work with partners and we can amend legislation. On the outside we would be policy-takers and we would be doing what the European Union asked us to do. If we felt it was in our interests we might sign up to it but the costs are likely to be significant. If we engaged in a relationship that looked like a Norwegian model, we would end up paying into the Union budget, taking policy and having even less influence than now.

Noble Lords may say that I say that only because I want Britain to remain in. I am simply suggesting that it is important for citizens of the United Kingdom to understand the implications and that the Government should make clear what the implications of leaving would be and how they envisage the relationship of the United Kingdom with the rest of the European Union.

On Amendment 32A, could the Minister bring back to the Committee some thoughts on how the Government envisage the relationship with the Republic of Ireland if there were a vote to leave the European Union? That relationship is sui generis. The relationship between the Republic and Northern Ireland and the fact that there is currently no land border would be fundamentally changed. Withdrawal has implications for the United Kingdom and this one particular close neighbour in the European Union. I ask the Government to look again at that relationship.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

Of course, when we come to debate whether we should stay in or go out, this is really going to be the basis of the whole campaign: there will be all these wonderful scare stories about how barriers are going to be put up. I remind my noble friend Lord Tugendhat that there are probably just as many EU citizens living in the United Kingdom as there are British citizens living in the EU, and therefore in the inevitable negotiations that will take place after a decision to leave—if such a decision is made—something will need to be done to cater for these people so that they can travel without visas between both countries.

I also remind my noble friend that we are not part of the Schengen agreement, so there is not free movement of citizens directly from the EU into the United Kingdom. They have to show their passports, which they do not have to do when crossing borders in the EU, as we have discovered through the inordinately large number of immigrants now coming into the EU.

I also want to pick up on the point about the timing made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. This is obviously of major concern to the Government, and I know that my noble friend will be covering it in his response to the debate, but we must know exactly what is involved in getting these people to register. I make it absolutely clear to the Committee that if an amendment on this is tabled on Report, I shall certainly ensure that another amendment is tabled to enfranchise all citizens around the whole world.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, I had planned to keep my comments incredibly brief. Obviously I support the amendment in the name of my noble friend Lady Miller and the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, myself and others. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, I feel that we should speak to the amendments that are listed to be dealt with today. While there may well be a case for enfranchising British people who have been abroad for more than 15 years wherever they live, that is not what we are discussing today.

One issue that has come up several times is the number of people. Frankly, I do not believe it matters whether there are 1 million or 2 million British people living in the European Union or EU nationals living in the United Kingdom, or how many 16 and 17 year-olds there are—which was the subject of debate on our first day in Committee. We should be talking about the principles and whether we believe that EU nationals resident in the UK and British citizens who are resident for more than 15 years in the EU or elsewhere should be allowed to vote. Those are matters of principle; the actual numbers really do not matter greatly. Although it was interesting to hear the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, turn himself round on this issue, I am not persuaded that the numbers matter.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Hamilton of Epsom

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I cannot believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is actually putting this amendment forward because he has no intention to increase the franchise of people who will vote for his position, which is to stay in the EU. Come on—let us see this for what it is: this is trying to slant things rapidly in the direction of those who want us to stay in the EU. It is absolutely blatantly obvious that that is what it is all about. For anybody to pretend anything different is absolutely ridiculous.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, like the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, I have also put my name to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I fundamentally believe it is right that EU nationals who are living and working in the UK and who have been here for a significant time, paying their taxes, ought to be enfranchised, irrespective of how they might vote. If I were speaking from behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, I would still say that they should have a right to vote. They have come here thanks to EU free movement rights, just as millions of British taxpayers have moved to other parts of the European Union—they may have retired there or be working there thanks to the free movement of people and 40 years of membership of the European Union. They will all vote in different ways. This is not a free-for-all to say that any EU national who just happens to have pitched up here should be entitled to vote. However, people who have committed to being here but have not sought British citizenship, precisely because, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, they have understood that they have rights as EU citizens, should be enfranchised.

It should not be a free-for-all. I do not quite believe that the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, is the right thing to do. However, enfranchising people who have a great stake in the future of Britain in Europe is important, whether they are British nationals or not. Commonwealth citizens resident in the UK will be enfranchised, so it seems invidious that EU nationals are not. This is not about skewing the franchise but about giving people with a genuine interest the opportunity to have a say.