Relations with Europe

Debate between Baroness Smith of Newnham and Lord Kennedy of Southwark

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

That this House takes note of the relations between the United Kingdom and Europe, particularly on issues of culture, diplomacy and security.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I thought it would be helpful to the House to remind all Back-Bench speakers that the advisory time for this debate is four minutes. This means when the Clock has reached three minutes, noble Lords should start making their closing remarks, and at four minutes their time is up. I have asked the Government Whips to remind all noble Lords of this fact during the debate, if necessary. I thank all noble Lords in advance for their understanding, which will enable everyone to contribute to the debate fairly, in the allotted time.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords, this debate in my name is on a slightly different topic from the one that we got so used to debating in the last few years: the UK’s relations with the EU. It is intended to be a more general, open and inclusive debate, hopefully working with the interests and concerns of everyone in your Lordships’ House and people of whatever opinion in the United Kingdom and to help us think much more broadly about how we interact with our neighbours in Europe.

I will start, slightly unusually, with a quotation:

“The UK is not just any third country … we share deep historical ties and aligned interests … a stronger partnership is not just beneficial but essential for our security, our economies and our people … cooperation through dialogue, debate and mutual understanding”


is what is needed. Those words come from Sandro Gozi, whom many noble Lords may not have heard of yet but he is the newly elected chair of the UK-EU Parliamentary Partnership Assembly. When Members of your Lordships’ House and the other place have the next delegation with our European parliamentary colleagues, Sandro Gozi will chair those meetings from the EU side.

His words, spoken just last week, are indicative of a new flavour of thinking among our European neighbours. There was a period when discussions between the UK and our European neighbours—whether with the EU 27 as a bloc or bilaterally—had become very difficult. They were tense and scratchy on both sides, yet the importance of working with our European neighbours never disappeared. Whatever you think about the institutional relationship with the European Union, security co-operation with our European neighbours was and remains crucial. That has been especially so since February 2022 and the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine. Student and youth mobility are also extremely important to cultural co-operation.

I am delighted that this debate has garnered so much interest, and particularly that the noble Baroness, Lady Hodge, will be making her maiden speech. She was a formidable participant in the other place, particularly as chair of the Public Accounts Committee, so we very much look forward to her speech. I am reminded that, almost exactly a decade ago, I made my own maiden speech. In making a maiden speech, one is discouraged from doing or saying anything controversial. It took me a while to find a suitable debate. There was nothing on fly-fishing, painting, pottery or whatever—something that would have looked entirely uncontroversial. But there was one topic on which I thought, “I know something about this”. This is where I declare my interest for today: my day job is as professor of European politics at Cambridge, where one of my research projects is on relations with other European countries.

The topic on which the Whips encouraged me to speak—I was a little worried—was a debate in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. It was a Motion to Take Note of the case for the UK’s membership of the European Union. The Whips at the time did not think that was too controversial, but many of the electorate clearly did not take note of the case that the noble Lord and I tried to make. Afterwards, in the cloakroom, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, came and said, “Good speech”. Obviously everyone in the Chamber makes laudatory remarks on a maiden speech—I have never heard any negative ones—but, outside the Chamber, it was possible that a passionate Brexiteer might have been a little negative. I said that I was trying not to be too controversial. He said, “No, you were just this side of controversial”.

I hope I have made it easy for everyone not to be too controversial in this debate, because our relations with Europe are necessary. They have to happen; the question is how we improve them. I hope that the rather general title of the debate offers the opportunity for an open discussion. At this stage in the Parliament, it is not intended to be hostile to His Majesty’s Government; in many ways, it is intended to try to empower His Majesty’s Government to carry on with some of the initial attempts that have been undertaken to work with our European partners, both at a European level and particularly through bilateral relations with some of our nearest neighbours, particularly Germany and Ireland so far.

The Lords Library has, as always, produced an extremely good briefing. We should have expected nothing less, but the briefing focuses very much on the last 100 days—the period since the new Labour Government were elected. My remarks will look a little to the past, as well as to the future, because some lessons can be learned about the previous “new Labour” Government. There is a lot of discussion about the new Starmer Government, but the new Labour Government offer some lessons, some of which are positive and some a little more salutary. I hope that, by the end of my contributions, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, and others will be thinking about some of the things they need to avoid.

In the run-up to the July election, now Foreign Secretary David Lammy was making very positive remarks about strengthening the UK’s security relationship with the EU. That, in many ways, is still an open question. Whereas the withdrawal agreement and the trade and co-operation agreement have been settled, there is still very much an opportunity for strengthening our security relations with the European Union at the institutional level of the UK and the EU. Already, as the Library Note reminds us, the Foreign Secretary had been talking about strengthening relations with Germany, Poland, Ireland and France. Those bilateral relations with our European partners are hugely important because, in many ways, they are the building blocks for strengthening and enhancing our relations with the wider European Union and wider Europe.

It is timely to be thinking about bilateral relations, because the new Government have clearly looked for a reset in our relations. We are also at a point in the European cycle where the European Parliament had its elections in early June and the new Commission is in the process of being appointed, so there is now an opportunity for four and a half years of deep and serious discussions about security and defence but also cultural co-operation.

It is also important for us to think at a wider level about bilateral relations. In particular, I welcome the Government’s agreement with Germany. Last month I was on an IPU visit to Berlin, where we had many very significant discussions with committees from right across the Bundestag. There was clearly a lot of interest in working with the United Kingdom on a bilateral basis on defence and cultural issues and understanding that it would be desirable to have much closer co-operation not just between Prime Minister and Chancellor but potentially between parliaments. I very much hope that the Minister might be able to say something about that relationship in his winding-up speech and to speak a little more generally about the extent to which the Government are thinking about strengthening inter-parliamentary relations, because a key aspect we need to think about in strengthening bilateral relations is people-to-people contacts at a variety of different levels. In 1997 and 1998, the new Labour Government understood that.

Here is my little bit of history: the new bilateralism was the term used by new Labour—I am not sure, but it may have been invented by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle—and was intended to be a step change in the UK’s relations with our European partners. It was on the basis of strengthening bilateral relations across parliaments: representatives of the Westminster Parliament would talk to their opposite numbers in other national capitals, Ministers would talk to their opposite numbers, and civil servants would strengthen relations. If one really wants strong bilateral relations, the perfect model is the Franco-German couple, which is deeply institutionalised and works even if the Chancellor of Germany and the President of France are not on the same page; the two countries look to work together. That heavily institutionalised relationship was sort of the model for the step change that the UK undertook in the first Blair Government, and it was initially very well received by our European partners.

Thanks to an underspend by the FCO, as it was then, I had some funding for a project at Chatham House looking at the UK’s bilateral relations. I interviewed colleagues in several European capitals, where there was an almost unanimous sense that “The UK understands Europe and how to work with us”—it was very positive. Just a few years later by 2006-07, if one went to European capitals, even in central and eastern Europe where previously they had said, “The UK is fantastic. It’s advocating for us to join the European Union—it’s a real supporter”, the sense was, “You can’t really trust the United Kingdom. It doesn’t understand reciprocity”. The term that had been used for the bilateral relations in the first Blair Government was promiscuous bilateralism—that you picked up a bilateral partner, you worked with them when you wanted something, and when you had what you wanted you did not keep that relationship going. Within a decade there was some disillusion; a sense that the UK maybe did not understand how to work with our European partners and did not understand reciprocity.

Clearly our bilateral relations are now outside the European Union, but the importance of that lesson remains. Therefore, could the Minister reassure the House in his response that, in the new relations we are seeking to build with Germany, France and Ireland, the Government understand the importance not just of the high-level agreements and the rhetoric at the start, but of ongoing relations? They are so important. By that I mean the person-to-person contact—that might be parliament to parliament or within political parties. The Liberal Democrats are still certainly part of the ALDE Party. I believe the Labour Party still has strong relations with the SPD. Whether its links are so strong with the PES I am not sure, but it would be useful to understand that.

Beyond that, will His Majesty’s Government think about how we can strengthen our relations more broadly—on defence, which I am sure several noble Lords will speak on having looked at the list of contributors, but also on culture and cultural co-operation? I know that my noble friend Lady Bonham-Carter will speak on that. If the British Council has, as it does, priority countries in Europe—France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany—will the Government commit to ensuring that it is sufficiently resourced to be able to do its work effectively?

Finally, one of the key aspects of closer co-operation must surely be understanding among people, particularly the younger generations. Will the Government think again about youth mobility, as the leader of the Liberal Democrats asked the Prime Minister yesterday in the other place?