European Union Bill

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I hope that I may suggest a response to the noble Lord. One example that we on this Bench have discussed is the growing incidence of piracy, which might stop a great deal of traffic passing through the Red Sea and affect the interests of our country and of others. Secondly, in the immediate aftermath of the freezing of assets of a number of non-democratic leaders following the Arab spring, money laundering might be regarded as an urgent issue.

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[Lord Taverne]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Taverne and I have a difficulty. A number of speeches addressing this group of amendments have moved somewhat between the groups. There have been references to later amendments. We are not quite sure whether this debate is meant to comprise the list of things being put forward by the Front Bench of the Labour Party, including this amendment as well as the others that fall within the same general area, or whether we are supposed to limit ourselves entirely to the single market. In that case, a great many speeches have been rather close to being out of order. Perhaps the Government will indicate whether they wish this debate to be limited to the single market or to take a number of these amendments together, in which case my noble friend Lord Taverne and I both wish to say something.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

As the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, recognised, and perhaps I may suggest, as this group and the groups that follow cover similar themes one might talk about this group and those that follow, which will save time later when we get to the others.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I am grateful for that, which is exactly my view. Perhaps I might refer to what the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said. I also associate those concepts with some of the later amendments. I will not keep the House for long. The noble Lord’s good argument was made strongly on the basis of the need in some cases for urgent decisions to be made. He pointed out that the formal procedures are long-winded and slow and that therefore in some cases it would be irrelevant to the issue that had come up because it would take so long to deal with the procedures.

I now refer to a second group of amendments, which is what I might call the Canute group. What is the Canute group? Those of us who remember the early history of Britain will remember that the king at the time ordered the tide to turn back. In other words, he insisted on not seeing the world as it is. The amendments in this group are about insisting—

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords—

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

Perhaps I may finish my sentence before I give way. The amendments in this group insist, to some extent, that the urgent and very troubling issues that confront us now can somehow be put off and not dealt with at the present time.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

All I want to say is that King Canute did not order the sea to go back. He was demonstrating to his courtiers that he did not have the power to turn the sea back, so the analogy that the noble Baroness was making is incorrect.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I defer to the noble Lord’s deep knowledge of history, but he will accept that metaphors and similes are sometimes rather broader than a deep knowledge of history would insist on them being. I insist on keeping my metaphor going for a few more minutes. The point that I want to make strongly is that issues are coming up that clearly will require a degree of competence on the part of the European Union that is not embraced in the present treaties. Unless we exclude some of these issues from the elaborate procedure of the referendum lock, we will find ourselves hobbled in trying to deal with them.

I shall give two illustrations. I particularly urge my noble friends in the Conservative Party to consider one of them very carefully. In the past couple of months we have seen some of the consequences of the Arab spring. One of those consequences has been the placing of substantial sums of money within the structures of the European Union because there is very little control over how the European Union at present deals with inflows of money from other quarters. Members of the European Parliament have shown a great deal of sense about this and have urged the European Union to take additional action, which, as I understand the Bill, will probably require the referendum lock procedure to be met.

One of the most vociferous and articulate Members of the European Parliament on this issue of how one deals with what one might believe to be illegitimate funds—funds that have been stolen from a nation by its leader or funds that have been deliberately laundered through Europe—was the spokesman of legal affairs in the European Parliament. Mr Karim is a Conservative Member of the European Parliament, and I will quote what he said because it is extremely relevant to this debate. He said:

“I would … invite Baroness Ashton, as a key architect of the EU’s new plan for north Africa, to implement strong anti-money laundering provisions as an important part of the future EU strategy in the region. More broadly, the … Commission must act to urgently address the deficiencies in the current arrangements regarding funds originating overseas. The EU cannot continue to be a savings account in which leaders of developing countries deposit their ill-gotten funds”.

Mr Karim went on to call for urgent action by the European Union, which under this Bill will of course be caught by the referendum lock.

I think that my second example will stir a number of Members of this Committee as it certainly stirs me: namely, the relative unwillingness of the United Kingdom to address the issue of human trafficking. According to the International Labour Organisation, human trafficking has now become the third largest common illicit business in the world. It is valued by the ILO at approximately €32 billion in the past year. It is third after the drug trade and the arms trade. It has burgeoned and mushroomed in the past few years.

The United Kingdom was unwilling to sign and agree to an EU directive on the trafficking of children. It refused to do so on the grounds that the United Kingdom had its own measures and did not require a European Union directive on the issue. As many will know, the argument went on month after month, with only Denmark and the United Kingdom refusing to agree to the proposed directive. In this country, the official figures are said by the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the UK Border Agency to be far higher than the official figures that are given. Recently, the Home Office said that the official figure for child and human trafficking was around 250 cases a year. One area of the borough of Westminster alone has found something like 1,120 children who are being trafficked. It has announced that it is having to strengthen its own steps strongly to try to deal with the issues.

I will not bore the House with telling it—

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

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[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I will not give way at the moment. I am in the middle of an argument. I will gladly give way to the noble Lord afterwards. I will not bore the House by going on about some of the unspeakably awful cases. For example, a boy from the middle of Africa was brought to this country at the age of 16 by a man who pretended to befriend him. Day after day, he was locked up in a house with just one meal a day being served to him and was repeatedly sexually abused by older men. A young mother of several children was trafficked to this country and used by up to 15 men a day against her own will. That was the price of the people who trafficked her in order not to reveal that she was an illegal immigrant.

I will not go on about this, but the cases are bloodcurdling, frightening, terrible. People are trafficked for three purposes: first, sexual exploitation; secondly, direct slavery, often in domestic work; and, thirdly—this is not unfamiliar to those of us who, like me, live in East Anglia—fruit and vegetable picking; young men and women, often children, are used in fruit and vegetable fields, often with almost no wages at all, in conditions of near slavery. We do not like to observe these issues. We like to think that that does not happen here and we reject the concept that such things can happen in an orderly and well policed state, but we are wrong. Unless we can get some international agreement, or at least a European-wide agreement, we will not be able to stop the sources that are being dealt with in other European countries in such a way as to bring this kind of thing to an end. It took 10 months for the British Government and the Prime Minister, under pressure from a group of women who organised visits and petitions to No. 10 Downing Street, finally to agree to this directive a couple of weeks ago. The Prime Minister did not want to do it because he did not want to agree that this extension of the competence of the European Union was essential to deal with this disgusting trend.

I have mentioned these things, and I shall now stop arguing them, to point out that there are what I call—I am sorry, but I shall repeat it—Canute cases, where we try to pretend that the massive structure of organised crime, ranging from the drug trade to human trafficking to money laundering, is not there. When you weigh these issues in the balance, it is right for the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, and his colleagues on the Labour Front Bench to press for certain issues not to be subject to the referendum or to the inevitable delays that follow it. These issues affect our fellow human beings, many of them British, in ways that we should never accept as a country. They require at least a reasoned reaction; they can no longer be dealt with on a purely national basis.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Without wishing to detract in any way from the terrible situation to which the noble Baroness has so brilliantly spoken, does she have any statistics on how many of these people come here from Europe through the European open border? Would it not be easier for this country—which is, after all, an island—to police its borders more effectively if we had control of those borders? I suspect that the majority of these people come through from other countries in the European Union.

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[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

In the case of prostitution, quite a lot of the entries are from eastern Europe. Indeed, some of the more disagreeable people have exploited the fact that the eastern Europeans are not aware of where they are going. They are offered jobs in the catering trade—hotels and so on—and then find out that they have been sold into prostitution. They are not aware of how to deal with the situation or of the safeguards that should be open to them. However, that is not the case with the other two examples I gave of domestic slavery and agricultural exploitation. In those cases, most of them come into this country, rather amazingly, straight from third countries and not by way of other member states of the European Union.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

On the first intervention, I got the impression that the noble Baroness thought that all five groups of amendments were being taken together. Is that correct? If we are taking all five groups together we will be here for a very long time and noble Lords will miss their dinner. Could we have clarification on this?