European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Wednesday 25th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

The noble Lord may find my remarks inconvenient, perhaps because they are entirely on target. I am explaining why the British people do not want these amendments and a large part of that is because of the damage that the euro has done, and which they can see it is doing. Could I also ask the noble Lord, Lord Howell, to respond to the delicate little point that the big idea behind the whole project of European integration is also proving to be misguided? I asked him that earlier.

This is essential to the amendment, as I hope even the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, will agree. That big idea, as I never tire of reminding your Lordships, was that the nation states—the democracies of Europe—were responsible for two world wars and the long history of bloodshed. They therefore had to be emasculated and diluted into a new form of supranational government run by bureaucrats. The whole project of European integration, with its attendant euro, has at its heart the destruction of national democracy and its replacement with the anti-democratic structure that is the EU. That is why the unelected Commission still has the monopoly of proposing all EU legislation in secret, which is now the majority of our national law. That law is then negotiated by bureaucrats from the nation states in COREPER and then passed, still largely in secret in the Council of Ministers from the nation states, with your Lordships’ House and the House of Commons having virtually no influence—in fact, no influence.

When you tell them this in Washington, they simply cannot believe it. I wonder how many of the good people travelling here today with President Obama are aware of it. I imagine that he may pay some tribute today to the European Union, and I wonder whether he will know what he is talking about if he does.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

Would the noble Lord acknowledge that American Presidents repeatedly, from President Eisenhower on, have urged the United Kingdom to work more intensively with the European Union, or the European Community before it, to offer it leadership and to play a major positive part in its development?

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, of course I am aware of that. I also remember Henry Kissinger saying that he rather liked one telephone number to ring in Europe. I have to tell the noble Baroness that Mr Kissinger changed his mind when he read Mr Christopher Booker’s book, The Great Deception, after which he said, “Oh, at last I understand the thing”. We can come and go on that one, but time is pressing.

The British people are waking up to the truth of all this, and they do not like it. Eighty per cent want a referendum on EU membership. They want their democracy back and they will want any chance to be heard in any referendum, which touches on the huge deception that has been practised on them by their political class, which is their entrapment in the European Union. These amendments would deny them that opportunity, so I trust that the Government will not accept them.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Monday 23rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, obviously I do not support this amendment. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Radice, was present in the Chamber on 3 May when, as reported at columns 398 to 400, I thought I made a pretty good fist of destroying the usefulness of the single market. I will not repeat those arguments now, but any student of these matters can look up the case against the single market and why his famous 3 million jobs are not worth much against the 4.5 million jobs which they have through making things and exporting them to clients in this country. I also discussed why we can trade with a market of 350 million people through free trade in the same way as 63 other countries around the world do at the moment, now moving towards 75 countries. There is really no advantage to our membership of the European Union which we could not enjoy through free trade and friendly collaboration. I will not go down that obvious and inviting route.

What I will do is produce some statistics and facts to show that the wicked Murdochite and Desmondite et cetera press is more than balanced by the BBC in this country. It is not as the noble Lord, Lord Lea, suggests. In 2005, thanks to continuous monitoring by the organisation Mediawatch-UK, the BBC was forced to hold its first ever independent inquiry into some of its political coverage, in this case its coverage of the European Union and our relationship with it. The whole of that story can be found on the Global Britain website. That independent inquiry, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, found unequivocally that the BBC’s coverage of our relationship with the European Union was inadequate and biased. The BBC responded in November 2005 and made one clear promise: to explain to the British people how the institutions of the European Union work, how they interact, and their effect on our British way of life.

I trust that the noble Lord, Lord Radice, agrees with me that it is a great pity that the BBC has never fulfilled that promise. It would be helpful to the debate between us, because obviously we are never going to agree, if the BBC did conduct such an unbiased debate and at least told the British people what they are voting for when they vote for the European Parliament. They do not have a clue what the European Parliament is, or where it fits into the European law-making process, that of laws being proposed in secret by the unelected Commission, negotiated in secret in COREPER and passed in secret in the Council. The people do not know that. I think that if the BBC were to explain all that, Euroscepticism in this country would rise. The noble Lord, Lord Radice, and other noble and Europhile Lords presumably think that public opinion would swing in favour of the European Union.

I have one devastating statistic from the BBC’s coverage. Over the past six years, the “Today” programme has devoted only 0.004 per cent of its coverage to any discussion about withdrawal from the European Union. That figure, which has not been bettered anywhere else in the BBC, has to be set against that of the roughly 25 per cent of the British people who voted for a withdrawalist perspective in the last European elections, and roughly 5 per cent at the last general election. We have a British public who are massively more interested and massively more Eurosceptical than the BBC gives them space for.

Whatever else the noble Lord, Lord Radice, and I do not agree on, surely he would agree that all these matters could be laid to rest not only if the BBC did its stuff, as it should do according to its charter and guidelines, but also if we had a genuinely independent cost-benefit analysis of them. I cannot understand why the Government go on refusing to do that. I hope that we can agree, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Radice, will accept that the answer to his amendment is not that it should be seen through, but that there should at least be a genuine economic cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. We can leave aside the constitutional disaster of EU membership; let us just look at the money.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I do not believe that the noble Lord, Lord Radice, was suggesting that there should be a legal obligation on Ministers to say nice things about the European Union. What he was trying to do is to get at long last a more balanced perception of the pros and cons of our membership of the European Union, for which I profoundly commend him.

Of course there are many things wrong with the European Union, as there are with the United Nations, with our special relationship with United States and with many other aspects of international institutions, one recently mentioned being NATO. Nobody argues with that; we live in a world of real politics where it is clear that most institutions have substantial flaws. Nobody denies that the same is true of the European Union.

But what I find so sad is that, for 40 years now, this country has gone on missing opportunity after opportunity to lead and profoundly to influence the European Union because of its obsession with constantly trying to run it down, even when it does things which are obviously in the interests of this country, of the European Union itself and of the world. Neither your Lordships nor I have got time to go back at great length, but such an attitude dates from our refusal to have any part in the Coal and Steel Community of 1951, our refusal to take part in the 1957 treaty of Rome, with our dismissal of the enterprise as being unlikely to succeed, our failure to recognise the astonishing achievement in bringing Spain, Portugal and Greece, all of them dictatorships, into a framework of democracy which has been sustained, undoubtedly with some difficulty, right up to the present time—which is an amazing achievement—and our total lack of interest or great concern with the European Union’s extension eastwards into central Europe, the Baltic states and elsewhere, countries for which the European Union, alongside their membership of NATO, were the guarantees of their future democracy and stability. They still have a long way to go, but they have come a very long way since 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed.

We turn aside time and again from the fact that the European Union is the single greatest giver of aid to developing countries, exceeding any other country on the same scale such as the United States, China or India. We take very little notice of the tremendous efforts made by the European Union to do something serious about emissions, greenhouse gases and the environment. At the most parochial level, when we look at the cleanness of our beaches and at the fact that the Thames river now has salmon all way up to the Pool of London, we see that that is due directly to European Union directives, though nobody is ever prepared to say it very loudly in this country. I could go on—I shall not—but what I find so sad is that we in this country have failed to give a constructive lead to the European Union and spend almost all our time carping about it. We are right to criticise it—yes—but to carp, to sour and to change and distort the facts in the way that happens in the British press is astonishing and not copied in France, Germany, Spain or most other major countries of the European Union. It is a unique aspect of a certain kind of British moaning about the great opportunities that it has decided not to follow up.

The noble Lord, Lord Radice, spoke about the Murdoch press and Associated Newspapers. Those newspapers do not simply produce balanced and constructive criticism of the European Union; they continually emit a series of distorted statements, falsified facts and false scandals which rarely come home. One should compare them with the one newspaper that I think everybody in this House would recognise does not grind very strong party axes and attempts seriously to devote itself to society and the public good, in providing the nearest thing to truth that can be provided—I refer, to your Lordships’ surprise perhaps, to the Financial Times. The indications, the outlines, the descriptions and the analysis in the Financial Times of what is actually going on in Europe are unique in being genuinely international, genuinely global and genuinely objective in a way that most newspapers do not pretend or even try to be. One reads in that newspaper lots of criticisms and worries about the eurozone and so on, but it provides a picture of what is happening that is far better balanced than that which one gets from most of the other major tabloids or even for that matter, sadly, some of the major broadsheets.

Our future as a country lies in working closely with the European Union. It is not just me who says that; it is people such as President Obama and the leaders of China. Our major neighbour nations recognise that the UK’s future as a serious player on the world stage is very closely linked to the extent to which we can co-operate with our neighbours in Europe. That is very strongly the view of the United States; it has been over several presidencies—I do not doubt that we shall hear anything very different when the present President of the United States comes here on Wednesday. Should we not at least give a moment’s pause for some of our closest friends and best allies when they say to the United Kingdom, “Please, think constructively about what you can contribute to the future, and think about how the Commonwealth and Europe together could create a world of greater peace and greater balance”? Just for once, let us move away from the negative position that we in this country so often take and look at the prospects for our children and grandchildren. Let us notice that they inevitably require us to work, not uncritically, but thoughtfully and constructively, with our European neighbours to make the world a somewhat better place.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has said, and I promise to keep entirely within order. My speech will be directed to why Clause 6 should not stand part of the Bill.

As my noble friend said, we have had a string of amendments trying to limit the scope of Clause 6. I shall not go through them all. We all know them and they have been tabled by various Members of the Committee. We now have another group of such amendments relating to Schedule 1. Again, they cover a very wide range of issues which at least some Members of the Committee feel should not be subject to the referendum lock procedure. I want to draw the Committee’s attention for a moment or two to one particular aspect of this, as it goes far to show how difficult the Bill will be to carry out in practice.

Earlier today, we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Marland, about a carbon emissions programme. At the very beginning of his Statement, he said—I wrote it down—that we would need to keep in line with the targets of the European Union. Why, some Eurosceptic might ask? I am not currently addressing the noble Lords, Lord Pearson of Rannoch or Lord Stoddart of Swindon, because I do not have the eloquence of a Pericles and, even if I had, I do not suppose that I would persuade them. However, the reasons why we want to stay aligned with the European Union environment targets are quite straightforward: if we do not, others will compete with us and override us by cheating on those targets. Therefore, we have a profound national interest in ensuring that the targets are maintained by all our European Union partners. The UK is trying—and I think that most of us feel very pleased that she is—to be the greenest state in Europe. If there were no such EU understanding, the UK, instead of carrying others with her, would simply be competed into the ground by other countries which decided that they would not be bound by such targets, and, not being bound by them, they would be more competitive in energy-intensive industries. This is the most central national interest. If we are to address the single most troubling problem that confronts us—that of climate change and greenhouse gases—we desperately need to have agreed targets that the whole EU will buy into.

However, what do we find when we look at the list of Schedule 1 proposals? We find the amazing proposal under Clause 6(5)(g) that a decision that would replace the ordinary legislative procedure with a special legislative procedure would be subject to the referendum lock. I ask Members of the Committee to consider for a moment a referendum question which asked, “Do you agree that if the special legislative procedure replaces the ordinary legislative procedure, there should be a veto on this?”. Frankly, I do not think that one person in a thousand, however intelligent or thoughtful they might be, would have the faintest idea about the difference between the ordinary and the special legislative procedures. However, in Clause 6(5)(g) we find that that is subject to the lock. It would not be in our interests if that were agreed because, as I have already explained, on issues such as the environment we have a profound interest in finding common ground for the basis of our targets and practice.

I will not speak much longer in Committee, in which, if I might say so, some Members have spoken at very considerable length, except to draw the attention of the Committee to two things. First, I commend the noble Lords, Lord Triesman and Liddle, for attempting in our discussions yesterday to put forward a genuine compromise that might enable both sides, probably excluding the more extreme Eurosceptics but including most people of a middle and moderate position, to find common ground. That proposal was for a special legislative committee of the two Houses of Parliaments, which was a serious attempt to narrow down the scope of the referendum and to do it entirely within the spirit of the involvement of Parliament. It received no response of an understanding kind from the Government so that one begins to wonder whether there is any room at all for a meeting of minds over this Bill or whether we are simply wasting time because nobody was persuaded of anything.

This is not good for the United Kingdom. The more that we have a common position in the European Union, the more notable our influence is bound to be. The last election showed that this country is not united on this issue or even on the issue of who should be the majority Government. We do not want to weaken our position in Europe by exemplifying divisions that are not absolutely necessary. I fully understand the Government’s commitment to the referendum lock on the treaty issues. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and his colleagues have conceded the need for a referendum on the euro as a currency as a gesture to show that they understand the necessity for some tougher turns before agreements are reached. However, it is high time that the Government began to think about whether they could not meet at least part of the way the Members who put this position in Committee. That would mean limiting and narrowing down the number of the issues on which the referendum lock applies, to make sure that it goes in relationship to the most serious issues and to move toward the idea of a stronger parliamentary contribution to what is done over the rest of the exercise.

I say this with due feeling. I do not think that, if what comes out of this Committee is a failure to agree on anything, we will do ourselves or the cause of our position in Europe any good at all.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, there are a growing number of us who know that the planet’s climate has been changing for millions of years—and will doubtless go on changing for as long as the planet has left—but have the very gravest doubts as to whether it is changing as a result of man-made emissions or activity. In view of the noble Baroness’s powerful peroration that we have to be in the European Union seriously fighting for these environmental targets and so on, what chance does she think there is of our European partners meeting these targets? Are they not already quite a long way behind? Are they not likely to slip even further behind as time goes on?

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I will not be lured very far by the noble Lord, who is always very polite in the way that he attempts to broaden out the debate in Committee. I do not think that is what most people want to do. I will simply say that we have clean beaches in Britain. We have clean rivers. We have cleaner air. The first two of these owe a very great deal to the European Union’s requirements, which we should meet.

European Union Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[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—

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Monday 24th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, what the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, has just said is of extreme importance. She has summed up very well what is at stake in an issue that has far greater repercussions than the source of the differences between the two sides of the House. We do indeed put at risk the whole reputation of the House of Lords as a place of intelligent and thoughtful discussion, where from time to time essentially bipartisan considerations give way to the greater needs of the constitutional issues that affect the United Kingdom and its people.

In that context, observing this as someone who has not taken detailed part in the debate, it seems clear to me that there is some room to move on both sides. I suggest that one of the issues that might be moved on is that of giving slightly more discretion to the Boundary Commission on constituencies with a natural community. The House’s choice on the issue of the Isle of Wight showed how strongly it shares that view, and it is only sensible to do that within the narrowest conceivable limits, which basically means equal-sized constituencies while recognising that some issues have to be given rather more discretion than the present Bill gives them.

In exchange for that, it is vital that the Opposition accept their responsibility and cease to create what is in effect a filibustering lobby—for that is what it is. It is high time, speaking as someone who cares very much about this House as an essential element in a sensible, thoughtful and responsible democracy, that it is accepted that there should be some relatively small movement on both sides so that we can get an agreement and decision on this issue within the next few days and, to put it bluntly, cease to lose the respect that we so much need, and usually deserve, from the rest of the country.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I have given notice that I again wish to propose that we do not continue with these proceedings at all. I hope for a more helpful answer today than the one I was given last Wednesday. I have been encouraged to try again by several noble Lords who have told me that the brush-off that I was given last week was really most unsatisfactory and not at all in accordance with the convention of your Lordships’ House that the Government at least try to answer questions; they should at least make a fair stab at it, even if they do not like the answer.

My question last week was simply whether it was it was sensible to break our traditions and spend so much time and energy debating the method by which Members are elected to Parliament when so much power has been passed to Brussels that they can do very little when they get there. My question today goes further, and I touched on it in the first Oral Question today: if we are to have a referendum on anything, why is it not to be on what the British people have been promised, which is whether or not we want to stay in the European Union? After all, such a referendum was given as a cast-iron guarantee by the Prime Minister during the run-up to the Lisbon treaty. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, and this sews up the coalition Government quite nicely, actually walked out of the House of Commons—some would say flounced—because he was not allowed a vote on whether we wanted to stay in or leave the EU. Such a referendum was also in his party’s manifesto.

Why are we wasting so much time on a referendum to which the public are supremely indifferent while denying them one that they have been promised and which 85 per cent of them say they want? Surely the Deputy Leader of the House must agree that this sort of procedure, together with the regrettable filibuster that is clearly being mounted by Labour Peers, can do nothing but harm to the reputation of your Lordships’ House. Can it do anything but make the British people despise their political class even more than they do at the moment? Here I entirely share the sentiments and the words of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza.

I add my thanks and those of my party to all the staff in your Lordships’ House, who are behaving with such amazing fortitude and courtesy throughout these regrettable proceedings. I fear that we do not deserve such service if we continue.