Europe: Youth Mobility

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the right reverend Prelate for initiating this debate. It is not the first time and it will not be the last that we debate our relations with the EU and I thank him for making that possible.

I also welcome my friend the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, whom I have known for 26 years. He served in the European Parliament with me and had a distinguished career there, not only as deputy leader of the Labour group but also, significantly, as chair of the civil liberties committee of Parliament where he made a memorable contribution. The secret of success in the European Parliament is to get agreement across the chamber and the noble Lord, Lord Moraes, was excellent at that and well respected as a figure who could unify the chamber. He is very welcome here. I know he will make many contributions.

I am not giving anything away if I tell this House that I am an unrepentant supporter of the European Union. I voted yes in the referendum. Together with the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, I headed up the Cambridge for Europe campaign and I have never regretted a single statement or anything that we did during that campaign. As has been said, this proposal is very modest. It is not going back into the EU. It is far more modest than anything I would personally be happy with.

We cannot keep on hearing that the Labour Government have no plans. The Labour Government have a large majority. They have a population, particularly the young, who want a closer relationship with Europe, so they had better find some plans unless they want to alienate all the youth vote in Britain—that is, the youth vote that is not alienated from the Conservative Party, which does not seem to have many plans either. Maybe my noble friend Lord Effingham will correct me on that and tell me that we are going to have a Damascene conversion, which should please the right reverend Prelate.

I was a European federalist. In 1981, when the Labour Opposition were campaigning to leave the European Union, which was being magnificently defended by Baroness Thatcher, I joined a small group in Brussels that set up the Crocodile Club to campaign for a federal Europe. The Conservative representative on that group was the French passport-holding Mr Johnson —Mr Stanley Johnson, with whom I enjoyed many meetings and dinners when we planned what we would like to have seen as Europe, which was a Europe that was very similar in its structure to the United States.

I say to this Government and to my friends in opposition on this side of the House that, if people want to come to Britain, is not that the same as them wanting to go to Texas or California—a sign of a country that is in demand, where they want to contribute? I certainly agree that we have to sort out the welfare bill, because we do not want welfare tourism, but the fact that people want to come and work and contribute to the wealth of Britain is surely something we should be rejoicing in. We should be pleased about it, not be a dog in the manger and say that we do not want to see them. My view is that moving from Spain to the UK should be seen as little different from moving from, say, Maine to Minnesota.

I always believed that all citizens of the European Union should have the vote where they live. The idea, which our party and Labour have, that we should enfranchise people who have been outside Britain for so long that they have probably forgotten the language is not the way forward. The way forward is that a European citizen in the European Union should have a vote where they live. If noble Lords look back a few years, they will see that I moved a Private Member’s Bill to that very effect. I can say, not unsurprisingly, that the Bill got absolutely nowhere, but there is a lot to be said for it.

If we are going to look to the future, as a relatively small population grouping in a not huge geographical part of the world, then we have to work together. We cannot have a constant dog-in-the-manger attitude to our nearest colleagues. We have to get back to the spirit of my good friend, the late Arthur Cockfield, who designed the Single European Act so that we could work and trade together, and of Mrs Thatcher—before she went bonkers—who was fully in support of us having a Europe in which it was easier for us to move around and trade.

We have all seen the ABTA report which shows how far the ability of British citizens to work in Europe has declined: 69%, it said in the briefing that it sent me. We have seen the YouGov report from April, which said that 68% support a youth mobility deal. We have heard that youth mobility, sadly, does not involve free movement; personally, I wish it did, but the fact that it does not surely makes it even harder for the major political parties to decide that they have no plans to do anything.

As I have said before in this House, if we want to represent the future of Britain, we have to change our attitude to the European Union. We have to move on. The majority that voted to leave have been cremated; they are not there any more. We have to start looking positively at Europe.

One of the saddest things in my 25 years in the European Parliament was, I am sorry to say, dealing with often Labour Ministers who quoted the Daily Mail to me. I well recall a meeting with Geoff Hoon, who was a Europe Minister—one of the 18 that we ran through in our 17 years. He lasted about six months. I went to see him because I wanted Britain to take up money from Europe to publicise the EU through our libraries, with documentation and material supplied by Europe. Geoff said to me, “I’m sorry, Richard, the Daily Mail wouldn’t stand for it”.

Yesterday, my wife drew my attention to the fact that the Labour Government now wish to invoke the spirit of Mrs Thatcher. Goodness knows where we go from here, but that is where we are. If we are going to move forward and be the Government of this country again, on this side and that side, we have to start doing what the younger voters in this country want. This is not a country of old men and women any more; it is a country in which we have to deliver for the up-and-coming generation who are going to create the wealth of the country.

I have said many times when I have talked to students through our schools’ programme that I came from a golden generation. We grew up in peace, with growth, and we are fantastically better off than we were when I was a child. If we are to deliver that for the next generation, it will require a fundamental reset with Europe—one that goes much further than either the Government or the Opposition are talking about. And noble Lords will notice that there is one party I have not mentioned in that sentence.