European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 27th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra]

My noble friend, as an expert in these matters, is absolutely right. He puts it very succinctly. Please correct me if I am wrong—I am very happy to be shot down on this point—but is it correct that if we stay in the single market, then we have to accept what the EU calls the four fundamental freedoms, including open borders? Is it true that if we stay in the single market, we have to pay into the EU budget to a certain extent? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to let the European court rule over us? Is it correct that, if we stay in the single market, we have to accept laws made by a body over which this Parliament would have no say or control? That is not leaving the EU, and those who advocate staying in the single market know it full well. It is staying in the EU by the back door, and that is not what the British people voted for.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

Perhaps the noble Lord would explain about the people of Norway who voted to not join the European Union and accepted all the things he said they had accepted.

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[Lord Blencathra]

I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for attempting to get in before him: I had forgotten that other noble Lords had amendments they might wish to speak on. I must warn my noble friend the Minister that I am very tempted to support these amendments, provided he can give me two firm assurances—first, that these assessments will be carried out by the Bank of England, the IMF and the same geniuses at the Treasury who forecast that by 2030 we would all be £4,322.15 worse off; and secondly, that he will send these assessments to Mr Juncker and Mr Barnier. I can think of nothing more likely to completely mislead those with whom we will be negotiating. Better still, he might get PricewaterhouseCoopers to do it, after its spectacular success at the Oscars last night where it could not count up a few hundred votes correctly.

In all seriousness, when have we ever seen an impact assessment attached to a government Bill which was remotely worth the paper it was written on? They are meaningless rubbish and no one takes them seriously. I did take one seriously when I was asked to chair the joint Select Committee on the original draft so-called snoopers’ charter Bill, which some noble Lords and Members of the Commons served on. We went through that impact assessment in detail and tore it to shreds. It estimated about £900 million as expenditure and our committee calculated that the real figure would be about £2 billion to £3 billion. We all know that impact assessments are not very accurate.

On the other hand, let us suppose that the Government did manage to write a proper impact assessment. We could do that on a sector-by-sector basis for each industry. I suppose that we could get the leaders of all those industries and all the other experts to draw up a proper SWOT analysis where Ministers have a pretty accurate assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to that industry from staying in or leaving the EU. Let us say that those SWOTs were spot-on accurate. Does anyone seriously suggest that we should then publish them and hand them straight over to the EU negotiators so that they can spot all the weaknesses in our position and the strengths that we want to exploit? It would be the height of folly to do such a thing. Indeed, it would be barking mad. If we were to do that, why stop there? Let us send Mr Putin a list of all our defence weaknesses and get MI6 to tell ISIL about any gaps in our security. Will Mr Barnier and the EU give us a paper on their strengths and weaknesses? Will they tell us their impact assessment of Britain? Of course not.

I am not being totally facetious. We will embark on negotiations that will determine the future of this country. The EU is reported to be demanding a £50 billion divorce settlement from us. I hope that we will strongly resist that. But if we are so daft as to publish any weaknesses in our arguments against it, we could end up robbing the taxpayer of billions of pounds. Billions of pounds are at stake.

I am not against impact assessments per se, although I prefer the SWOT analysis. Indeed, I hope that our Ministers and the Prime Minister have them. But I also hope and pray that they are keeping them under a top secret cover and keeping them very close to their chest. The last thing we want is to have them published or shared or laid before Parliament, which is probably even worse than publishing them in the press.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I will be slightly less cynical than the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, on the subject of impact assessments. I will speak to Amendment 22 in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Lennie, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, and my noble friend Lord Kerslake. I will take a less cynical view about impact assessments.

For the historical record, it might interest noble Lords to know that when we were negotiating our accession to the European Union, the first thing that we tabled in Brussels was an impact assessment of the European budget on the United Kingdom, which of course had not been part of the European budget until then. It was a very long way different from the one tabled by the Commission in return, but we were actually right. The consequence of being right was a very long negotiation in the 1980s under Baroness Thatcher that resulted in the rebate system. My point is that when we were negotiating with the European Union from the outside, we had no hesitation whatever about producing an impact assessment—and thank heavens we did. Otherwise, we would not have got the commitment from the European Union that if things went as we predicted rather than as it predicted, it would adjust the budgetary burden, which eventually it did.

I want to look forward now and not backwards, because this seems quite odd. We are now a little over eight months from the referendum and it defies belief that the Minister and his colleagues have not conducted impact assessments by now. If not, I am not at all sure what they have been doing—but since I know that he is an extremely hard-working person I can assume that they have in fact quite a lot of impact assessments but are not sharing them with anyone else. It was rather odd, when the Prime Minister spoke at Lancaster House, and even odder when a White Paper was published, that there was not a single blooming figure in either of those two documents—not one. That was a trifle odd. It is not what the Government normally do. It is even odder if they do have impact assessments; it could be that they are so awful that they do not want to tell anyone about them. That also would not be hugely comforting.

I would like to play the game by the Minister’s rules. He has argued several times that to publish impact assessments would be to give the game away and give the people with whom we are negotiating some deadly secrets that they would be unable to get from anyone else. Okay, let us play the game by those rules. In that case, there are two impact assessments that could be published which would not have the slightest possibility of doing damage to us. The first is an assessment of where we would be in terms of our economy if we stayed in the European Union. That is not difficult to do, because the previous Government did it. If he looks at the papers that were published last March he will find it all there.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but I think I might have been responsible for some of the language there and I have to tell him that it was explicitly put into the treaty to safeguard the British position as a permanent member of the Security Council. If he reads it carefully, he will see that we are under no obligation whatever to follow a European decision unless we participate in it ourselves, and these decisions are adopted by unanimity. The saving clause is that our responsibilities under the UN charter are preserved despite the move forward on common foreign and security policy. So I am sorry to say that this fox is just about as dead as it could be.

[Lord Blencathra]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, and of course I bow to his incredible knowledge of the workings not just of Europe but of the United Nations. Nevertheless, part of the treaty of the European Union has conditions asking all the contracting states, the members of the union, to concert with the EU high representative. That is not the position that we had 20 years ago, and it shows the inexorable move to the EU wanting to take more and more power. I give way to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr.

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[Lord Blencathra]

I have to agree with my noble friend. The United States will do what is in the financial interests of the United States and its companies. It may talk tough about not doing a trade deal with the sixth largest nation on earth—the United Kingdom—but, when it comes to pounds, shillings, pence and dollars, the Americans will trade when it is in their financial interest to do so.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

Will the noble Lord consider carefully whether he is falling into the best-known trap for British commentators on American policy, which is to think that we know what American interests are better than they do? In fact, that statement last week was made by a member of President Obama’s Cabinet. I happened to be at a conference at the weekend at which people from both sides of the divide in the United States—in quite senior positions—made it clear that the policy reflected a cool and careful judgment of where the United States’ interest lay. If we choose to ignore it, we do so at our peril.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, I am not suggesting we ignore it but I am suggesting that we analyse it and possibly take it with a pinch of salt.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra]

The noble Lord is little premature. If he is still here in half an hour, he may hear my speech supporting the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, as he seeks to remove Commonwealth and Irish citizens from the register. I hope that the noble Lord will be here to support that amendment.

I was concluding by saying that the vote on Maastricht would have been a devastating change to the EU. I had no idea what the consequences would be. Denmark would not have been thrown out, of course, although I heard one EU commissioner at the time saying that it would be if it did not comply. That noble Lord is no longer with us.

When the Irish voted against Lisbon, again that was mega bomb under the EU and the Irish again had to vote until it came up with the right conclusions. I speculate, if Ireland had not voted again on the Lisbon treaty, would the treaty have gone ahead or would Ireland have been put into a second-class category? I do not know but it was a mega decision that Ireland and Denmark took, so I do not think that we can say that this referendum that we are having in Britain is more important than some other European referenda.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

This situation is completely different. In the case of the Danish and Irish referendums, had those negative results been upheld, the only consequence would be that a treaty called Maastricht or Lisbon would not have come into force. Nobody would have had any rights, privileges or advantages removed from them. The whole of the European Union would merely have stayed where it was.

The noble Lord is quite right in saying that Denmark and Ireland would not have been chucked out. At that time there was no machinery to do that. There was not even a withdraw clause, but it would not have happened. The point is very simple. The result would have simply been—as was the case in the vote on the constitutional treaty in France and the Netherlands—to negate something that might have come into effect had it been ratified. This is completely different. Here, you are taking away various important rights and privileges that European citizens here have as a result of our membership of the European Union. You are depriving them of those things. It is honestly not like for like.

[Lord Blencathra]

I do not accept that if there is a decision to leave we will be taking away some fundamental rights from European citizens who are living in this country and that they should therefore have a right to vote in the referendum to protect those rights. On Report we may have a list of what those rights may be. I can understand the noble Lord’s point that there is a difference in quality or perhaps in quantity in these referenda, but I do not accept that the referenda in Denmark and Ireland were of a vastly different magnitude to this one. We could not vote in the Danish referendum and rightly so. I did not want the right to vote in the Danish and Irish referenda, and I do not see how this referendum is so different that other non-British nationals should have the right to vote in it.