Queen’s Speech

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I found absolutely heartbreaking the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Perry, about the school in Wolverhampton where young girls were written off in the middle of their school careers as having no future. I know that she was talking about some years ago, but it is a sign of how much our education system needs to do better in the future so that this does not happen again. My noble friend Lady Jowell added an element of real vision to this debate.

I will make two brief comments before I move on to the referendum. First, I am delighted that the new process for appointing the Secretary-General of the United Nations will be more transparent than before. We have discussed this in this House, and the Government played their part in ensuring that it would be more transparent. That is positive progress. Secondly, the Foreign Office has been very helpful to the All-Party Group against the Death Penalty in helping us to visit countries that have the death penalty and to engage in discussions with them in the hope of persuading them to reform it and, in the end, to abolish it. I do not know whether we will get more support from the Foreign Office in the current financial year. The Minister’s smile suggests everything.

There is one country in the EU that would be more dismayed than any other if we were to leave, and the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, referred to it. Ireland, our closest trading partner, would be absolutely appalled at the thought. If we were to leave, it would be the one border between the United Kingdom and the EU—a border that many people have spent years trying to get rid of, with all the associated violence. I am not clear how we could leave the EU and not have a border in Northern Ireland with some form of passport or other checks. At the moment, we are in the common travel area. Would it be possible to have that if we are not in the EU and Ireland is? I do not understand how that could happen. That alone seems to be a sufficiently positive argument for saying that the people who want us out ought to explain what they are about. We have seen so much violence and devastation in Britain and Ireland as a result of the Troubles, and putting the border back is too awful to contemplate.

Some years ago, when the G8 countries were trying to join the EU, I talked to a senior Minister. I forget which country he was from. He said: “One of the great things about the accession process is that it is making us do much more rapidly the things we ought and need to do anyway”. By that, he meant human rights, the rule of law and all the values that are dear to members of the EU. That this Minister said it was helping them on their path and that they were doing it quicker is a tribute to what the EU is about. There is a danger that the public will still see the debate as being within the Conservative Party or between it and UKIP. We on this side of the House must put that right. It would be a disaster if it was seen as not relevant to people who are not active conservatives.

When I watched the Andrew Marr programme on Sunday morning, I was shocked, along with other Members of the House, to hear a Cabinet Minister denounce Turkey. She said that its membership of the EU was inevitable, which of course it is not, and that if it was a member, all these criminals would come here. It is our partner. We might not like Turkey’s human rights record or be happy that Cyprus has not been resolved yet, but, for heaven’s sake, they have been NATO allies for a long time, and to denounce them in those terms is very offensive to any country. We are trying to persuade Turkey of the benefits of moving to a better position on human rights. In any case, I was looking at some statistics about the prison population. I know that the Turkish prison population is larger than ours, but we have a larger prison population than any other EU country. The EU countries do not say, “We don’t want the Brits living here, because they’re all criminals”, yet that is the conclusion one could draw. Ministers who want us out should be more careful.

Some months ago a Norwegian Minister was interviewed on television. Of course, Norway is not a member of the EU. He said that Norway had to abide by all the EU rules and regulations anyway in order to keep trading. He said, “Please, Britain, stay in, because you understand our position and you can speak for us in Brussels”. I know that some of those advocating getting out of the EU say that we should not be in the single market at all. I hate to say, “What are we going to be like, Albania?”, but that seems to be pretty appalling.

We have a difficult decision to make as a country. I hope to heaven that we make the right one.