EU: Prime Minister’s Speech

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, I very much thank my noble friend Lady Noakes for raising this debate on a most important subject. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, for raising a most disturbing constitutional point, to which I hope the Minister will be able to give us at least a preliminary response today.

I was very glad that the Prime Minister emphasised his apparent desire to remain a member of the Union. He said that repeatedly. Of course, he did not bring himself to say “full-hearted member”, which was in the original Conservative manifesto that we remember from many years ago. Apart from some limpid support from a few Czech politicians, the UK stands chillingly alone yet again in this chauvinistic posture.

Despite the eurozone crisis last year, most new member states are anxious to join in the euro, which they see remains a strong international currency, unlike sterling. That is one very important point that we have to acknowledge as we now see the eurozone economy and markets recovering. Instead of getting on with strengthening the Union to create a greater and greater collective sovereignty for all the members, which of course remain individual sovereign countries as well, a small number of witless—I am sorry to use that word—Tory MPs, scared of the euro and of UKIP in equal measure, have forced a foolish PM to abandon his own exhortation five years ago for his party to stop banging on about Europe all the time.

Struggling, therefore, to contain the atavistic forces that he has now unleashed, Mr Cameron will henceforth lead a country teetering on the brink of resolving its incoherent European policies in favour of either long-term half-membership or perhaps complete separation. The others are by now getting so fed up with the antics coming from Britain from one of the parties in the coalition that the bad member of the club is now disliked more and more. They may one day even invoke the Lisbon treaty machinery to ask us to leave. We have not reached that point yet and they are happy to go into discussions about so-called reform.

I am very glad to see, in contrast, that the Deputy Prime Minister is not going along with all this nonsense about an in-out referendum, to be promulgated many years before any real negotiations begin. The public must by now be thoroughly bemused by the twists and turns of the superficial referendumitis arguments by all politicians of all parties, with the dubious exception of Mr Nigel Farage and his colleagues.

My right honourable friend has clarified the latest position in asserting that it makes sense to wait before suggesting such a drastic step, since, sadly, we still have the very unappetising EU Act of 2011 on the statute book. After all, even a dubiously worded referendum at some stage in the future would be dealing, presumably, with powers returning to the UK rather than going away, were such a negotiation to be feasible, which is, as Ken Clarke said in the launch yesterday, a big “if”.

Parliament is constantly undermined. Our Conservative colleagues always say that they admire and respect history. Why do they undermine it by always talking about referendums when we made all the major decisions in British history without establishing Parliament’s authority again and again. That is what we need to do in this country.

Finally, why is it that myopic Tory politicians strongly approve of British companies being international, even to the extent sometimes of being slack on paying national taxes, but believe that countries have to be national only? This is a peculiar division and we need more clarification.