Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, and I 100% endorse what he said—at least in the first half of his speech. We must all work on these issues.

My starting point is a bit different from that of most other noble Lords who have spoken so far, whose contributions, if I may say so, have been a bit local. One cannot stress too strongly that what is happening in the aftermath of the referendum is being watched around the globe. A country as heavily dependent as ours on overseas investment should be paying due attention.

Not too many articles in the world’s press, to put it mildly, see a plucky Britain struggling through from the tentacled monster that is the European Union. Truth is often conveyed in humour, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, knows very well. A cartoon that has appeared in many papers is typical. It shows a plane with an EU symbol on its side. The hatch door is open and a man in a bowler hat—for some reason, the rest of the world thinks that the British still wear bowler hats—and waving a tiny union jack is poised to jump out, but without a parachute.

This is a world where the global and the personal are intimately bound up with one another, and I must add my experience to those mentioned by other noble Lords. I was walking along the corridor of your Lordships’ House yesterday and bumped into a member of the House of Lords staff whom I know very well. We started talking about football, and then his face crumpled and he said, “I was brought here when I was seven. I have been here for 35 years. What will happen to me? What can I do?”. I therefore wholly echo the sentiments mentioned in the wonderful speech of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the other speakers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, on this issue. There is a huge repair job to do here for all of us and this House can take the lead in some of it.

The metaphor of Basil Fawlty jumping out of the plane might turn out to be worryingly accurate. The outcome of the referendum will be determined by two things once Article 50 is invoked: first, how other nations, global markets and international investors respond; secondly, what kind of deal the rest of the European Union is able to come up with. I remind noble Lords that the European Union is not that mysterious entity, Brussels, but 28 nations collaborating. Individual member states, or small groups of them, have a veto over many issues. Being subject to these twin forces if and when the UK leaves the EU does not look much like increased sovereignty to me. The world today is so massively interdependent that real sovereignty comes only from collaboration with others, whether it is the EU, NATO or the UN.

All noble Lords sitting here know that this referendum, as has been discussed this morning, had an unhappy provenance and was to do with muting squabbles inside the Tory party in the run-up to the last election. However, it is important to see what was going on. At the time Mr Cameron made the commitment, early in 2013, less than 10% of voters put the EU at the top of their main preoccupations. A decision of this significance should have emanated from widespread public concern rather than from factional party rivalries.

The referendum, as we all know, has not quietened divisions in this country. On the contrary, it has served to heighten them. One of the fundamental problems we face, as we all know, is that those who advocated leaving the EU, and won the day, have been quite unable to agree on what leave actually means. Their differences are quite profound. They were not resolved during the campaign but simply fudged.

On the one side are the radical free marketeers—in which category I think I would include the noble Lord, Lord Lawson—who think that exiting the EU will free Britain to trade across the world and who are willing to abandon the single market altogether. Although I may not be correct to, I exempt the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, from my next comment, which is that they care little for tradition or for the past. In addition, many are intuitively pro-migration, which he certainly would not agree with.

On the other side are those who have a nostalgia for evaporating customs and ways of life, who want to close the borders and retrieve lost sovereignty. They are hostile to big business and claim to stand up for the common people. These yawning ideological differences account for the descent of the leave campaign into empty populism, epitomised by Boris Johnson’s absurd remark that in negotiations with the rest of the EU he wanted to have his cake and eat it. I suppose it makes it easy on the digestion.

The British people can make a proper judgment only when there is a plausible plan on the table, a firm outline of which has been agreed and accepted by the other 27 states in the EU. The core dilemma involved is well known, but could quite possibly prove intractable. Not far off half of British exports go to the rest of the EU, and most are services rather than goods. Again, I rather strongly disagree with what the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, said on these issues, because passporting—the absence of regulatory barriers for business firms—is the key to success in this instance. That is not the same as the absence of tariffs.

Exiting the single market, even in the medium term, would be hugely problematic, yet staying in almost certainly involves accepting freedom of movement. If there is a way out of this dilemma, no one has discovered it yet. Precisely because there is no plan, there must be some sort of renewed and extensive public engagement, if and when a deal is agreed with the rest of the EU and starts its passage through Parliament. I am not sure in my own mind what form this should take, but I would not write off the possibility of another referendum down the line, or an election in which this figures as the prime issue.