European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate, which has ranged far and wide over the major strategic issues of the last 70 years in Europe, since the last war, right through to the issues of today, such as the wording of the referendum question and purdah. However, the Bill itself is mainly about very technical matters; 48 of the 56 pages concern detailed technical issues to do with the organisation of the referendum. I hope—others may not agree—that when we discuss this in Committee we will be able to carry out the House of Lords’ traditional role of scrutinising detail and spend at least a little of the time looking at these matters because they need scrutiny. There are a lot of ministerial powers set out here, for example, not just about the question of purdah, which I think we ought to look at and at the very least press the Government into saying what their intentions are.

On a minor detail, I express my personal thanks to the Government for the change to the Bill that means the referendum cannot be on 5 May next year, which is the day my current term of office as a local councillor comes to an end. If I decide to defend my seat, I would really prefer to do it without the encumbrance of a referendum on the European Union at the same time, which might divert attention from whether people want me again.

It has been a good debate and, in particular, I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth—who is not in his seat at the moment—who talked about going into battle waving a white flag not being the thing to do because you are giving up before you start. However, the problem is that some of us would rather that this referendum was not taking place and we have no real confidence that there will be any huge change as a result of the negotiations. The Prime Minister and others will come back with a huge amount of spin, trying to tell the country about all the great changes they have achieved, which will not add up to very much at all. To that degree, I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Forsyth and Lord Lawson, and people on their side. The problem is that I do not really want any changes before we have the vote. I am perfectly happy to vote for the European Union as it is now and get stuck in within the European Union to achieve what changes this country might like.

As for flying the flag, the noble Lord, Lord Elis-Thomas, said that he was responsible for flying some flags somewhere in Wales and had four in a row: one for Wales, one for the UK and I am not sure what the others were. That is exactly what we did in the town I live in, Colne in Lancashire, where we have four flags flying outside the town hall. I always thought it was rather nice, all the flags you saw outside continental town halls when you went to Europe—the European mainland, I should say—so we have done it in Colne. We have the union flag, the flag of England and the European flag, which we were told people would come and tear down but nobody did. The only one anybody ever tore down was the union flag and they were football hooligans who wanted to run round the streets in a drunken manner, waving it. We also have the Lancashire flag. It took some time to get Lancashire County Council to agree to allow us to use the Lancashire flag, or perhaps it was the sheriff who had to agree—I am not sure. In the end I had to go to see Louise Ellman, who at the time was chairman of Lancashire County Council, to knock some heads together because they said the Lancashire flag could be flown only on the county hall and on the county jail in Preston. It now flies in Colne as well and that is the way to fly flags: fly as many as possible to represent the things to which people feel allegiance. The danger with flags occurs when one flag is dominant and it becomes very nationalist.

The noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said that there had been a European distrust of democracy and democratic accountability, but I suggest that democracy is more than simply having elections and electing a leader or a group of people every so often. Representative democracy is indeed at the very heart of democracy but other things are too—things such as the rule of law, due process, equality and freedom under the law, and concepts of citizenship. Many of those concepts are as well known within the rest of Europe as they are in this country, and in some cases better known and better understood than they are in this country. How much better it is to have all those long, tedious and, some people think, extremely boring and time-wasting meetings in which European politicians and officials negotiate farm payments at 2 am to meet deadlines that expired at midnight and so on than it is to have them organising arms to shoot at each other.

One of the great triumphs of Europe is that it is 70 years—at least, within the European Union—since people in Europe were organised to shoot at each other. That is a huge triumph of Europe and, given its history, 70 years is a long time for that to have been the case. Anybody who thinks that Europe could not revert to a situation in which some of the countries that are now in the European Union start shooting at each other again is living in cloud-cuckoo-land. You have only to look not very far away—for example, to the eastern part of Ukraine—or to remember what happened in the Balkans just over 20 years ago to realise that there is nothing special about Europeans and that we are not a special kind of human being that does not engage in that sort of activity. The European Union has been absolutely fundamental in questions of war and peace. I hope that we will manage to talk about that in the referendum campaign and not just about trade, although, as a Liberal, I am not going to say that trade is not important.

I have two more brief points to make. One concerns the question of voting by 16 year-olds or whoever. One of the huge problems under the new system of individual electoral registration—which in general I support—is the registration of young voters. It is said that 2 million 18 to 24 year-olds are not registered and that among 17 year-olds—the attainers—only 25% are registered. That has to be tackled.

My final point is that it is all very well being able to vote as a British citizen living in another European Union country if you can get on the register and get your postal vote sent to you, but there is quite a lot of anecdotal evidence from the recent general election that people had problems with both those things. That is another issue that will have to be looked at if we have a referendum in which all these people in Europe vote.