European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Davies of Stamford

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

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

The noble Lord is uncharacteristically inaccurate; he normally does his homework before intervening in this way. He is quite right that I and many on the remain side argued against the EEA being the right solution but he is quite wrong to suggest that any of us argued that it was the worst solution. On the contrary, throughout the campaign I always said while it was a very bad solution, it was the least bad solution of all those on offer. I am on record as saying that and probably said it in debates in which the noble Lord took part. Indeed, that is my strong view today and is the case I now argue.

I wish we could stay in the EU—period, as the Americans say, or full stop—but if we cannot we must try to mitigate the enormous damage. That is the argument I have been making. The way to do that is to try to find a way to stay in the single market, and one way we could certainly do that is to rejoin EFTA, as my noble friend Lord Lea set out. It is extraordinary that the Government have excluded that possibility and I now come to their extraordinary behaviour.

The Government have not only revealed that the benefit for which they are prepared to pay this high cost is nothing like as great as it was always made out to be, but not even considered negotiating on the single market regime provided by the EEA and using that as a basis for trying to get some concessions on freedom of movement. My two noble friends suggested a way forward that might be possible. I do not think that we on this side of the House will be able to take over these negotiations but we want to know—it is important that everybody in the country knows—why the Government did not even think it worthwhile to sit down with our European Union partners and say we would like to stay in the single market but we would also like to curb freedom of movement at least to some extent. We could have a negotiation on that basis.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Could my noble friend refresh the House’s memory on what success the previous Prime Minister had in having this as an objective in his renegotiation of our terms of membership of the European Union?

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I think the previous Prime Minister was a completely incompetent negotiator. The way to make progress in European affairs—it is extraordinary that after all these decades the Tory party has not learned this—is to adopt a communautaire approach and the language of one’s partners, to say that what one is seeking to do is in the interests of everybody and not purely in the selfish interests of this country, and certainly not just to get a good headline in the Daily Express or Daily Mail. We make it clear that we share the long-term objectives of our neighbours and partners for the future of western civilisation, as well as for prosperity, competitiveness and employment and these important economic but ultimately subsidiary objectives. Then we say pragmatically, as we have a reputation for being pragmatic, “Would it not be a good idea to do X, Y and Z which would strengthen our common purposes and take further forward our common ambitions?”. That is the way to make progress but it is the opposite of the confrontational approach the last Prime Minister adopted. It is not surprising that he did not get very far.

I am glad that my noble friend made this brief intervention because it enables me to say that I am extremely worried—I am not alone in this—that the Tory party has learned nothing at all from this experience or from any other experience over the last 40 years of the European Union and so will make the same mistake again. It will find itself not achieving what it ought to in the national interest in these negotiations. They will be a disaster, and a largely avoidable disaster, precisely because the Tory Government have not learned the obvious lessons of the past which my noble friend was kind enough to give me the opportunity to remind them of this afternoon.

If you have somebody negotiating on your behalf—a solicitor, an accountant or some representative, agent, trustee or whoever—and you watch carefully what they are doing, you are entitled to get worried should they do something that goes quite counter to normal human common sense. I pointed out three ways in which the Government are behaving in an extremely irrational fashion. I will repeat them so that the Minister can address them when he sums up. First, why are we pursuing this particular objective with the same kind of intensity and passion when we have acknowledged that the objective that we are trying to achieve—what we are trying to obtain in exchange for the high price of giving up our membership of the single market—is not anything like as great it was previously made out to be?

Secondly, why have we not decided to negotiate on the basis of the available option, which we know exists, of our potential membership of the EEA and see if we can perhaps do a little better and achieve some additional concessions? We have not even tried to do this—why not? Thirdly, why are we proceeding in this negotiation by giving up options in advance, before we have even explored them and before we have even started the negotiations? It is a very extraordinary thing to do.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Grocott and Lord Davies of Stamford

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Grocott]

It would be fine if that happened, but the figures are worth reflecting on. I find it difficult to imagine that the contribution to British agriculture would be less than it is currently via the common agricultural policy. I took the precaution of getting an up-to-date figure—I assume that responses from Ministers are accurate on these matters. I asked the Government two or three weeks ago what the current cost of the common agricultural policy was and the answer from the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner of Kimble, was €55 billion for 2015. He went on to say that the CAP accounts for 40% of the EU budget.

Noble Lords who regularly contribute to economic debates—which I do not—will be able to do these figures in their heads. However, €55 billion is the total cost of the CAP. That represents 40% of the EU budget. The UK contribution to the EU budget as a whole is €16 billion. Let us work that out. Off the top of my head, I think the British contribution to the cost of the common agricultural policy is 2 billion or 3 billion euros. I repeat that I have doubts about the use of the word “objective” in this kind of discussion, but it seems that anyone considering this objectively would have to consider that a very substantial contribution to agriculture—that vital industry in this country—would have to come from the British Exchequer if there were less support coming via our contributions to the CAP.

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My noble friend asked rhetorically whether there was any reason to suppose that, if we came out of the EU, our level of support to our agricultural sector as a separate country would be any less than it currently is within the EU. I put it to him that there is one obvious ground on which one might expect that our support to agriculture would be much less if we were outside the EU. The political weighting of the agricultural sector’s interest is markedly less in this country than on the continent, in the Republic of Ireland or in other EU member states. If the noble Lord goes to Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands or France—let alone Poland or Romania—he will be able to satisfy himself of that. We have one of the very lowest proportions of population—which of course means voters—who are directly dependent on the agricultural sector: about 1%. That means that the political balance is very different here when agricultural matters are discussed from how it is on the continent, where there is much more political weight behind agriculture. Inevitably that will be reflected in the amount of money coming through to agriculture and in the willingness of the Treasury to continue to support agriculture at the current level, which is based on the aggregate weight of agricultural interests in the European Union as a whole and not on their weight within this country in terms of domestic and political debate.

[Lord Grocott]

My noble friend makes my point very effectively: these are matters of debate. There is no objective analysis of the cost of the CAP and the likely expenditure in the UK that can be resolved by putting statistics into a computer. He makes a perfectly valid argument from his own perspective.

I am tempted to go down memory lane. Believe it or not—this may come as some surprise to the House—40 years ago, in 1975, I would occasionally go to meetings of the Agriculture Ministers of the European Union, in my lowly capacity as a Parliamentary Private Secretary. I have to say that the conclusions reached by the Council of Ministers at the time were not always in Britain’s interests.

However, let us not go down that road, because I am not disagreeing with my noble friend. These are not matters of fact but matters of judgment. Part of the judgment might be whether—