EU Referendum and EU Reform (EUC Report)

Debate between Lord Hannay of Chiswick and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, I cannot help mentioning that, of the 34 speakers in this debate, I can see perhaps only two who think that we should leave the European Union. I remind your Lordships, and anyone who may read this debate—and indeed the one that follows, where I cannot see a single Brexiteer on the Order Paper—that your Lordships’ House is a very Europhile place, well-stocked with former government Ministers, Members of Parliament and servants of the EU, who between them have been responsible over long, and what they no doubt regard as successful, lives for bringing this country to its present state of subservience to the corrupt octopus in Brussels. It must be disappointing for them to see so much ingratitude and anger boiling up among the British people against the project in which they have invested so much and in which they so fervently believe.

That is why, during this referendum campaign, we have seen Project Octopus turning into Project Fear—we are told to be fearful of leaving the clutch of its tentacles. This morning we have Project Panic as the Chancellor threatens us with all manner of taxes and pestilence if, as the world’s fifth-largest economy, we dare to take our own place outside the failing project of European integration and simply join the 160 other countries in the world that have not made the mistake of joining it.

At the heart of this threat of economic disaster if we vote to leave next Thursday lies a wholly improbable scare: that somehow we would lose our present free trade with the single market and have to pay job-destroying tariffs to export into it. I propose to spend the rest of these few minutes examining that central fallacy in the remain position.

Government figures suggest that around 10% of our GDP goes in trade with clients in the EU—supporting some 3 million British jobs; another 10% goes to the rest of the world; and 80% stays in our domestic economy. But EU overregulation strangles all 100% of our economy, so 90% of it would be set free from Brussels overkill if we leave the EU. Of course, we would have to meet single market requirements for the 10% that we export to it, just as we do for what we export to the foreign markets outside the EU.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

The noble Lord says that EU regulation strangles our economy. Can he explain why the OECD found that we were the second-least regulated economy in the OECD—that is, we were less regulated than its non-EU members—and that the only country less regulated than us was another EU member, the Netherlands? Perhaps he could give a little thought to that before he makes foolish remarks such as the ones he has just made.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I do not see that anything the noble Lord has said alters what I said. The Dutch Prime Minister recently went so far as to say that he thought a large proportion of the Dutch economy was afflicted by EU regulations. The noble Lord will simply have to wait until we are out of the European Union and then he will see how we set ourselves free.

As I was saying, we would go on exporting to the rest of the world as we do now. We would meet the conditions required by the rest of the world, just as it pays to put the steering wheel on the left if you are selling a car to the United States.

The Government’s ONS Pink Book reveals that our growing trade deficit with the single market reached £85 billion in 2015. This means that manufacturers in the EU sold us £85 billion-worth more in goods than we sell them. If we accept the Government’s suggestion that some 3 million jobs support the 10% of our GDP which exports to the single market, this means that there are around 5.5 million jobs in the EU which support exporting to us. So if the politicians in Brussels try to impose tariffs on our trade together, that would hit 2.5 million more jobs in the single market than it would here and would not be tolerated by EU manufacturers.

Let us take the specific example of our car trade, which the Prime Minister and other Europhiles pretend would suffer a 10% tariff on its exports to the single market if we leave the political construct of the EU, with consequent job losses here. That must be nonsense, because we import twice as many cars from the EU as we export to it—1.7 million cars in and 700,000 cars out—while EU manufacturers also enjoy having 64% of our domestic car market. So those powerful manufacturers, with their suppliers and employees, will simply not tolerate a tariff which would damage them so much more than us, however much Herr Juncker and Herr Schäuble and sundry other mischief in Brussels might wish to punish us for leaving the rest of the EU.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hannay of Chiswick and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Monday 23rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 24C. In doing so, I pay tribute to the Minister for the way in which she has listened to the points raised, with some force and detail, in Committee. With the two amendments that she has produced today—Amendment 24A, in response to an amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, which I also felt was absolutely justified, so I am delighted that she has picked up his amendment and turned it into a government one, and Amendment 24B, which deals with matters that I and others raised—I think that she has made a major effort to meet the point that we made in Committee, and which I continue to make, which is that there will be a need for the electorate to receive factual, objective information from the Government about these extremely complex matters, additional to any information that will come to them, no doubt in tsunamis of rhetoric, from the two campaigns. The campaigns will be advocates but the electorate has to make a judgment, and it will be of essential value to them to have objective factual material provided by the Government. That is why we were extremely dissatisfied with the absence of any provision for this in the original Bill that was drafted by the Government and which came to us with the imprimatur of the other place because we felt that it was a completely inadequate basis on which to move forward to what is after all, as the Prime Minister said, one of the most significant and important decisions that this country has had to take for many decades. So that is a very good step forward.

I shall explain why we felt that the Government should be prepared to go further and be a bit more specific than they are in Amendment 24B, or at least than they were before the Minister gave some rather helpful clarifications this afternoon. I shall take two examples—two sub-headings—that illustrate the amendments that I and others have proposed. I start with Gibraltar because the Minister has mentioned it. What the effects of withdrawal would be is of importance to more people than just the people of Gibraltar. Our own wider electorate needs to know that Gibraltar became part of the EU only because it was a dependent territory for whose foreign affairs the United Kingdom was responsible. That was the sole basis on which it became a member, and therefore if the UK left, it would leave. That has quite important implications for the vexed issue of the land border with Spain, for example, which would cease to be an internal border of the EU and would become an external one. These are facts, not matters of opinion; they do not seek to draw the Government on to what would come after an Article 50 negotiation or anything like that. They are just so that the electorate knows that, the moment they cast their votes, certain consequences could follow from it.

Secondly, I take the law and order issue. The European arrest warrant was debated at enormous length in both Houses at the time of the Protocol 36 negotiations two years ago. It became apparent during that debate that the European arrest warrant is extraordinarily important for this country in terms of recovering indicted criminals from abroad and returning EU citizens who are accused of often very heinous crimes from here to the country where they have been indicted. These are hugely important for our law and order and our battle against international crime.

In those debates, it also became apparent how important the European arrest warrant is for the Good Friday agreement and what goes on in Northern Ireland because it has depoliticised the extradition arrangements between Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the past, they have been highly politicised and have led to a number of very unsatisfactory discussions between the two Governments, often not leading to the return of criminals who have committed terrible offences. Therefore it is important for the electorate to know that the European arrest warrant would disappear in this country if we left. I am not talking about what we might try to put in its place, the fantasies about negotiating 27 extradition agreements with the other member states or anything like that. I do not want to go there. That is not where the amendment was intended to go.

This afternoon, the Minister has given some important clarifications on a large number of the detailed specifics that I introduced. I and others will need to study them with great care. However, on the point about Gibraltar and the devolved Administrations, I entirely understand what she is saying—that it would not be right for the Government, off their own bat, to write in a report what the consequences were going to be for Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales or Gibraltar without consulting them and without having their view—but I hope that in her reply to this debate the Minister will go a little further. She said that the devolved Administrations and Gibraltar will be able to produce their own reports. That is fine. They would be reports to their parts of the electorate. I do not imagine—I do not speak in any disparaging way—that they will be widely read by the electorate of this country, yet the issues involve the electorate of the whole United Kingdom. Therefore, I hope that she will be able to say that after consultation with the Government of Gibraltar and the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland Administrations and assuming—I do not see why they should have any objection—that they are willing to do so, the Government will include the implications for the Administrations of Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Gibraltar in the report to which Amendment 24B refers. This will allow the whole electorate to have a proper sight of all the implications. Frankly, those implications, particularly with regard to Northern Ireland and also to Scotland and Wales, could be very far-ranging. Therefore, I hope that when the Minister replies to this debate, she will able to cover that point.

We are making progress now. I shall listen with great care to the Minister’s reply. Others who proposed this amendment may wish to take up other points on which they would like to have clarification. Meanwhile, I look forward with interest to the Minister’s reply.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, buried somewhere in this group of amendments and, I think, in the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is the question about what happens on Brexit to all the EU law which is now sewn into our domestic law. That law will remain valid until repealed. I hope that it will be helpful to your Lordships if I recall that in 1997 I got a Bill through its Second Reading in your Lordships’ House, on a vote, that would have taken the UK out of the EU. The same question arose, since one is not allowed to table Bills which cannot be executed in practice. At the time, the clerks’ advice was that it would have taken about a dozen parliamentary draftsmen about one month to identify all the EU legislation that was then part of our domestic law. The laws that the Government of the day wanted to repeal could have been brought before Parliament either singly or collectively for Parliament to repeal. Of course, the volume of EU law would be much larger now, the draftsmen required rather more numerous and/or the timescale proportionately greater. However, I make the point that the process and its happy outcome would be the same, and there is no reason why it should not be undertaken.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I point out that I am not in receipt of such a pension. If the noble Lord was referring to me, perhaps he will withdraw the reference. I am not sure who he thinks he was referring to among those on the Order Paper, but as far as I am concerned, I am not and never have been in receipt of a pension from the European Union. I ask the noble Lord to consider the fact that he will have ample opportunity in the name of his party to put forward his views, including those on the giant octopus in Brussels, which seems to be taking a day out today. The purpose of this amendment was not as he has erroneously described it; the purpose of this amendment was to persuade the Government, which we will perhaps succeed in doing, to provide factual, objective information that will enable the electorate to make up their mind on the point the noble Lord raises.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, if the noble Lord is not in receipt of an EU pension, I have nothing to clarify. I do not have to name names. I am referring to previous employees of the European Union—in particular, of the Commission—who are in receipt of EU pensions, which they can lose if they go against the interests of the European Union. If no one feels guilty in that regard, of course they have nothing to say. On the amendment, I am going into the fundamental reasons why it is misguided, and with the noble Lord’s permission, I will continue.

It is some time since I reminded your Lordships of that founding idea, which was that the European nations had caused so much bloodshed over the centuries that they had to be gradually emasculated and put under a new form of technocratic government that was to supplant national democracy, which it has indeed done; hence the EU’s absurd claim to have brought peace to Europe since 1945, which was instead of course secured by NATO; hence also the huge but little-understood powers of the unelected Commission, with its monopoly to propose new legislation, in secret—which is now so much of our own legislation—and then to execute that legislation when it has been through the Brussels sausage machine, imposing heavy fines along the way, and subject only to that engine of EU integration, the Luxembourg court. The Commission also manages the EU budget—so badly that its accounts have not been signed off for 21 years. Believe it or not, the Commission also negotiates all our foreign trade agreements—so badly that we still do not have a free trade agreement with China, India, Russia, the USA, Australia, Canada and many of the markets of the future. Singapore has had them all for 10 years. Who knows what that failure has cost our economy; the amendment refers to our economy.

As to what is left of our democracy while we stay in the EU, the Euro-lie goes that it is upheld in the Council of Ministers from the nation states, where we have only 12% of the votes and where we have been defeated on every single one of the 55 new laws we have opposed since 1996.

My first point is, therefore, that even if we did get any advantage from our EU membership, in any of the areas mentioned in the amendment, it would still not be worth it because the price would have been our democracy. However, the fact is that we do not, as my noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke will confirm.

Europhiles try to frighten us by pretending that jobs would be lost if we left the EU. We are back to the economy again.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hannay of Chiswick and Lord Pearson of Rannoch

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord replies—

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, is intervening in my speech. Perhaps I could reply to the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton. That is the normal practice. The point that he raised is perfectly valid, but it is not called for in this amendment. The question of the financing of these policies would as usual escape the control of your Lordships’ House and be dealt with in a Budget. I imagine that British farmers need to know under what regime they would live, what the rules and regulations would be, and above how all that regime would be brought about in time.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, perhaps I can put a little flesh on my noble friend Lord Hamilton’s question. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, saw the Pink Book figures that emerged on Friday. They state our gross contribution for 2014 as £20 billion, of which the mandarins in Brussels were graciously pleased to send back to us a mere £7.5 billion. In the spirit of the noble Lord’s question, does the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, agree that we would have at least £12.5 billion clear to meet any financial difficulties arising from the points that he is making?

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

No, I do not agree and I do not have to address it in this debate, because it is not what we are debating. I remind the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, that in the most recent certified figures, which were produced for 2013—I am not aware of the ones to which he has just referred—the British net contribution per capita was ninth, behind that of France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg, and a few other countries.