EU: UK Membership

Lord Haskel Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, during the short break last week, I read a book by a Swedish journalist named Göran Rosenberg. The book, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz, described a journey that he had recently made, following in his father’s footsteps from the ghetto in Lodz, Poland to Auschwitz, to a slave labour camp in Germany, to a Red Cross resettlement camp and ending up in a small town in Sweden. At the same time as I was reading this book, there were events going on to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, which reminded us of all those horrors, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, told us. At the same time, there were some mean-minded nationalistic politics going on, both here and in Europe. All that reminded me why I have been a committed supporter of our membership of the European Union since its birth. It is a means of ensuring a civilised, decent life for our children and grandchildren instead of the poisonous and divisive Europe that our parents and grandparents knew. This view may have gone out of fashion, but it will be back, just as extreme politics comes back.

In my case for Europe, therefore, I make no apologies for putting the human and political arguments first and the economic arguments second. Economics is a means to an end, not an end in itself, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry put it. Looked at from this perspective, the EU is a good deal. The figures from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, are misleading. It costs us about 1% of our annual spend of taxpayers’ money. For this we get access to a huge single market and all the benefits of inward investment and trade that it brings, as other noble Lords have explained. It helps us to compete in today’s global economic environment where you must have allies. This is a world in which you cannot go it alone unless you have a portfolio of successful companies creating goods and services that are competitive with the best in the world and that are welcomed and not discriminated against.

This logic is so powerful that its detractors, particularly in the press and in the blogosphere, resort to misstatements. They are cheerfully pedalled again and again, sometimes even with a glass of beer in their spokesmen’s hands. Eventually, these misstatements develop a life of their own, with claims such as loss of sovereignty because 75% of our laws are made in Brussels. The House of Commons Library tells us that the true figure is 25%. There has also been the claim that EU membership stands in the way of our trade with the Commonwealth and Asia. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Empey, that it does not.

Another claim is that the cost is high, but 1% of our government spend is marginal. Another is that we are being overrun by immigrants from new members of the EU. My noble friend Lord Liddle replied to that. In reality, we should be protecting the integrity of our benefits, healthcare and education systems rather than blaming the immigrants from the EU who help service them.

Playing games with our EU membership has dangerous consequences. As multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization weaken, and as the nature of trade changes, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, explained, it becomes even more critical for a country like ours to be aligned economically with the EU rather than going it alone in a globalised world. More important, however, is the risk of losing the civilising influence of co-operation, the risk of taking us back to inflicting the terrible journeys and experiences that European nationalism inflicted on our parents and grandparents.