European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Liddle

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 21st February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

As the noble Lord knows very well, Turkey aspires—that aspiration may now be fading—to join the European Union, so being in the customs union was for many a halfway house to joining the EU, just as for noble Lords who tabled this amendment it is a halfway house to rejoining the EU. That is what their amendment is really about.

Lastly and briefly on the single market, the noble Lord, Lord Newby, was exhorting us all to go to the Treasury, look at the papers, draw the curtains and see the forecasts that have been made. Of course those documents should be taken into account, but there are many other studies made outside Whitehall that take a very different view. I refer him to the research by the academic Michael Burrage, who was at the LSE and at Harvard. He has done an in-depth analysis, which is published on the Civitas website, of the effect of the single market on the British economy and British exports. He has come to the conclusion that there is no correlation between the single market and the growth of trade between the UK and the EU.

Furthermore, he has pointed out something that people have acknowledged in these debates before—namely, that many non-members of the single market, countries outside the continent of Europe, have increased their exports to the single market much faster than Britain has increased its exports to the single market. So the idea that this great liberalising force has had a huge impact on the British economy is absolutely not proven. I make these points simply because the debate so far has been very unbalanced and, as my noble friend Lord Hailsham said, we ought to be considering, in a sober, balanced way, what is in the interests of our own economy now that the decision has irrevocably been made.

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

On the customs union, as a pro-European in his youth, the noble Lord will be aware that the customs union was one of the founding acts when the European communities were established. I understand why Eurosceptics might make a lot of arguments that the European Union has become much more federal and political than the economic basis on which it started. But what, given the arguments that the noble Lord made so powerfully in the early 1970s in favour of membership of the customs union, now prevents us staying in the customs union on leaving the EU?

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

I am sure the noble Lord is not intentionally misleading the House when he talks about the arguments that I made so compellingly and eloquently in the 1970s. If he has been studying my maiden speech in the House of Commons, I shall be astonished. The reason why I supported the customs union in the 1960s was that we then lived in a world of very high tariffs, and the EEC was a liberalising influence in the 1950s and 1960s. It was only after the American Administration started cutting tariffs in the mid-1960s that the relevance of the EEC in tariff negotiations became much less significant.

Since the noble Lord wanted me to get my feet again, I will say that my attitude towards the customs union is very different from his. I remember a debate in which he spoke about not being in the single market. He explained how he had been to a German car manufacturer which had explained to him—I could not believe my ears—how Germany was manipulating car standards in order to keep out goods from other countries. The noble Lord thought that was admirable and we were very stupid not to be part of this racket. Well, I do not want to be part of it.

European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Liddle

Friday 31st January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I will not detain the House for long. I think that there is pretty strong support all around the House for this amendment. It certainly has the support of the Opposition, who will vote for the proposition in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, if he chooses to test the opinion of the House. What is needed in any “in or out” choice is an authoritative assessment of Britain’s intended relationship with the European Union should the people decide to withdraw from it. That does not have to be just a wish list of hoping that we can have our cake and eat it outside the Union. It has to be a hard, realistic assessment.

I am a great lover of history. I like reading books about Britain’s post-war relationship with the European Union. The Macmillan Diaries is one of the books I have read. Harold Macmillan tried to establish a free trade relationship with the Common Market when the treaty of Rome was signed. He explored that and failed because, even in 1958, he was not able to achieve what was necessary for the national interest, and he decided we had no alternative but to join the Common Market. So we have to be realistic and this assessment has to be realistic.

Many Members on our side of the House have pointed out that the proposed referendum is not a popularity poll, it is a fundamental choice. It is not a choice you take once every five or 10 years. You cannot say that it would be a choice made for ever but you can certainly say that it would be made for generations. It is important that this choice is taken not on the basis of wish lists or hypothetical speculations—as I think the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said—but on the basis of what is a realistic alternative. The truth is that those who want to take us out of the European Union rarely state what they think the alternative is for Britain, which is why this amendment is crucial. There is a huge range of possibilities. At one end of the spectrum, there is membership of the European Economic Area, probably as a consequence of rejoining EFTA; but at the other end, we would have to rely on our WTO status in terms of our trading relationship with the European Union.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

Does the noble Lord recall that when he worked in Downing Street and the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, was a Minister at the Foreign Office, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, endlessly put down Questions asking for an assessment of the pros and cons—the benefits and the costs, because there are costs—of our membership? The noble Lord and the Government endlessly rejected that, year after year. Even a Bill was put down, but it was talked out. Does he think that he owes the noble Lord some sort of apology?

[Lord Liddle]

I am afraid that I do not, no. What I do know about the Labour Government is that when they were considering whether to join the euro, they carried out a thorough assessment. In the case of this proposed referendum, we need to have a thorough assessment of what the alternatives would be.

Many people assume that we can continue to enjoy the benefits of free trade with our European partners by being in the EEA. That, of course, is the economic option with the least pain. But as my noble friend Lord Kinnock said when he talked about sovereignty, although being in the EEA might involve a minimum of economic pain, it would certainly involve a huge loss of British sovereignty. Whereas now we have a say on every EU regulation that applies to us, in future, as members of the EEA, we would simply have to accept every regulation decided in Brussels, and we would have to make a budgetary contribution as well. Being in the EEA would mean a massive loss of sovereignty for Britain. We may no longer be in the European Union but, in my view, we would also no longer be Great Britain, a sovereign nation able to exercise some say over its future.

As for the alternative at the other end of the spectrum, relying on our WTO membership and trying to negotiate free trade agreements, noble Lords have already pointed out some of the problems. We would immediately be withdrawing ourselves from free trade agreements that the EU has with other countries, and the whole future of agriculture would be put into grave uncertainty. The car industry is perhaps the best example of what noble Lords on the other side have to address. The car industry is probably the most outstanding example of the manufacturing renaissance that we have seen in Britain.

European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Lamont of Lerwick and Lord Liddle

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

We can have academic debates about these questions in other places, and I do not want to delay the Committee. However, on the facts, there has been no great swing of British public opinion against the European Union over the past 15 years or so. It has fluctuated with circumstances over time. The Eurosceptic press was not created by the previous Government; unfortunately, it has been with us for a lot longer than that.

We on this side fundamentally object to the idea that plebiscitary democracy is the way to restore public trust. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is going along with this. I do not know what the noble Lord’s views are on the current referendum campaign, but there does not seem to be a high quality of public debate on referenda, given the way in which some of the people involved in the referendum campaign have argued that we are missing out by not having these issues decided in Parliament, where there would at least be a more balanced consideration of them.

I will, of course, withdraw this amendment. However, we on this side have moved several amendments on these lines, and we see no give whatever on the Government’s part. On subsequent Committee days I will refer to the question asked by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, to which the Government must face up: namely, if they think that something has to be done in the national interest, would it still require a referendum, and what would be their position on that? That question is highly relevant.

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick]

What sort of policy proposals would the noble Lord want the emergency brake lifted for? Given that the emergency brake is there purely as a defensive mechanism, to be used rarely on occasions of national interest as a negative power, what circumstances can he envisage in which he would want to get rid of it? In all the areas that he has mentioned on which there might be co-operation, we can agree to co-operate anyway.

[Lord Liddle]

The noble Lord is right, of course, but it seems to me that on judicial co-operation, for instance, we had established the confidence that the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw talked about and that Europe was important and effective in these areas. We might wish at some stage—I am not saying that we would but we might—to see some change in the processes. After all, it might be not only us who want to apply the emergency brake. Other member states might wish to do so, and that might be detrimental to the possibility of getting agreement on these questions. If we look back to Maastricht, we see that justice and home affairs were included in the European treaties for the first time on the basis of unanimity. However, by the time we got round to Lisbon there was an overwhelming consensus among member states that these matters should not be in a separate pillar but should be part of the main business of the Community, and that in the vast majority of cases there should be majority voting. Opinions change in the light of circumstances. Therefore, why should we tie ourselves up in referenda?