Queen’s Speech

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Monday 23rd May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, as we come towards the close of a long, civilised debate—if somewhat full of wishful thinking in some quarters—I begin, as many noble Lords have done, by congratulating my noble friend Lady Perry on the very model of a valedictory speech. For those of us of my age, that is ever present in our minds.

I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, on a maiden speech which proved that she is the living refutation of a view that is all too pervasive nowadays—that Members of Parliament are simply in it for themselves.

I should like to follow many noble Lords in confining my remarks to next month’s referendum. It seems to me that there are two striking aspects of the Government’s case in the European Union referendum debate. The first is that they can find no positive case for the European project, least of all for the full-blooded political union which is its declared objective. All they seek to do is to ramp up fear of what might happen were we to leave the EU. Indeed, today’s so-called Treasury analysis is a classic example of this. It has simply assumed a minor disaster and then, as even the Financial Times has pointed out, it has dishonestly portrayed it as a major disaster in order to scare the pants off the British people. Then it has spelled out the details of this assumption and called it an analysis.

The second striking aspect of the Government’s case is that they avoid like the plague anything that is a matter of fact and dwell exclusively on the area of pure speculation. It is, for example, a fact that UK law is obliged to conform to EU law, whether we like it or not. It is a fact that the European Court of Justice is legally superior to our own Supreme Court. It is a fact that we have no control over our own borders so long as any EU citizen has the right to live and work here. It is a fact that the EU as at present constituted is profoundly undemocratic. It is also a fact that we have to pay a net—I emphasise “net”—subscription of getting on for £10 billion a year in order to be part of this project, whose objective we conspicuously do not share.

But there has not been a word about any of this. Instead, we have a barrage of economically illiterate scaremongering. They speak of the dangers of not having access to the so-called single market. Poppycock. Everyone has access to the European Union market, as indeed our very substantial imports from the whole of the world testify. Indeed, it is a fact that since the so-called single market began, American, Canadian and Australian exports to the EU have grown faster than ours have. We already trade considerably more with the rest of the world than we do with the rest of the European Union, and the difference is growing with every year that passes.

If the existence of the single market is such a boon to those within its borders, how is it that the EU is one of the worst performing regions of the world, with distressingly high levels of youth unemployment?

It is widely acknowledged throughout the world that the economic reforms introduced by the Thatcher Governments of the 1980s, with which I was involved, transformed the British economy and transformed it for the better. We achieved this not by any trade agreement—in any event, as a member of the EU we would have been unable to conclude such an agreement even if we had wanted to—but, importantly, by a thoroughgoing programme of intelligent deregulation. This cannot be built on, and indeed is actively threatened, so long as we remain in the EU with its addiction to ever-more regulation, which is so damaging to the small and medium-sized enterprises that are the backbone of the British economy—however convenient it may be to big businesses, which have an interest in reducing the threat of competition from the small fry.

Tax reform, too, was a key feature of the transformation of the British economy in the 1980s. Today, the proposed financial transaction tax to which the European Union is committed was rightly described by George Osborne as a dagger pointed at the heart of London. He tried to kill the FTT and was roundly defeated. So much for Britain’s influence in today’s European Union.

We can build on the Thatcher era reforms and the economic success they so signally brought only by escaping the suffocating toils of the European Union. The future of this country lies in embracing a genuinely global, rather than little European, future, and doing so as a self-respecting and self-governing democracy.