European Union (Referendum) Bill
Debate between Lord Lawson of Blaby and Lord Garel-Jones(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)
My Lords, I am sure that the whole House will be delighted that we are close to the end of what has been a very long debate. It has been a good one, with a number of very interesting contributions. A number of noble Lords have referred to the problem of those British subjects who live on the continent of Europe. As someone who lives in France, I strongly support the principle of this Bill so ably introduced by my noble friend Lord Dobbs.
Among the other contributions—unfortunately, there is not time to mention many—I shall refer to two. To show my complete and customary impartiality, there will be one from each side of the House. I single out those noble Lords because they made good points that, remarkably, have not been made by anyone else, and they each drew the wrong conclusion from them.
The first point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, who alone referred to the importance of banking, finance and the City of London to the British economy, and the relevance of the regulatory proposals that are coming out of Brussels that will affect us. However, he then said that if there is something we do not like there, we can veto it. I have to tell the noble Lord and indeed the House that we simply cannot do so. This is a very serious point because in my opinion the destiny of this country is not European; it is global. In the City of London, we have one of the only two global financial centres, and it is the only one in the European time zone, which is tremendously important. I have to tell noble Lords, and to some it might come as a shock, that even if we were to leave the European Union we would still be within the European time zone. Our global reach is particularly important—this point has frequently been made by my noble friend Lord Howell—given the great opportunities that will continue to arise in the coming decades in the emerging world.
The other point was made by my old friend— I do not see him here but I am sure he is—my noble friend Lord Garel-Jones. Oh, he is here. He likes to come close to me, I know. He made the important point that there needs to be a debate about how we as a nation are going to conduct ourselves should there be a referendum and should we choose out. That needs to be considered. His mistake was to say that we will be in the position of Norway. No way Norway! I have a high regard for Norway and the Norwegians. I got to know them very well when I was Secretary of State for Energy and we had a lot of discussions about North Sea oil, which we shared. They were very amicable discussions and I was immensely impressed by the calibre of the Norwegians. But Norway is a very small country while we are a pretty sizeable one, and anyone who is as interested in realpolitik as my noble friend will know the enormous difference.
