European Union Membership (Economic Implications) Bill [HL]

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Friday 25th November 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend Lord Pearson for introducing this debate. This is the fourth such inquiry that he has asked for and it seems perfectly reasonable to ask the Government to take a dispassionate look at the costs of our membership of the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Desai, described my noble friend as a maverick; others have sometimes been less generous, but events have shown that my noble friend the maverick has been right and the purveyors of the nonsense about our destiny being in the EU have been comprehensively shown to be wrong.

The arguments that some of us have been making over the years about the financial costs to this country of our membership remain as valid as ever. There is our annual cash tribute of £18 billion gross a year, which my noble friend mentioned, and there is the common agricultural policy. If the noble Lord, Lord Davies, were in his place, I would say that of course we would support our farmers in Britain. We did so before we joined the EU and we will do so when we leave. What we will not be doing if we leave the CAP is to support French, Italian and Greek farmers as well, and we should not do so. The common fisheries disaster and all the regulations that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, talked about that are hamstringing the City were deliberately introduced by Mr Barnier and the Commission, probably at the instigation of the French and the Germans, who are jealous of the preponderance of the City of London. Those are enormously damaging.

I would add one other thing which no noble Lord has mentioned yet and that is the extraordinary folly of our emissions policy as part of our renewable energy policy. It has meant that we are building an extraordinary number of very inefficient windmills over some of the most beautiful parts of the country with no benefit at all other than to the manufacturer of those windmills and with a great disbenefit to the taxpayers of this country. That is an EU-proposed measure.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. Is he not aware that it was Britain that at every stage pushed for tighter and tighter EU targets? It was not the other way round.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

I am not sure that is right. The target of 20 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 is entirely an EU target, so I cannot agree with the noble Lord on that.

I think that the penny has finally begun to drop in the City of London, and I hope that it is indeed not too late for something to be grabbed back from all this. I wonder sometimes what UKREP is doing in Brussels. This tide of regulations, directives and thousands of rules seems to come almost entirely unamended, but UKREP is supposed to be looking after our interests in Brussels. I should like to find out whether that is what it is doing. I had a quick look at its website and saw that the EU flag was right at the top, with the Union Jack being almost invisible right at the bottom. I hope that that is not a sign of its priorities.

Leaving that aside, recent events have brought this whole debate into very sharp focus. The Government must recognise, however reluctantly, that we should stand back coolly and look at the economic benefits and disbenefits of our membership. Things have gone completely pear-shaped in the euro. What was supposed to be the cement is not even holding together the tottering edifice of the EU, which seems to be falling apart by the day. It is rather a cruel spectator sport to watch the daily news bulletins to see which domino is to fall next. All that the European politburo—the so-called élite—seem to be able to do is stand on one leg and sing “Ode to Joy”. They do not seem to have an answer at all to what is happening. Surely we have now reached a tipping point. The Government must take up the challenge in this Bill and try to identify where our interests lie. As my noble friend said, it is no longer good enough to say that the benefits of our membership of the EU are self-evident. That is simply no longer the case.

Let us take a brief look at the economics. The euro, as the noble Lord, Lord Ryder, said, was always a badly flawed project. The eurozone has turned out to be an economic disaster for the weaker members. They can never compete with Germany in the same currency—there is no chance of that at all. Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Italy have gone down the pan and Spain seems to be on the brink. However, for them—this was presciently put by Mr William Hague—the euro is,

“a burning house with no exits”.

The euro has turned out to be an incendiary device—a weapon of mass economic destruction.

However, almost incredibly, there are still voices telling us that we should be in the euro. From a padded cell in Conservative Central Office just last week the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, said that we should join the euro. Frankly, I suggest that they throw away the key. However, cheerleaders such as the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and others—of whom there are examples in this House—owe it to us to explain how a system that was supposed to engender prosperity and democracy has turned into the very opposite: a Caliban that is causing hatred and conflict, and turning people against their Governments and against each other. Already we have in Greece anti-German jokes, perhaps regrettably. When the EU economic task force imposed on Greece by the EU arrived, one Greek newspaper had the headline “The prison guards have arrived”. Unfortunately and unluckily, the head of that task force was a German called Mr Horst Reichenbach, who was instantly dubbed “Mr Horst Thirdreichenbach” by the Greeks. That sort of thing may be amusing to read about but it is actually a disaster when it comes to democracy and co-operation between member states and democracy in those countries.

The fact is that the economic cost is enormous, as my noble friend and others have pointed out, but the political cost also has to be looked at in this context. Do we need to be part of an organisation that is not only an economic failure but a political failure as well? Do we want to be a member of an organisation that usurps elected leaders in member states? Do we want to be in an EU that is so terrified of having a referendum that it took the elected Prime Minister of Greece behind the bike shed wherever the meeting was and forced him to resign? Do we want to be part of an organisation that hand-picks the leaders of democratic countries—the ones who can be relied on to toe the line—never mind that Monti and Papademos were willing parties to both Italy’s and Greece’s accession to the euro? Their hands are not clean on this, yet they are the people who have been put in place by the European Union. Above all, the Government need to carry out this analysis to nail, once and for all, the threats that, by disengaging from the EU, Britain will somehow be left in the slow lane and will lose its place at the top table. That is what they like to tell us. If the food at the top table is rancid—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

Yes, I shall be as brief as I possibly can be, but this is an important subject. I am sorry, but I do not feel that there is a time constraint in a Second Reading debate.

I was saying that we should not be told that we are going to be in the slow lane or removed from the top table if we are out of the EU. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, is not in his place—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Is it acceptable for the noble Lord to carry on speaking after that very clear advice from the government Whip, and after the position was made clear right at the start of the debate in response to the question from my noble friend, Lord Campbell-Savours?

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Unless the government Whip’s advice is inadvisable.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

My Lords, we are debating an interesting proposition, which is quite a good idea in some respects. But I suspect that the methodology would not be very straightforward and would itself become highly divisive. For example, many problems of quantification were illustrated in a point made a few minutes ago by the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who mentioned energy policy and the carbon tax regime. You can call it other names but essentially the EU has agreed that by 2020 it will collect €50 billion a year to hand over to the rest of the world in terms of adjustment finance. If our share is about 15 per cent that would come to €7.5 billion a year. In no way can that be charged against us in terms of “them costing us”, because since 1992 at Rio de Janeiro we have been the “leader in Europe” in pressing for tighter and tighter targets. This reveals some of the ambiguities of what might come up in the methodology.

Another question is how to add up apples and oranges in different sectors of the economy. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, has just said that the City of London is the jewel in the crown, to which I shall make two remarks. If we are the Hong Kong of Europe and that Hong Kong is the City of London—I doubt the logic of thinking that we will be in a stronger position to be the Hong Kong of Europe if we are not in Europe—what about the rest of our economy? How will we bring in the consequences for the rest of our economy if we measure the interests of the British economy only by the City of London, the jewel in the crown? I think that its role recently has been to lay hand grenades and not golden eggs. Therefore, there would be issues about methodology.

Many noble Lords have found it difficult to stick to the Bill before us. We have heard many speeches about the whole of the European exercise being a dead duck and that Britain should leave. I suppose that, if it is a dead duck and the whole thing has collapsed, there is no need to be in or out of it.

A totally separate question has been raised by noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Stoddart, about public opinion. To think logically about this, if we believe in the impartiality of this review and it produces a positive answer in favour of staying in Europe, the job will be somehow—I know that I will be shot for saying this—to educate the British people and to find ways to ensure that they understand that the conclusions are positive. There cannot be the logic of the study suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, without running the risk that it might produce an answer that some people do not like. But that is true of both sides. I suspect that we would find that, in the dynamics, this is a positive thing and that we have a problem with public understanding. But that is a separate question. One cannot then say, “But we ought to say no because of public opinion”. We are a democracy and of course that is an important question. However, the methodology is not to do with public opinion per se. It purports to be to do with quantitative methodology.

In the two minutes remaining, I shall echo three points which have already been made. The noble Lord, Lord Empey, made the point that we have voted for things that have happened in Europe. The Commission is not a set of gauleiters: it is the Council of Ministers which seeks agreement. As we all know, there are different procedures, including codecision, the Parliament and so on. But we can see the fallacy in the idea that Monsieur Barroso can say something and Chancellor Merkel goes down on one bended knee by just looking at yesterday’s newspapers.

We hear easy examples of countries which do splendidly without being in the EU. Switzerland and Norway are always cited. I want to spend at least 30 seconds on Norway. I have a great number of friends in Norway and I hope that they will not mind me saying that it is a sheikdom with democracy. In terms of the proportion of oil revenues to its national finances, it is not comparable at all with any other country in Europe. It has a huge sovereign fund, which is wonderfully administered and becomes a great contributor to aid to Africa, et cetera. The point that we really have to look at is that Germany is a successful economy: how they and not we?