European Union (Referendum) Bill
Lord Mandelson Excerpts(10 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Mandelson (Lab)
My Lords, we have heard some excellent speeches in this debate so far, including, charmingly, from the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, in a very good five-minute contribution.
Having been a member of the European Commission, I think that I can talk with some experience about the need for change in the European Union. My experience has made me decidedly pro-reform of the EU, but not in favour of a pig-in-a-poke referendum in this country designed to bridge the divisions within the Conservative Party. Of course, at a time when people across Europe are worried about their jobs, borne down by the cost of living and nervous about whether or when the fast-rising economic powers in the world are going to eat Europe’s collective lunch, it is hardly surprising that public hostility is directed at the EU. However, it is instructive that opinion polls, including recent ones, indicate that while the public are in favour of a referendum they are by a bigger majority in favour of Britain showing leadership in the EU, exerting its influence and not walking away from its responsibilities within it. That is why I am very confident that in any public debate we will win the argument that breaking up the EU is not the answer and Britain leaving it will not help our own economic future, which is completely intertwined with that of Europe.
That is why collectively our primary purpose should be to raise Europe’s performance and game globally, and why Britain is an essential component in changing Europe and bringing about that rise in Europe’s performance. We therefore need to concentrate all our efforts and energy on building up Britain’s influence in Europe, not driving Britain out of it. I am co-president with Kenneth Clarke and Danny Alexander of British Influence, the organisation dedicated to making our EU membership more effective. We want above all to see a confident Britain at the heart of a reforming Europe. My opposition to the Bill is based on the fact that it will scupper that objective.
The Bill is not about changing or improving the EU; indeed, it is stage 1 in raising impossible demands of the EU in order to create a pretext for leaving it. It will create huge uncertainty among investors when we need confidence to build our economic recovery, and it will put the Government into a straitjacket, binding them to a rigid timetable regardless of what is happening in the rest of Europe and indeed in our own country. It certainly will not increase the Government’s negotiating authority in Europe, at a time when we need to be reaching out and building coalitions so as to safeguard our national interests as a member of the EU and in the single market but not in the core eurozone.
My message to the Government is: stop grandstanding to the UKIP gallery. If they are really serious about European reform, they have to go out and work for it and join others in achieving it. If the need or cause for a referendum arises in the future—if a new treaty involving fresh European integration or transfer of powers requires it—that will be the time to consider the proposition of holding a referendum.
In conclusion, while we should be out there in Europe banging the drum for British interests, making sure that our people fill the right posts and that our policies are uppermost in the minds of the European Commission or others, we should recall the words of William Hague, who originally got it right before he and the Prime Minister were taken hostage by the militant tendency within their party, when he said about a referendum:
“It would not help anyone looking for a job. It would not help any business trying to expand. It would mean that for a time, we, the leading advocates of removing barriers to trade in Europe and the rest of the world, would lack the authority to do so”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/10/11; col. 55.]
He was absolutely right. We would simply create more alienation and public disillusion in Britain and on the continent and sacrifice yet more of our authority if we were to accept this Bill and if, instead of leading the charge for reform, we devoted the next three years to a referendum that presents a choice between standing on the periphery of an unreformed Europe or leaving it altogether. That, in essence, is what the backers of this Bill are inviting us to do, and we should resoundingly reject that choice.
EU: Recent Developments
Lord Mandelson Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Mandelson
My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, is more canary or Cassandra. I could take up many of his observations, but I shall not. Nor shall I dwell on current events in Greece, although I do think they illustrate the risk of becoming too fixated on austerity out of fear of market sentiment. Nor am I going to dwell on the events of December’s European Council meeting. I am not sure who was in the driving seat, but both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary chose to drive up a cul-de-sac of their own making. The important thing now is that the Government have decided to take an altogether more emollient approach, and that is welcome.
However, for all the interesting words and useful tour d’horizon of the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, I am still left with the abiding view that the Government are seriously lacking a hard-nosed, sustainable and long-term strategy for conducting Britain’s relationship with and within the European Union. It is a relationship—this is really my main point—that will be profoundly affected by the changes and restructuring that the eurozone will have to undergo if it is to endure and if economic and monetary union mark 2 is to be successfully created.
Whatever the virtues and successful record of the single currency itself, the design problems of the eurozone, on the other hand, are clear. A single collective monetary policy operating alongside a set of 17 national and insufficiently co-ordinated fiscal policies is not optimum. A currency union operating outside a single sovereign framework is certainly complicated. The absence of a central bank acting as a lender of last resort is not ideal. Convergence of the eurozone economies, much anticipated at the outset, has not happened and has become a serious impediment.
I leave it to others to amplify those issues. They all need addressing. No doubt there are those who relish the eurozone's predicament as a precursor to its inevitable demise. I say to them: be careful what you wish for. There is no bad outcome for the eurozone that is not also bad for the United Kingdom. Europe is our home, domestic market. Europe's growth is our growth. Europe's prosperity is our prosperity. If the European currency collapses amid a string of sovereign, corporate and banking defaults, the knock-on effects for all of us will be calamitous.
That is why, in my view, the Chancellor of the Exchequer is right to play a constructive role in helping to get through this crisis. The rest of the Government and the rest of his party—and, I might say, the Labour Party—should support the Chancellor, including in respect of the IMF’s involvement in helping to get through this crisis.
These, however, are just the preliminaries. In the months and the year ahead, the Government will be confronted with some big policy choices and substantial decisions on Europe and the future direction of the European Union. The eurozone will have to address its original design flaws. In effect, it will have to reinvent itself to sustain itself. The steps that the eurozone will have to contemplate and prepare for, politically and institutionally, will make the current negotiations over the fiscal treaty look like a casual walk in the park. It will be no good saying, “We are not in it, so it does not concern us and we needn't bother”. For Britain, that is not an option. The Government will find themselves in a substantial dilemma.
Essentially, the dilemma is that the UK is actually willing the eurozone to integrate further. We are—I think rightly—telling the eurozone member states to follow the construction of the currency union to its logical political conclusions. That is what the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are saying, and I think they are right, but, at the same time, they are pretending that that can happen without a cost to Britain's position and influence, standing as we do outside the core. If EMU mark 2 emerges, as I think it should and will, Britain's terms of engagement not just with the eurozone but with Europe as a whole will change seriously. We will see an inevitable gravitational pull in focus and decision-making to the eurozone from the EU of 27. Instead of an EU that the Government would like to see as wide and shallow, the eurozone means that it must deepen. That will call for much smarter, much more intense engagement by the Government, not less.
As it happens, the Government got off to a reasonable start, one that was engaged in Europe, if not overwhelmingly enthusiastic, at the beginning of their term. I think that Ministers were pleasantly surprised by how much Britain is valued in the European Union and how much Brussels wants to accommodate our views. However, the feeling in Brussels now is that that engagement has waned since the early days of the Government. That is bad news for Britain and bad news for Europe. As the Government's dilemma, which I have described, gets deeper, their ambivalence will become less and less useful and their lack of a plan for our longer term relationship with the European Union will become more and more obvious. That is dangerous for one reason above all—I shall finish on this.
As Trade Commissioner and as Business Secretary, and now in the work I do outside your Lordships' House, I have spent a lot of time in the rest of the world. It is naive not to realise that the rest of the world sees us in Britain as no different from Europe. Of course, we have been largely sheltered from the investor nerves and capital flight that have blighted the EU's periphery, but the credibility problem that we have in the eyes of the world is a European one that includes Britain. People in the United States and Asia say that, as an asset class, Europe is over and that Europe, including Britain, belongs to the old world, and that we cannot fix our problems because we lack the mechanisms and the political will to do so. That hurts us all as an investment destination, and we need to repair it. Of course, it is a caricature, but it is none the less a perception.
As it happens, given the constraints, I think that EU institutions have moved a long way to face up to the eurozone's problems in the past year. New Governments in Italy and Spain are doing so now. However, Europe as a whole, including Britain, urgently needs to show the world that it has a plan both to reboot the eurozone and to re-engineer growth in Europe—one that rethinks EU structural funding and intervention, uses the European Investment Bank to better effect and deepens the single market for services. We also need social model reform to sustain that essential safety net in Europe. We have to show once again that Europe is investment-grade. Floating Britain off somewhere into the mid-Atlantic, to quote the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, will not help us put together that plan to signal to the rest of the world that we have our act together and know where we are going.
In my view, that is what the Government have to face up to and, in doing so, face down the rather unworldly figures in their own ranks. They have to do so with a darn sight more courage and, above all, a darn sight more rigour than they are showing at the moment.
European Union Bill
Lord Mandelson Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Empey
My Lords, in the short time that I have been in this House, it has seemed very difficult to have discussions without noble Lords dividing on the basis that they are either for or against the European Union. Virtually every comment seems to boil down to that issue. However, I do not believe that that is right. People should not be put into one box or another; we are in the European Union and these measures—some of which have significant inelegancies, one has to admit—are there for a purpose. When the concept of nations working together is a perfectly good idea, when there is evidence that there is practical advantage in that, how is it that the general population do not share that view? Disillusionment has crept in because over a prolonged period of years Governments of different persuasions have made promises on these matters which they simply have not kept. This has built up a resistance; it has been seized on by red tops and tabloid newspapers and become a very stale and futile argument.
Nevertheless, we have to realise that there are certain practicalities. For instance, no subject is better at bringing Members into their places than a debate on Europe. I looked back and discovered that the largest number of Lords participating in a vote was in the Maastricht treaty debates in the 1990s, when 621 turned up to vote—the largest number that had appeared in this House since 1831. This clearly indicates that there is a huge interest and I suspect that it is because people are still on separate sides of the argument. We have to move away from that. We are in the European Community. I do not see any prospect of us being out of the European Community in the foreseeable future, so the issue is how can we make it more acceptable, more flexible and more answerable to the population?
Some very interesting arguments have been put forward about the measures, and we will have them again at Report. I suspect that their purpose is to try to get away from a position where Ministers make promises which they simply will not keep. That has undermined support for the European Union, from which there are many advantages to be had. For eight years in Brussels I gained experience on a modest organisation, the Committee of the Regions. There are Members on all sides of the House who were on that committee, some of them at the same time as I was. I have to say that it was not a particularly successful part of the European apparatus.
Europe and the bubble in Brussels have become disconnected from the ordinary person and that is a most unfortunate development. I fear that if Clause 3 is removed without this Chamber taking a more comprehensive view on what we should do about this disconnect, and if we go back to the old ways where Ministers make decisions and put them through the House under the Whip, then there can be little confidence about gaining the acceptance of ordinary people. The Minister referred to the danger of people becoming elitist—we say that people do not understand things. However, if we put propositions to people then we should jolly well ensure that they do understand. People are perfectly capable of understanding the significance of certain things. I therefore feel that we should not run scared. If you believe in something and you think that it is worth doing as a Minister and as a Government, you should jolly well go to the people and put it before them and ask for their support.
Lord Mandelson
My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships so near to the dinner break; I shall make only three observations in relation to Clause 3 and whether it should stand part of the Bill. What we have seen during the course of this debate is a series of false assumptions and non sequiturs advanced to justify the Bill, and in particular this clause, which the Government are bringing forward.
My first observation is that we must be absolutely clear that there is no intention on the part of any Government or any member state in the European Union to claim further powers for the institutions of the European Union at the expense of member states. If anyone can jump up and point to a position, a policy, a statement, a direction of thinking on the part of any member state that would suggest otherwise, I would be perfectly prepared to hear it. Instead, what you have among the 27 member states of the European Union is not a determination to claim more powers—on the contrary. You have a determination, rightly, to better use the existing powers for the EU and its institutions, with a better sense of strategic direction for the European Union, a better set of priorities which really support our long-term economic and other interests in Europe and a better quality of decision-making on the part of the institutions, including the Commission and the European Parliament, as well as the European Council.
Lord Mandelson
If I may persist, I am not going to make very extensive remarks and we have heard a lot from the noble Lord.
On the basis of my first observation there is really no need for this Bill.
Secondly, if there were a move by one or more member states or institutions in the European Union to secure the transfer of more powers to the EU, the Government would not win their case or prevail against this argument or mood or sentiment by picking up the blunderbuss weapon that such a referendum would represent. For the Government to persuade others to their point of view, they need to use argument, they need to use persuasion and negotiation. If we were proposing something and another member state said that it was having nothing to do with this and was, indeed, going to put us over a barrel and blackmail us into submission by holding a referendum in its country that would bring the whole thing to a grinding halt, do you think that we would give in to that sort of blackmail or pressure? Of course not. We would want to hear the argument, we would want to be persuaded, there would have to be negotiation. That would be the case if the opposite situation arose.
I slightly hesitate to make my third point as I always fear I might go too far in conceding too much to the Government, but judging by their record to date as far as Europe is concerned, they are in reality and in practice adopting a largely pragmatic and common-sense approach. Why on earth would they allow themselves to be diverted in this ridiculous way by an absurd Bill, simply to console and accommodate the extreme Europhobic views of a portion of the Tory party? Much better, in my view, to go back to what the Prime Minister said in an earlier incarnation when he was leader of the Opposition. David Cameron used to say that what we need is a strong, determined, focused European Union with all the combined strength that it can bring to address the really great global problems and challenges that we face in the world. I remember him writing an article in the Sunday Telegraph where he talked about the needs of global growth and tackling global poverty; the great challenge of global warming, the insidiousness of global terrorism for which, he said, we need a strong European Union in order to combine our strength to address these great issues. How right he was.
I wish only that the Government would revert, in time and in rhetoric, to those words and that sentiment expressed by the Prime Minister in an earlier incarnation. Instead, we are grinding through the Committee stage of the Bill, trying desperately to put the equivalent of lipstick on a pig. Let us be honest, these amendments will make the mildest and most modest difference to a pathetic and inadequate Bill. I hope that the Government will recognise this, see sense before it is too late, and resolve to get on with following their largely pragmatic and common-sense approach to Europe that has, in the main, characterised their policy since the election.