European Union Referendum (Date of Referendum etc.) Regulations 2016
Lord Mandelson Excerpts(8 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Mandelson (Lab)
My Lords, I support what the Prime Minister negotiated in Brussels, and I hope that others on both sides of this House will do so. However we got to this point, we have to realise that it is a national fight that we have on our hands now, not a party one, and for the country’s sake we have all of us got to make sure that the right side wins. We simply cannot allow British business and their employees to take such a hit for the sake of the political aims and whims of those who simply cannot understand the difference between taking back control of our country and the modern means of exercising influence in the 21st century—those who simply cannot understand how, yes, you can diminish your sovereignty when you enter a transnational treaty or institution, but then you get back in return a real increase in your power to affect public policy, big events and important challenges, which all of us face in our neighbourhood.
Noble Lords should be under no illusion that the coming referendum presents us with a profound moment in the life of our country—and once the die is cast, there will be no turning back. We cannot leave the European Union and for economic and trade purposes be treated as if we are still in it; that is the unescapable fact that we are facing. Let us be clear about what that means. Unless we want to become a bigger version of Norway, accepting all the laws and rules of the single market without having any say over them whatever—and, by the way, paying quite a healthy sum into the EU budget for the privilege of doing so—or if we want to become some variation of Switzerland, which by the way has no passporting rights for its financial services into the European Union, leaving would mean no more unhindered or unfettered access to Europe’s single market by Britain, our businesses or exporters. It would mean continuing to accept European norms and standards as a condition for the market access that we are granted, and it would mean that once the divorce is promulgated, after the two-year Article 50 process, we would face a return to paying EU tariffs while whatever deal was finally negotiated and struck between us. That means that we would pay EU tariffs on our exports and imports, which means higher prices in our shops.
Lord Mandelson
If the noble Lord does not mind, I shall continue. It would mean losing the EU’s preferential trading benefits in foreign markets until such time—and it would be a long time—before we were able to renegotiate them back. It would also potentially mean having to raise our own tariffs on imports for those markets, as they would no longer be covered by WTO-compliant agreements.
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way, somewhat reluctantly. He has talked about access to the internal market and the additional costs, as he sees it. If this is so catastrophic, will he explain how it is that in the invisible trade in goods since 2011, the United States, without being part of the single market, has managed to sell considerably more than we have to that market? Even in terms of services, the United States sells more than $200 billion worth a year.
Lord Mandelson
I am sorry—I am not just talking about invisible services. I am talking about British exports and British jobs and what we would pay in addition to get our goods, and all we contribute to supply chains and value chains, into the single market.
I am not going to dwell further on the trade implications of leaving, except to say that anyone who thinks that, freed from the so-called protectionist shackles of Brussels, we could somehow beetle around the world bagging major new free trade agreements like low-hanging fruit needs a reality check. This is not the 1970s, which is when Britain last attempted to negotiate an international free trade agreement. We have no people. We have no negotiating capacity left in Whitehall. We would have to rebuild it from scratch before we began that process. More to the point, there are not the countries queuing up to negotiate with countries like us. We are a mid-sized, mature, already open, advanced, western economy. Others are seeking trade agreements either with large blocks of countries or with larger, younger, faster-growing, relatively closed economies with a lot more to bargain into a negotiation than we have to offer. That is the reality of international trade, and we have to grasp it.
I shall finish by going back to my original point about what the Prime Minister negotiated in Brussels. This package is not everything, but nor is it nothing. In particular, the renegotiation in the package reassures those members of the public with doubts—people with genuinely sceptical minds—that they can support UK membership again by making it clear that the EU’s talk of ever-closer union is not a catch-all provision driving continuous political integration, by removing the right of EU nationals to unconditional and immediate welfare benefits and by giving appropriate protection to our economy from the operation of Europe’s single currency, which we should not join and from which our businesses should not suffer any discrimination as a result of our being outside it.
This is not the end of reform in Europe. It is a start. Reform is a process; it is not an event. This package is, in effect, a bridge. It is a bridge that people with genuine doubts can walk back across in order to support the European Union in good faith, and I hope they will do so on 23 June.
Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)
My Lords, in well over 40 years as a Member of one House or another of this Parliament of ours, I have never before known such a blatant campaigning document—not least one that is so economical with the truth—masquerade as a Government White Paper. The title itself, I have to say, is a lie—The Best of Both Worlds: The United Kingdom’s Special Status in a Reformed European Union. The European Union has manifestly not been reformed, and, such is the nature of the beast, is almost certainly unreformable. Britain’s so-called special status may well, should we remain in the European Union, prove to be not the best but the worst of both worlds. It is certainly very much worse than being outside the European Union.
Those of us who wish to leave the EU are asked to say what our alternative is to our membership, so I will answer that question. The alternative to being a member of the European Union is not being a member of the European Union. It may come as a great shock to the little Europeans in our midst, but most of the world, including significantly the fastest-growing countries in the world, are not in the European Union. As one who for a number of years had responsibility for the conduct of economic policy in this country, I have little doubt that we would prosper more if we were not a member of the European Union.
As for the contents of the White Paper, there is one curious and significant omission. It fails to mention the single most important feature of the Brussels agreement of 19 February—namely, the declaration:
“Member States not participating in the further deepening of the economic and monetary union will not create obstacles to but facilitate such further deepening”.
Thus, at a stroke, we have given up our ability to veto a further transfer of powers from the United Kingdom to the European Union—should we remain in the European Union—that it believes is necessary for further economic integration. Not so much White Paper as white flag. Moreover, it completely undermines the claim in the White Paper that more powers cannot be transferred from the United Kingdom to the European Union without the United Kingdom agreeing.
What then of the exit mechanism in the welcome event of the referendum being won by the leavers? There is much talk of having to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty and of the process taking up to 10 years or even more. This is balderdash. If it requires Article 50 to leave the EU, the 1975 referendum would have been a fraud as the Lisbon treaty dates back only to 2007. Article 50 refers to the EU’s recommended procedure for negotiating the nature of the relationship of a member that has left the EU with the surviving European Union.
As the Prime Minister has frequently pointed out, Parliament is sovereign and we can at any time leave the European Union by repealing the European Communities Act 1972, which makes UK law subordinate to European law. Indeed, Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty states:
“Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”.
In the case of the United Kingdom, our only constitutional requirement is the repeal of the 1972 Act.
Among the many grossly misleading scare stories peddled by the Government—whose only argument, I regret, is Project Fear, with nothing positive at all—is that we would have to renegotiate all our trade agreements with countries outside the European Union. The plain truth is that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. The great bulk of our trade with the rest of the world is regulated by our membership of the WTO and would remain wholly unchanged.
Lord Mandelson
Does the noble Lord accept that 60% of British exports are covered by the free trade agreements negotiated and won by the European Union on our behalf—60%?
Lord Lawson of Blaby
The great majority of the agreements we are party to through the WTO and its predecessor, GATT, were concluded before 1995, when, at that time, the European Union or its predecessor was not even a member of the WTO or GATT.
As for the argument that you need to be a member of the so-called single market to trade with the single market, that is an equal nonsense. Indeed, exports into the single market from countries outside it have, for many years now, grown much faster than UK exports to the single market. After all, the weighted average of the European Union’s common external tariff is only 3.6%. The prospect of our not being able to secure a far better free trade agreement than little Switzerland is minimal.
Certainly the future is uncertain. That, after all, is its nature. But the uncertainty surrounding Britain’s future within the European Union, should we decide to stay, is far more worrying than regaining our freedom. The EU’s blundering route to political union—for that is what it is all about; that is the purpose of the whole enterprise—will continue and, even though we have secured an opt-out from political union, we will remain shackled to it: a sort of colonial status.
This referendum debate is not primarily about economics. It is about whether we in this country wish to take control of our own affairs and to be a self-governing democracy with a global rather than a merely European perspective.