European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Teverson

Tuesday 22nd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

At this rate I will be at more than 20 minutes. I suggest that noble Lords do not interrupt, but it is of course up to them. As I was just saying, this new campaign has people on it who believe that we should stay in the EU but who still want a referendum. So far, some 50,000 people have signed it and thousands more have volunteered to campaign as activists. I suggest that noble Lords have a look at it at peoplespledge.org.

Then there is UKIP and its performance at the recent Barnsley by-election, where it beat the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats into second place. In fact, we got nearly as many votes as those two parties combined. I am sure that much of the success was due to the fact that it now has a decent leader again, and it was of course only a by-election, but something is moving out there in the country. That something is the country’s growing wish to have a referendum on our EU membership. That wish will not be met by the Bill. The Bill is an irrelevance to that wish.

Why do Her Majesty’s Government refuse the people the referendum that they want and which they were promised, and instead offer them the pale imitation that is the Bill before us? The answer is clear; they think that they would lose the referendum which the people want and we would then have to leave the EU. In the Government’s defence, they seem to really believe, as do most of our political class, that leaving the EU would somehow be bad for trade and cost British jobs. I think they believe that because so few of them have ever run an international business. They just do not know how it works.

I guess that this would be the central debate in any referendum campaign about our membership. I give the Government and your Europhile Lordships four brief reasons why leaving the EU would have the opposite effect to the one that they might genuinely fear. First, we indeed have 3 million jobs exporting to clients in the EU, but it has 4.5 million jobs exporting to us, so it would want to continue its free trade with us. We are in fact its largest client. Would the French stop selling us their wine or the Germans their cars just because we are no longer bossed around by Brussels? Our trade and jobs would continue. There is no fear on that score.

Secondly, the EU has free-trade agreements with 63 countries worldwide, with more in the making, so why not with us—their largest client? Thirdly, the World Trade Organisation would also prevent any retaliation, and anyway the EU’s average external tariff is now down below 1 per cent so there is not much point to retaliation. Fourthly, Switzerland and Norway, which are not in the EU, also enjoy free movement with the EU and every other facility that we have. They control their own immigration and export much more per capita to the EU than we do—Norway by five times and Switzerland three times.

[Lord Teverson]

I thank the noble Lord for letting me intervene. Although Norway and Switzerland are not within the European Union and have full relations with it, the result is that they have very little control over their legislation. The way it works is that the European Union faxes instructions to the Governments of Norway and Switzerland in those areas and they have to comply or withdraw from the European Economic Area. That is the problem. You have the single market but far less control and no input into the legislative process.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

That point is often made. Of course, if we were not in the European Union, we would have to obey the EU rules for the exports that we sent to them, but not in our own internal market and not to the rest of the world. Most countries in the world export to the European Union without that problem. It is really not a real one.