European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Waddington

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waddington]

My Lords, I want Turkey and other states to accede but, like many others, I worry about whether a referendum would yield a yes vote. However, I must not emulate certain others and come down against referendums in this area for fear of the result. That indeed would be sinful. I want convincing arguments as to why referendums on accession treaties should be excluded, and I am worried about the strength of the arguments advanced so far. In particular, what about immigration? Do we not, when we agree to an accession treaty, cede more power to control immigration into this country? That is what worries me. I would just like an answer from my noble friend on that point.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, my name is to the amendment. I support it and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, on how he introduced it. In doing so, I put on record some of the background to new countries joining the EU, which will apply to any new country joining in the future.

One of the arguments put forward by those who support the project of undemocratic European integration is that all those eastern European countries voted for it and signed for it, Turkey and Croatia want to join, and so there cannot be anything wrong with it, can there? This argument avoids two essential ingredients in the story of what actually happened in those countries before they joined. The first was that the yes campaigns—the campaigns in favour of the country in question joining the EU—were massively better funded than the no campaigns. For instance, in Estonia, where I went once or twice in an attempt to help the no campaign, it was estimated that the yes campaign spent 60 times as much as the no campaign could afford and Brussels felt free to dispense taxpayers’ largesse on a large scale to the applicant nations’ yes campaigns. In Estonia, I regret to report that our Foreign Office funded a yes campaign battle bus, which distributed chocolate and whisky to happy Estonians. I saw that—it did happen, but I did not get any chocolate or whisky.

The second ingredient was less easy to spot and has received virtually no comment, which is that many of the political class in the applicant nations were keen for their countries to join the EU because they wanted jobs in Brussels, or at home, on the Brussels pay scale. The Polish ambassador in London at the time told me twice that 1,400 Poles got jobs in Brussels or Poland at a minimum of 10 times their previous salaries. Most of us would do quite a lot for 10 times our present income and so one cannot blame the politicians and bureaucrats in question in those countries for seeing EU membership as a very rosy project indeed. Whether it turns out to be so in the long term for the people whom they deceived remains to be seen. That is another of the powerful hidden factors at work with all those former communist countries and their desire to join the EU, and they will apply to any newcomers.

How does it look from our end? My noble friend Lord Stoddart has mentioned the 12,000 or 13,000 people who were estimated to come into this country after the applicant nations joined. I think that the final figure was more like 1 million. I hope that the Minister will give us an estimate of the number of people who came here. The Poles are wonderful people and I admire them tremendously. They are one of the greatest people on earth but I am not sure how the general influx from the new European countries affected our UK labour force. We had Mr Brown’s mendacious promise of British jobs for British workers, which never looked like being a starter while we remained in the EU and were unable to control our borders. More widely, we now know that our borders were deliberately taken down by the Blair Government. We are told by a civil servant who was involved at the time that they did so,

“to rub the noses of the right in diversity”.

What they may have done, in fact, is to condemn a great many of our working people to unemployment. I cannot believe that the present Government want to follow that route, so I would have thought that they would support this amendment.

Finally, we come to Turkey, to which my noble friend Lord Stoddart referred. I cannot see how the Government can say that they want to limit immigration to tens of thousands per annum and in the same breath say that they want Turkey to join the EU. I have to put another specific question to the Minister: if Turkey is admitted, will there be some long-term ban on Turkish immigration to this country? Will the right to free movement of persons be withheld from Turkey for a long period? Is that in the Government’s thinking when they say that they want Turkey to be in the EU, or are the Government saying simply that, “The project of European integration is wonderful; the more the merrier; and let’s have Turkey in”? One then has to ask, if there is to be such a hold on Turkish immigration, whether the Turkish people themselves will want to join the EU if they cannot come here—particularly here, given our generous welfare system. I look forward to the noble Lord’s answers. I support the amendment.

European Union Bill

Debate between Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Lord Waddington

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Waddington]

The noble Lord is perfectly entitled to pick on what I said about salaries but, of course, it goes very much further than that. I could quote umpteen examples of things that have caused enormous annoyance. There is also enormous annoyance at the salary paid to the new EU Foreign Minister, and goodness knows how much will be paid for the European External Action Service. It is worth remembering at this stage where we are. Mr Blair was not going to have an EU Foreign Minister at any cost and was totally opposed to an external action service, but of course at the end he gave way, rolled over and agreed to it.

Of course, both posts were created by the constitution/Lisbon. I venture to suggest that if the people had had a say, not about the constitution or Lisbon but in the matter of either of those posts, they would have said, “Certainly not. Why should we pay for pointless EU aggrandisement?”. There have been some terrible betrayals by the Government of this country. Take, for instance, the surrender by Mr Blair of a large part of our hard-won rebate. It was supposed to be for reform of the agricultural policy, but no reform has taken place. There were all the carryings-on over the constitution/Lisbon. Some insist that there was enough difference between the two to justify Mr Blair ditching his promise of a referendum, but surely there is one thing on which we can all agree. With all the parties promising a referendum in 2005, and with the main changes proposed in the constitution reappearing in Lisbon, it was not at all strange that a lot of people felt that they were entitled to have a say in what was afoot, but they were told to mind their own business. They did: they went off in large numbers to vote for UKIP.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I did not want interrupt the excellent speech of my noble friend, if I may refer to him as that, except to ask him about the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, sitting beside me. Surely the difference is that the British people can do something about what happens in Westminster. They can elect and dismiss the people who make their laws, who defraud their expenses and all the rest of it. In what goes on in Brussels, the British people and the Select Committees of both Houses of Parliament are completely powerless. That is the difference. I apologise again for interrupting the noble Lord’s very important speech.