European Union: Recent Developments

Lord Renton of Mount Harry Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Renton of Mount Harry]

My Lords, I always enjoy listening to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and today was no different. However, for a few minutes I intend to talk about something quite different and perhaps much more humble. I shall respond to the views of some of the Conservative Party, not obviously in this House, but in the House of Commons, who wonder whether we should be in the European Union at all. We have not heard anything of that today, but I know that it is muttered about a good deal in the House of Commons at the moment.

I regard not being at the heart of the European Union as unthinkable and dangerous to our prosperity. I make no bones about this. I have always been a strong believer in the value of the European Union and in Britain’s full participation. I was influenced in this by having a Spanish great-grandmother and a German grandmother. Perhaps they drove me on. I followed Ted Heath in the 1970s and Ken Clarke in the 1990s and I have always thought that the pathway for the United Kingdom should be a leading role in the European Union.

I still have no doubts about that but I realise that, if I look ahead 20 years, say, I can see China close to the USA in its strength and ability to dominate trade throughout the world and it is followed by Russia, India and Brazil. Where will we be if we are by ourselves, with just 60 or 70 million people? We certainly will not be dominating the international banks as we do now, or leading the United Nations assistance to Africa. If we are to be effective as a country in the years ahead, I believe that we will need to have a leading and active part in a European Union which has country members stretching from Poland to Bulgaria and, because of the size of our collective trade, our voice will be listened to and followed.

Clearly, there is a danger ahead, for the reasons I gave at the beginning of my speech. I would very much like to see more direct discussion with our parallels in the European Parliament and in other European member countries. This simply does not happen enough at the moment. I have served on three sub-committees of our EU Select Committee—I am a member of one of those committees now—and I have been on the main committee. We have produced wise and thoughtful reports, but they are always British reports and I do not think that they are read by anyone outside this country—or certainly by very few people. Surely we need to change this. We need to make reports and decisions collectively with our European colleagues so that we talk and agree together about how to increase the trading strengths of the European Union.

The important point at the moment, of course, is the discussion about the budget for the European Union Commission for the next seven years—2014 to 2021. This budget is being discussed at the moment and questions about how much it will go up and whether it will go up at all are on the table. However, who among us has had the opportunity to talk to colleagues in Germany, France and Poland about the amount of money being made available to the EU over the next seven years and how it should be spent? That surely should be our challenge at the moment. All of us who support the European Union should surely be beating the door to the Commission and demanding involvement in the vital financial decisions that are ahead. We should be taking part in establishing the crucial programmes in the new budget and which ones could be dropped, because there are some of those too.

The Commission plays off one against another, determined to increase the amount of money it is going to get from the 27 countries that are now members of the EU. A balance needs to be struck. Surely there has to be more involvement and more discussion among the members, not with the intent of destroying the European Union but, rather, with a view to being determined to make it work better and more effectively in the years ahead. That should be our challenge. If we can succeed in that, our success will be blessed by our descendants.