European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Stevens of Ludgate Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 31st January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Ludgate (UKIP)]

My Lords, I am grateful that I have not yet been annihilated. It is disappointing that those who lost in the referendum are still demanding another one. It does not help for a government Minister to describe certain Eurosceptics as “swivel-eyed”. I had hoped that we had got past that level of debate.

In a high turnout, the people voted to leave by a majority of 1.5 million—huge in electoral terms. In the last election, if 40,000 voters in the most marginal Labour seats had, instead of voting Labour, voted for the runner-up, Labour would have lost 40 seats. It was that close. Let us suppose that the leavers were to lose another referendum—unlikely, in my view—then we would have every right to demand a further, deciding referendum. Let us respect the people’s wishes. We are not the EU, which asks members to vote again when it does not like the result.

We cannot argue that the remainers did not fire every barrel, from Mr Cameron’s “World War Three” to Mr Obama’s “back of the queue”. He was sadly so ill informed that he did not know that there was a queue of one—the EU. President Hollande, Madame Lagarde and every other leader you can think of all warned of economic disaster. Even the poor old CBI, which opposed the ERM, was in favour of joining the euro and is partly financed by the EU, is still at it. The Bank of England has got it wrong yet again. The governor is still muttering that the GNP would be 1% higher if there had been no vote to leave. How on earth he works that out is quite beyond me. As for the latest leaked economic forecast, it must have been leaked by remainers. In 2005, UK trade with the EU was 55% of the total. It is now 45%. If present trends continue, it will be 35% in 10 years’ time, or 10% of GDP. Are these forecasters seriously suggesting that EU trade would halve if their 5% reduction in GDP occurs if we choose the EFTA route? It is simply not realistic.

The case for remaining was set out. The Government even spent £9 million of our money doing just that. Everything we have seen since the referendum has justified our decision. There is general dissatisfaction throughout the EU with the present arrangements. Incentives are given to big businesses to locate in Luxembourg, contrary to the rules. Then there is the situation in Poland; no stable government in Germany; upcoming elections in Italy; the state of the European banking system; and even President Macron says that the French—how wise—might vote to leave if given a referendum.

Quite why the EU is so desperate for our cash, I do not know. With a budget of some €150 billion, surely it can be cut by 10% or 15%? One has to ask how the proposed sum we are thinking of paying the EU is arrived at. Yes, we should pay for commitments entered into when we are a member, but why should we pay for access? Surely it should be paying us. It has the trade surplus, not the UK.

I am somewhat nervous about how the Government will use the so-called Henry VIII powers. For many years, we have had to accept all regulations and laws from Brussels with no possibility of rejection. I hope we can trust our Government more than the unelected bureaucrats in the EU. As was mentioned yesterday, let us be careful of having a Corbyn Government.

I wish our negotiators well, but the signs are not auspicious. We are allowing the EU to dictate the agenda. Normally, an agenda is agreed between the parties. One gets the impression that we are going into these meetings with no clear objective other than to listen to the other side and to try to compromise. Negotiations are better if both sides feel that they have won the argument. So far, we have been the givers. We need to get back our territorial waters and our ability to do trade deals, spend our own money and make our own laws, and we need to keep Gibraltar and keep an open border in Ireland. However, how one can get 27 countries, all with their own agendas, to agree to this I do not know, unless we give a lot away. We must adopt a harder line in the negotiations. The EU has much more to lose than we do. We have the world to expand into.

Any implementation period must be as short as possible. Two years is more than enough; otherwise, it will be dragged out for ever. We must not be subject to any more EU laws or regulations during this period. Financial services should be included in any deal if possible, but let us not panic if they are not. We are the world’s financial centre, and the EU business through us is a small percentage and not that critical. Already many of those threatening to move staff away are scaling down their estimates—Deutsche Bank, for example—and the governor of the Bank of France has stated that the numbers leaving are exaggerated. Even the chief executive of Barclays is telling us to be prepared to sacrifice access to the single European market after Brexit if it means gaining control of our own financial rules.

The more that we argue here, the weaker we make the Government’s negotiating position. Should we not be implementing the people’s vote, unelected as we are, pulling together and presenting a united front? By all means improve the Bill before us, but let us not frustrate it.

European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Stevens of Ludgate Excerpts

Monday 20th February 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Ludgate (UKIP)]

My Lords, the referendum was clear: vote remain or vote leave. The previous Prime Minster said that if the vote was to leave, he would exercise Article 50 the next Monday and we would not be having this debate. Both Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne also said that if we voted to leave, we would also leave the single market.

As we all know, the turnout in the referendum was 72%, which was a record. The leave majority was 1.4 million, a substantial figure. To put that into perspective, if at the last election in the most marginal Conservative constituencies 8,000 voters had voted for the runner-up instead, the Conservatives would have lost 15 seats. Those asking for a second referendum should perhaps be asking for a re-run of the last election.

The referendum was a clear political commitment from the UK Government to act on the referendum result. The Conservative manifesto said:

“We will honour the result of the referendum, whatever the outcome”.


Those of us who were in the majority in the referendum should thank Mr Cameron for bringing about our departure from the EU—even though he did it by mistake.

The Prime Minister, Mrs May, should be congratulated on honouring this commitment. She also said that we would leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. Why, therefore, has the UK’s signature to the unified patent court agreement—when this agreement is subject to the European Court of Justice—been put down by the Government as a negative statutory instrument, which would therefore be under the radar? That means that unless an MP objected—fortunately, one did—it would have automatically gone through. I would be most grateful if the Minister let us have an answer to that question in due course.

Will we be subject to the European arrest warrant? At present, all British citizens on British soil may be subject to unevidenced arrest warrants issued by any judicial authority in Europe. The charges may be completely fictitious or based on the flimsiest of clues. No evidence is provided and no British court is allowed to ask to see any evidence. This has led to innocent British citizens being seized by British police under orders from continental authorities. In Greece, Express Newspapers, of which I was chairman, was convicted of criminal libel without even knowing that there was a court case going on. Fortunately, I was not arrested and have not been arrested since. These citizens have waited in foreign prisons, sometimes for months, with no right to a public hearing, while their cases are investigated.

Do we really want to remain in the EU for the next two years? Is it worth the risk? Even the poor old International Monetary Fund, which gets practically every forecast wrong—but maybe not this time—says that Greece’s debts are on an explosive path and the IMF appears unwilling to fund further bailouts. Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist, said recently that the ECB is becoming dangerously overextended and that,

“one day, the house of cards will collapse”.

He said that,

“the Stability and Growth Pact has more or less failed”,

and that,

“the no bail-out clause is violated every day”.

The ECB holds more than €1 trillion of bonds bought at artificially low or negative yields.

In the light of the parlous state of the Italian economy, the general and increasing discontent of voters in the EU, the terrible levels of youth unemployment in Greece, Italy and Spain, the vulnerability of the German banking system, in particular to all their loans to the southern members, and the crowning glory of Mr Verhofstadt, who recently said that we, the UK, are,

“rats leaving a sinking ship”,

are we not better off leaving quickly, rather than seeking to negotiate? We are serving notice under Article 50 so we can try to negotiate the terms of our future relationship with the EU. If we do so, the EU can drag this out at least until the two-year limit expires. The Government can try for all the best reasons, which one may admire, to negotiate, but to get agreement from all 27 countries will be impossible, let alone from the European Parliament. It would have been better to bite the bullet and get out before the house of cards comes tumbling down.

There are a few main priorities, of which I am sure we are all aware. We should convert all EU legislation into UK law and then amend or reform it as a matter of urgency. We should resolve that existing EU residents can remain in the UK. We should have our own fisheries policy in UK waters. We cannot join the EEA as we have ruled out free movement. We should seek to trade freely with the EU 27 as at present, or go to WTO rates for both sides; or, if the EU 27 do not agree, become a free-trade, low-tax area.

There are many other areas to consider, but we will have opened up our country to some 160 other countries in more rapidly expanding areas of the world, including the Commonwealth, which has stayed with us through thick and thin. As the President of the European Parliament said:

“The British have violated the rules. It is not the EU philosophy that the crowd can decide its fate”.


Well, they have decided. This House should now accept the Bill as presented to it by the elected House and not seek to tie the Government’s negotiating hand.

House of Lords Reform

Lord Stevens of Ludgate Excerpts

Tuesday 15th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevens of Ludgate (UKIP)]

My Lords, the title of today’s debate is “Further incremental reform to address the size of the House”. It seems a funny thing to debate. Surely the debate should be why the Prime Minister is creating so many new Members when we are already overcrowded. The best way to control immigration is to close UK borders. There are other solutions but that is the easiest solution, and the same applies here. Whether it is right to close down completely is another matter.

I am greatly reassured by the statement of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that the number of UKIP Peers should not be reduced. Looking at the numbers created under this and the last Government, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the Prime Minister is making a mockery of this House, deliberately to force reform from this place, because probably neither House will agree to it. The House of Commons will not, and why should it, when over a quarter of our Members were Members of the other place? But one has to ask the question: why should existing Members be penalised to accommodate more new Members? Why should we, who were appointed for life, now be told there will be a retiring age, fixed terms, attendance requirements—which of course achieve nothing—and then be criticised for not taking part in so many debates? For example, you can be in the House for three to four hours to speak for five minutes.

The recent spate of proposed appointments is a Dissolution Honours List. Where are the UKIP appointments? This is the party whose voting pattern helped this Government to be elected. Where is the recognition that UKIP got 4 million or 13% of the vote and came second in over 150 seats? UKIP required 100 times as many votes for its one elected MP as the Conservatives did for each of theirs. Surely one way to right this wrong is to honour the commitment given by the Government in this House in reply to Written Questions tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and by me. For example, on 21 May 2013, I asked a further Written Question on the same subject:

“To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they have taken to rebalance the membership of the House of Lords in line with the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election”.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, replied:

“It remains the Government’s intention that appointments to the House of Lords will be made with the objective of creating a second Chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election.

The Prime Minister exercises his powers in relation to appointments to the House of Lords in order to deliver this coalition commitment and will continue to keep numbers under review”.—[Official Report, 21/5/13; col. WA 57.]

One way to do that, while recognising the Cross-Benchers, would be to limit this House to, say, 600 Members to start with—the same as the reformed Commons—and to allocate Peerages based on the percentage vote secured by each party at the last general election. Members would be proposed by the respective parties, serve for five years and then be reviewed based on the following election result.

On the basis of votes cast last May, UKIP would be entitled to more than 65 Members rather than the three we have now—none of whom were originally members of UKIP. Is this really a fair representation of the views of the British population who, according to the latest opinion polls, might well vote to leave the European Union?

Despite our concern about the numbers in this House, the Government have had a chance to honour the above commitment but they have failed to do so. May I ask when or even if this will be honoured, or are the Government now wriggling on their latest statement that Peers’ numbers should reflect the result of the last general election? But even on that basis, how can the Dissolution Honours List be justified? A reduction in some parties’ membership of this House would be more appropriate. At the last general election the Conservatives got 330 seats with the vote from 24% of the electorate; UKIP got one seat with 8%. It is a clear case for electoral reform.

This House has too many Members, but if this Government are to persist in the creation of more, they should recognise their commitment to making this House more representative of the votes cast in the general election, and any new appointments should clearly honour that commitment.