Lord Tebbit
Main Page: Lord Tebbit (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Pearson of Rannoch (UKIP)
My Lords, I fear that it is that time of year again, as the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees put it when we last approved our EU Committee on 16 May 2013. Everything I said then remains valid for this proposed committee. Its composition is heavily Europhile with, so far as I can see, only two mildly Eurosceptic Peers out of its 19 proposed members, of whom at least eight are among the most ardent Europhiles in your Lordships’ House. I accept that the noble Lord’s task is not easy and that your Lordships’ House is a very Europhile place, perhaps because it contains so many former EU Commissioners and employees in receipt of forfeitable EU pensions, and so many former Foreign Secretaries and Ministers of the Crown who have played their part in this great country paying billions a year to Brussels to take our sovereignty from us. Indeed, I estimate that there are perhaps only eight out of roughly 750 active Peers in your Lordships’ House who are prepared to say publicly that we should leave the EU forthwith, without the charade of renegotiating the terms of our membership.
That is why I have been asking the Prime Minister to fulfil his commitment to make the composition of this House better reflect the votes cast at the previous general election. It is not because I agree with that policy, which is clearly very misguided. I imagine we all agree that one of the great strengths of your Lordships’ House is precisely that it does not reflect the composition of the House of Commons. However, I have been using the Prime Minister’s promise in an attempt to get some improvement on the present imbalance, to which I have referred. I should now correct last Saturday’s BBC News coverage in this respect because I never asked for the 23 new UKIP Peers which our vote at the previous general election would indicate. I have suggested four, or perhaps six, but without success.
I ask yet again whether we need six EU sub-committees, whose resources could be redistributed over many other subject areas where your Lordships’ House does such valuable work for the nation. In other areas, apart from the EU, I submit that your Lordships are often more in touch with British public opinion and interest than is the House of Commons, which is why your Lordships’ reports on those subjects are so respected by the nation.
By contrast, our EU reports are routinely ignored here and in Brussels where it is hard to find a recommendation that has been accepted. Between January 2010 and June 2013, the latest period for which figures are available, the scrutiny reserve of our committees was overridden 298 times in either or both Houses— 235 times in your Lordships’ House alone. Not that Brussels appears to take much notice of our Government’s views either. Our Government have been outvoted in the Council of Ministers on every one of the 55 objections they have raised against new EU legislation since 1996.
I suggest we reject this Motion today and respectfully request the noble Lord the Chairman of Committees to return with a more balanced composition for the committee and without our agreement for any sub-committees at all.
I conclude by suggesting that the first task of our new committee should be to report to the British people how EU law-making, which makes so much of our national law, actually works, of which they are at present largely ignorant. I suggest it would be helpful, as we approach renegotiation of the treaty of Rome, if our people understood how the unelected EU Commission has the sole right to propose all EU legislation, which it does in secret; how those proposals are then negotiated, still in secret, in COREPER—the Committee of Permanent Representatives, bureaucrats appointed by the member states—and how the proposals then go to the Council of Ministers for further clandestine discussion; and to the EU Parliament, with its powers of codecision. Such a report would also explain why the appointment of the next President of the Commission is so important, which at the moment the people do not understand at all. They are beginning to cotton on that the whole project is wildly anti-democratic, but they do not know why. I think they should be told. The BBC refuses to do it, so I suggest that the first report of our new committee should fill this vital gap in our people’s understanding of our arrangements with the European Union. I look forward to the noble Lord’s reply.
Lord Tebbit (Con)
I do not want to delay matters, but I want to mention briefly these facts. On becoming a commissioner, a man or woman is required to swear an oath of loyalty to the European Union, which, to my mind, is incompatible with, for example, the oath which one swears as a privy counsellor, and when one retires from the Commission and draws a pension, that pension is dependent on the continuing loyalty of the former commissioner, who is enjoined not to do or say anything which would be to the detriment of the European Union. That seems to present a man or woman with the problem of two masters. I think it unwise that we should exacerbate that conflict by placing such people on the European Union Committee.
Lord Bowness (Con)
My Lords, I will not enter into an argument with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, on the general points, but on the specific, as a former member of the European Union Committee, I think he has to be challenged on questioning whether there is a need for the number of sub-committees. Your Lordships ought to be reminded that one of the objectives of scrutiny is to hold our own Government to account. Rightly or wrongly, the amount of work involved covering the number of topics involved is such that to reduce the number of sub-committees, which have already been reduced from seven to six, would have a very adverse effect on that vital work of holding our own Government to account, never mind making our contribution and input into the policy of the European Union.