Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Vinson Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, 23 June was not independence day for Britain; it was the day the UK shot itself in its foot. Our economy has been doing so well. While European economies have been doing badly we have had cumulative growth of 62% since the single market started in 1993. We did not lose our sovereignty. We have had the best of both worlds. We have been in the EU but not in the euro. We have been in the EU but not in Schengen. We pour our beer in pints. We measure our roads in miles. Yet Vote Leave makes claims about red tape and regulations. I have seen in the 10 years that I have been in this House that the regulations that we make—the laws that we make that affect our daily lives—are made by us right here, right now in this House in this Parliament.

We take for granted 1.2 million of our citizens living in the European Union and we have 3 million European Union citizens living here. How dare people even think of sending these people back? These are people who left their families a thousand miles away, who came here not knowing the language to a strange culture and made friends, worked hard, paid taxes, put in five times more than they took out and contributed to our economy. How ungrateful can we be? We should be grateful for the efforts that they have put in. They are welcome to stay here.

We have for many years been saying: “Take control of our borders”. I believe we have lost control of our borders. I have been saying for many years: “Illegal immigration is the issue. Let’s bring back exit checks. Let’s scan every passport, EU and non-EU. Let’s make that first step, rather than making immigration the excuse that we have”.

Our universities will suffer. Already we have lost our AAA rating. Eight of our universities have already lost their credit ratings. Our universities receive £1 billion from the EU. I am president of UKCISA.

[Lord Vinson (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bilimoria]

My Lords, I am sorry, but I do not have much time. We have 500,000 international students in this country; 170,000 of them are from the EU.

In the finance sector, big banks have already begun to make plans to move staff out. The Royal Bank of Scotland has lost value of £8 billion. That is more than we put into the EU every year and it is taxpayers’ money.

The biggest lie of them all was the £350 million that we give to the EU emblazoned on the Brexit bus with: “Let’s give that money to the NHS instead”. There was the Vote Leave advertising film showing the NHS inside the EU and the NHS outside the EU. What is going on here? It was completely misleading. These are lies. It is a net contribution of £8 billion a year, 1% of our annual government expenditure per year. That is not going to shift the needle, let alone save the NHS.

What was the Electoral Commission doing? That is what I ask the Minister. In India, which has one of the largest elections in the world, the election commissioner is the most powerful person in the country at the time. Here we have an Electoral Commission asleep on the job. Surely we need to look at the role of the Electoral Commission. Then the result would have been completely different, because I have met people who have said: “I voted to leave to save the NHS”.

We rely hugely on inward investment. The referendum saw the pound plummet to levels not seen since the 1980s, when I was here as a student, when the UK was the sick man of Europe—the 1980s when this country had a glass ceiling for foreigners. Today in this country, anyone can get anywhere, regardless of race, religion and background, yet we hear of these awful hate crimes, attacks against migrants and discrimination, which I have experienced myself. Do we want to wind the clock back?

In this referendum, 72% of voters under 25 wanted to remain in the European Union but, sadly, just over one-third of them turned out to vote, whereas 83% of those over 65 turned out to vote and they overwhelmingly voted to leave. I hope that the youth of this country have learned their lesson for ever: they have to exercise their precious right to vote and come out, regardless of whether it is in or out of term time; they must come out to vote for their futures.

What is more, I forecast that if we left the EU, it would threaten the EU itself. Already, many countries in Europe are demanding a referendum, which could lead to the break-up of the EU, which could lead to the break-up of the euro, which could lead to the biggest financial crisis the globe has ever seen. Already Scotland, a region that unanimously voted to remain, is asking for another referendum. Northern Ireland, which voted to remain, talks of merging with Ireland. We are going to be a withered, shrunken England and Wales. Is it not gut-wrenching to see Nigel Farage, who was so responsible for creating the mess that we are in, resigning as leader of UKIP and this weekend wearing Union Jack shoes when he could be responsible for breaking up our union?

Look at the treacherous behaviour of the people leading the leave campaign. Boris Johnson stabs the Prime Minister in the back and leads Vote Leave. Andrea Leadsom stabs Boris. What a hypocrite she is. She said that leaving the European Union would be a disaster:

“I don’t think the UK should leave the EU. I think it would be a disaster for our economy and would lead to a decade of economic and political uncertainty”.

Wow, how prescient. Michael Gove stabs Boris Johnson in the back. These are the people who led us to leave the European Union. What were people thinking? Project Fear? Project Reality.

The referendum was advisory, and pro-remain MPs outnumber leave backers in the House of Commons, the other place, by 3:1 and in this House by far more. There is now a strong legal case, as we have heard, that Article 50 cannot be triggered until Parliament votes on it. Here is a conundrum: with the lies, the deceit, the treachery and the turmoil that has been caused, will a responsible Parliament affirm the 52:48 referendum result built on such shaky ground? With hindsight—this point has not been brought up by anybody—a decision as important as this should have had a two-thirds hurdle. Changing the fixed-term Parliament in the other place needs a two-thirds majority. To change the Indian constitution, you need a two-thirds majority. There would then have been a definitive result.

As for the Opposition, please forgive me, but Jeremy Corbyn has been absolutely useless as a leader, and his role in the referendum was pathetic. That could have changed the whole picture—and now look at the turmoil the Labour Party is in. On top of all this, we have 4 million people signing a petition asking for a second referendum. There is no legal obstacle to holding a second referendum, and a general election could even be treated as a proxy second referendum on the issue. Would the Minister agree? A MORI poll says that 48% of voters agree that there should be a general election before Britain begins formal Brexit negotiations. A BBC “Newsnight” poll says that a third of voters do not believe the UK will leave the EU, despite the referendum result.

According to Saturday’s Financial Times, the UK is now heading towards,

“lower growth, more uncertainty, a weaker currency and looser monetary policy”.

That is just what I said on 15 June, in my last speech in the debate here. Our airport expansion has already been delayed. Brexit will hugely damage our economy, our businesses, our citizens, our stability and our standing in the world. The Governor of the Bank of England is already talking of economic post-traumatic stress disorder. The Economist Intelligence Unit projects a 6% contraction in the economy by 2020.

Brexit is now the central focus of politics and government and will be for years to come. Just think of the opportunity cost of all that time, which our leaders and civil servants could be spending improving this country and the lives of our citizens. Switzerland voted two years ago by 50.3% to modify the free movement of people—two years later, it has got nowhere in its negotiations with the European Union.

I conclude by saying that this 52:48 vote to leave will not actually achieve the slogan of Vote Leave: “Take back control”. We have actually lost control and will lose more. The irony of it all is that the chief Brexiteer publication, the Sun—wot won it—published a poll just this weekend showing that 67% believed the priority of the new Prime Minister should be steadying the economy. Only 28% of them want tackling immigration to be a priority for the Prime Minister. The irony of that is unbelievable. This wretched referendum was a dreadful decision. This country had the wool pulled over its eyes and was misled by a buffoon and a court jester—the Pied Pipers of Hamelin leading our people over the white cliffs of Dover.

Now is the time for us as a country, in the words of the leave campaign, to take back control. We need strong leadership and we need to negotiate with the European Union before getting anywhere near Article 50. Then, whether the decision is for staying in the European Economic Area with restricted movement of people or staying in the EU with restricted movement of people, we can go to the nation through a general election, properly supervised by an effective Electoral Commission, so that people can make an informed decision about our children’s and our grandchildren’s future, with the youth turning out in full force.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Vinson]

My Lords, all of us at Westminster are responsible for the tangle we are in, and have only ourselves to blame. As we think about getting out of Europe, we should think of how we got into this state.

We pushed on as internationalists with a well-intentioned daydream of a united republic of Europe. We set out to minimise the distinction between natural citizens and outsiders. We gave complete disdain to patriotism, which—inescapably—is the tribal loyalty that gives the social cohesion that glues society together. We wilfully overlooked the democratic deficit that is the inherent weakness of the European Union and which, coupled with the demise of the euro, will lead to its eventual downfall.

We, the economically privileged, preached about the benefits of immigration, and damned as racist those who disagreed and moaned about the inadequacies of the health service. But we refused to face up to the effects of population growth of half a million a year. I have sat here most of the day and hardly anybody has mentioned the horrendous problem we will have in this country of trying to accommodate a further 5 million people over the next 10 years, in the same way that we have been bottlenecked by 5 million over the past 10 years. It is nothing to do with race, creed or anything else. It is to do with the huge overload on our services. We have not faced up to this, and to the effect that it is having on our hospitals, schools, prisons and housing, and not least on the wage levels of those less fortunate than ourselves. The silent majority who have had to suffer the consequences used Brexit to express their concern. They voted for reasonable control of immigration and there will be riots if this is not implemented.

Then we come to the problem of the young. Everybody says that they voted to stay in. The problem there is that they have yet to experience that democracy is a frail concept. Democracy when it works gives social stability while it is believed in, but it is incompatible with the coming reality of a centralised, unaccountable governance of Europe. The noble dream of ever-closer union is having the opposite effect. Many of those who voted for Brexit felt that their views were being ignored, particularly by the party that hitherto represented them. They felt deserted by the Labour Party and theirs was a cry for help. They were patronised and assured, but not convinced, that all was well and that, being at the heart of Europe, we could influence policies. Little did they know that at the Council of Ministers, where we have only 14% of the votes, of the last 72 proposals put forward by our Government, none was accepted. So much for having influence. The EU is a dysfunctional system that depends on arm-twisting and the pressure of a thousand lobbyists. It is a perfect example of regulation without rectification—an updated version of “no taxation without representation”—that has caused those who care about democracy to demand the bringing back of self-administration.

On a more positive note, trade crosses all borders. Tariffs may hinder trade but they seldom stop it. The Woolsack in front of us is a symbol of our timeless trade with the continent. Some 14 million jobs in the EU are partly dependent on our custom. They need to trade with us—and will. You do not have to be a member of the single market to trade with it, so the only obstacle to trade is tariffs—which on average are less than 2%, except on cars where, as we buy so many more cars from them, a deal is bound to be done. Of course, we never did get, in spite of trying, free trade for services.

Meanwhile the good news is that the pound has dropped some 7%, so that the tariff cost is now well offset. Our pound has been overvalued for years. A lower pound will help correct the huge imbalance of trade and borrowings. It will make our manufacturing industry, and farming, very competitive. That is greatly to the benefit of all those out of work who have good manual and dextrous skills—skills, incidentally, that are unsuitable for coffee shops, through which it is difficult to get the productivity that the economy needs.

So now we have the perfect moment to get our economy moving along the right lines. A revitalised Government should encourage saving, not even more debt. We are borrowed up to our eyes, both personally and nationally. We should start a new form of infrastructure bond that is pension suitable, and use the proceeds to develop, as a priority for job creation, a massive investment in our decaying infrastructure. We should get on with Heathrow. We should scrap the entirely unsuitable HS2. We should get out of the engagement with Hinkley Point, which is already a dying technology. There are better nuclear ones on the immediate horizon. We should, regretfully, look at our wasteful overseas aid, every penny of which adds to our overseas indebtedness because we have to borrow it before we can spend it. We should use the savings to increase our defence expenditure, which sometimes is the best sort of aid we can give to other countries. We should now have the opportunity to borrow cheaply and to get on with the massive building of hospitals, schools and transport that our infrastructure needs. We should get Britain cracking.

Unshackled, in due course free from excessive EU bureaucracy, and with compliance only when needed, this great country—one of the largest economies in the world—will prosper, with control of its own borders and sovereignty restored, as a major trading nation on the right side of history.