European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Willoughby de Broke Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, for introducing this important Bill. It has been a long time getting here, has it not? It is more than 20 years since we last debated an EU referendum, when there was a Motion to approve a referendum on the Maastricht treaty. I voted for it, but we were defeated, thanks largely to the very successful whipping of the then Conservative Chief Whip in this House, the noble Lord, Lord Hesketh—who, I am happy to say, has now seen the light and is a member of UKIP.

I have to say that I am still astonished and disappointed that it was successive Conservative Governments who started handing over the powers of Parliament and of the British people, without asking them, to Brussels. That was enthusiastically followed up by successive Labour Governments, who were cheered from the sidelines by the Liberal Democrats, for whom no surrender to Europe and Brussels is ever meek enough.

Many of the powers were given away, as I will tell noble Lords in a minute, without the British people ever being asked whether that was what they wanted. Treaty after treaty—Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam, Lisbon—drained ever more power away from the British Parliament at Westminster and from the people of this country and channelled it to the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Very little that matters is now left to the Westminster Parliament, which has nothing at all to say about the economy, immigration, energy, trade, agriculture, fisheries and social policy.

During those 20 seemingly endless years, with endless debates about our membership of the EU, some of us were always against the handover of powers—the surrender to Brussels of the powers of Parliament and of the British people. However, in this House at least, we have always been outnumbered by the Europhile tendency—the Euro-grandees, who seem unable to see politics except through their Euro-prism. They accuse those who believe in parliamentary democracy in this country—the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, was at it today—of being “little Englanders”, of wrapping ourselves in the union jack and of wanting to turn back the clock. That is patronising rubbish. Why are they so blinded by Brussels and the desire for further integration that they are unable to see the truth?

After all, it is the Europhiles who got it wrong, not us, the “foam-flecked Europhobes”. It was the Europhiles who wanted us to join the euro. They said that if we did not we would be marginalised. However, the euro has not exactly been a shining example of political and fiscal success, has it? Just ask the millions of unemployed in France, Spain, Ireland, Portugal and Greece how they are getting on with the euro. It is not really very successful.

The Europhiles were badly wrong then and they are badly wrong now when they say that we will be marginalised and somehow turned into a pariah state if we were rash enough to leave the EU. As EU Employment Commissioner László Andor happily put it the other day, we will become the “nasty country” of Europe—that is, the nasty country that gives the EU £20 billion a year at the moment. We look forward to getting that back.

The Vice-President of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, could not have been blunter when she spoke in Athens the day before yesterday. She said:

“We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government”.

That is not an invention of Nigel Farage and UKIP’s “foam-flecked Europhobes”—it is straight from the apparatchik’s mouth. So we know what direction Europe is going in. I am grateful to Mr Andor and Ms Reding for reminding us that the EU is going one way and one way only, for reminding us how damaging and how humiliating our membership of this club is and for reminding us that the European project is all about rampant supranationalism, with a sneering disregard for national sovereignty.

This Bill will give the British people a chance to make their voice heard, and to vote on whether they wish to continue to be run from Brussels or whether it is time to throw off the shackles of the EU and to be a truly free nation with the ability to frame our own laws and decide our own destiny at last.