European Union Referendum (Date of Referendum etc.) Regulations 2016

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, at this late hour a lot has been said already. I wish to make a specific argument about the document The Best of Both Worlds and a general one about the provision of accurate information during the campaign that we face.

On the second page of the Prime Minister’s foreword, he says:

“Leaving Europe would threaten our economic and our national security”.

But nobody on either side of this argument is talking about leaving Europe. We are talking about leaving the political arrangement known as the European Union, as the Prime Minister himself said in his Bloomberg speech in 2013:

“If we leave the EU, we cannot of course leave Europe”.

This is not just a semantic point. It goes to the heart of the problem that I have with this and other dossiers put out by the Government supposedly to inform voters before the referendum. Again and again these documents make claims for the European Union that it does not deserve. The credit or the blame often lies elsewhere—or at least is shared elsewhere with inter- governmental collaborations or with national decisions. Let me give a few examples.

On page 42, The Best of Both Worlds makes the claim that EU membership is necessary to combat Russian aggression in Ukraine. The evidence for this claim is threadbare to say the least. The US and Canada both imposed sanctions on Russia over its actions in Ukraine and, indeed, it is arguable that the EU bears some responsibility—some, not a lot—for provoking Russia with the ill-judged inclusion of military matters in its negotiation with Ukraine. On page 23, it is claimed that EU membership is necessary to protect UK energy security. How can this be when 60% of our imported gas comes from Norway and 60% of our coal from Russia, Colombia and America? There is no common EU energy policy. On page 42, The Best of Both Worlds makes the claim that EU membership is necessary to deal with Ebola. This is nonsense. Norway made a significant contribution to fighting Ebola. The EU has treaty obligations to co-operate with third countries in the field of public health. Anyway, it was mainly through the World Health Organization that we made our magnificent and leading contribution to defeating that terrifying outbreak in Sierra Leone.

I could just about understand if these frankly mendacious claims were being made on behalf of the remain campaign in the cut and thrust of debate. After all, that campaign has been extraordinarily careless with facts and numbers already. Only this afternoon, before the Treasury Select Committee in the other place, the leaders of the BSE campaign admitted that 3 million jobs would not be lost, that all the trading would go on, and that claims of an £11 billion rise in prices are entirely speculative—and, therefore, that many of their own claims cannot be trusted. But the claims in The Best of Both Worlds are being made by civil servants in supposedly neutral documents. One reason this matters, as I argued when the European Union Referendum Bill was before this House, is that we must make this a final decision that all sides can respect going into the future. So it is vital that the playing field is level and the Government are seen to give accurate information that is not misleading. I have to say that the worries that some of us voiced during those debates about purdah and related matters look increasingly justified. I think my noble friend Lord Forsyth was quite right to use the word “propaganda” earlier this afternoon.

Will my noble friend the Minister take great care to give credit to intergovernmental arrangements and national actions and not to fall for exaggerated claims made on behalf of the political and bureaucratic arrangements within the EU? Listening to some of the speeches this afternoon, you would think that the sun could not rise in the east tomorrow morning if the European Commission did not command it and that it would not if we left the European Union. We hear that the EU is a military alliance, apparently eclipsing the role of NATO. We hear that the EU is to be given credit that is actually due to the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the G20, the G7, Basel, Codex, Five Eyes and many more such international collaborations. Again and again, we find that standards that are set at the international level are simply transmitted through the EU to us.

In the case of scientific co-operation, not only is our closest scientific co-operator—measured by the number of co-authors on scientific papers—the United States, not the EU, but many of the formal scientific collaborations across the continent of Europe, such as the European Molecular Biology Organization, the fusion project ITER, the European Space Agency, and the particle physics laboratory CERN are not EU projects, they are European projects. Indeed, CERN has an accelerator which runs under an EU external border. Furthermore, even the EU’s science funding projects, FP7 and Horizon 2020, have 13 non-EU members in them including Norway, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel and other countries. I ask my noble friend the Minister: can we please not make the mistake of using “Europe” when we mean the EU, and not imply that they are the same thing when they are not? One is a political and bureaucratic supranational body with a democratic deficit and the other is a principle of international collaboration.

To end on another point, I agree with what has been said on the other side of this argument: that we should remain civil and amicable throughout this process. So it is that I have to report a worrying development. As I was coming through Westminster Tube station yesterday and limping, unfortunately, because of my sciatica, I passed the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, who said to me, “Damn—I told them to shoot your arm, not your leg”.