Queen’s Speech

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 15th October 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this gracious Speech, especially its emphasis on innovation and science. I would have liked to speak on those topics, but I cannot be here on Thursday, so I will speak on Brexit. Who knows, perhaps this is the last chance to speak on Brexit in the future tense.

Over the past few months, I am sure I am not alone in being told by people elsewhere in the country, “You sit in Parliament—you must know what is going to happen about Brexit”. Fortunately, back in February I was given a perfect riposte to this statement by a sheep farmer in Teesdale, which I have used to deflect it ever since. He said that there are two kinds of people: those who do not know what is going to happen, and those who do not know that they do not know what is going to happen. I think I am in the former category, at least, so I am not going to speculate about what is going to happen this weekend. Instead, I will try to emphasise a simple philosophical truth: that uncertainty is never a reason for not taking risks or for inaction.

Yesterday, we heard from both sides of this House pleas for more understanding of each other’s points of view. I am not sure either Front Bench necessarily got the memo, judging by today’s contributions, but we must try in this respect. I voted to leave the EU and I hope we do leave. I think it is the right thing to do and I think we will be better off in the long run if we leave, with or without a licence. However, I do not know these things to be true for sure—of course I do not—and most Members opposite do not know that leaving is foolish, that remaining is sensible or that leaving with no deal is cataclysmic. They cannot possibly know these things with the certainty that they often express. The economy is a complex system with multiple causes, consequences and feedback loops, and so is civil society. Such systems are genuinely unpredictable because of the way in which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large changes in outcome, and the way in which consequences can also become causes.

The inventor and writer Jim Lovelock, whose 100th birthday party I was fortunate enough to attend earlier this year, once said:

“I think anyone that tries to predict more than five to ten years ahead is a bit of an idiot, so many things can change unexpectedly”.


This is why, as Professor Philip Tetlock has shown, in economic forecasting experts generally do less well than taxi drivers. Professor Tetlock ran a tournament testing 28,000 specific predictions from 284 experts over 20 years, starting in the 1980s. He found that, on average, expert forecasters were only slightly more reliable than chance, and that the more famous the forecaster, the worse his or her performance. If we did not know this before, we surely know it now. The forecasts made during the referendum campaign by the Treasury, the Bank of England and the IMF for what would happen to unemployment, the public finances, the stock market and growth if we voted to leave were not just wrong; they were upside down. They foresaw things getting worse when in fact they got better.

Does this opacity of the future not therefore argue that we should not let go of nurse, for fear of finding something worse? Emphatically not. Taking decisions under uncertainty is the dilemma that all human beings face all the time. Staying under the bed is not the best way to get ahead in life. Doing nothing might be even more risky than doing something. In the present case, for instance, the European Union’s general direction of travel has grown more centralising since the referendum, especially since the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen, so remaining—or rejoining—will not be on the same terms as those we had in 2016. Therefore, the status quo is also a risky option. As Andrew Lilico recently wrote:

“The EU is not a trade area. It is a political union, with EU citizens, an EU currency, a Parliament, a system of presidents, a civil service, a central bank, an army and border guards. In due course there will be EU taxes, EU debts and EU political parties who have policies for EU spending. The UK does not want to do any of these things. We are just in the way. The EU has tolerated us slowing everything down for far too long”.


Becoming a province in a nascent empire is as big a risk as becoming an independent state again. I used to avoid using the word “empire” about the EU, because it seemed too provocative, but now that we have heard Guy Verhofstadt using the word at the Lib Dem conference again and again—and with fervent approval—I do not see that there can be any doubt as to who the fervent imperialists are in this debate.

There is no risk-free future. We heard yesterday, from my noble friend Lord Dobbs and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, and today from my noble friend Lord Ahmad, calls for more optimism. This Prime Minister is indeed an optimist. One of the features of a rational optimist is that people like us notice that people tend to be far too pessimistic about the world. Let me give you a couple of quotations from when I was a teenager and very pessimistic about the world. The economist Robert Heilbroner wrote a bestseller in 1973 in which he argued that:

“The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seems to be very slim indeed”.


The ecologist Paul Ehrlich, speaking in 1971, said:

“If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000”.


If we had listened to such people and battened down the economic hatches, opting for de-growth—which I argued for at the time as a precocious teenage idealist—we would have missed out on the greatest increase in human prosperity and welfare any generation has ever experienced, and the greatest decline in poverty, violence and ill health, globally and nationally. Remember what the media said about the Y2K computer bug? A few days before the new millennium, the Sunday Times wrote:

“This is not a prediction, it is a certainty: there will be serious disruption in the world’s financial services industry… It’s going to be ugly”.


So, yes, I am as sure as I can be that the predictions of doom if we leave the EU are exaggerated—because predictions of doom nearly always are—and that the comforts of staying are also exaggerated. I beg this procrastinating Parliament to take the risk of leaving, rather than run the risk of staying, to step into the future and grasp the opportunities of change.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Taverne (LD)]

My Lords, I want to return to one of the most important decisions that we face in the near future about the future of Britain as a whole. It is the question of whether we should hold a new referendum. I want to stress how strong the arguments are in favour of doing so.

Brexiteers say that we are ignoring the people’s will but they seem to assume that the people’s will is the same now as it was in 2016—or will be by the time we hold a referendum. Since 2016, a lot of older people—who mainly voted leave—have died, and there will be a lot of new, young voters who will, on present evidence, mainly vote remain. Leaving aside those demographics, what matters is that we now know much more about what Brexit actually means. There have been a number of forecasts by independent bodies such as the IFS and by experts asked by the Government to assess what the future holds. These have produced strong evidence that we will be much poorer, especially after a no-deal Brexit.

I am aware that the noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, says that experts are often wrong. I have a certain bias in favour of the IFS because I was its first director. I am proud of the fact that I nursed it in its early days and acted as midwife to the infant which has now grown into a formidable adult. However, there are other cases where people make forecasts and the evidence begins to support it; we should then take note of it. I differ profoundly from the noble Viscount, who is a sceptic about climate change. There is now plenty of evidence that climate change should be taken enormously seriously.

[Viscount Ridley]

I draw attention to the fact that I regard the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, as a mentor, friend and ally on the issue of genetically modified crops, on which we have both said exactly the same thing.

[Lord Taverne]

I quite agree. I have great admiration for the noble Viscount as a scientist; he has written some excellent books about science.

The evidence produced by the IFS and many others—that the future we face from a no-deal Brexit would be disastrous and that, in any event, Brexit means we would be much poorer—is dismissed by Brexiteers because any evidence that contradicts their beliefs is dismissed as more of Project Fear. Even if one disregards the forecasts of economists, it is hard to completely ignore the predictions of employers such as the car manufacturers, Airbus, the chemical industry, the pharmaceutical companies and massive numbers of small, and many large, service companies, that if there is Brexit they will move production from the United Kingdom. There are already signs of this. Many businesses have already incurred losses and face enormous costs because of the very prospect of Brexit.

Why do we also assume that most leavers just want out, and why do we pay so much attention to those who shout the loudest? People give very different reasons why they voted leave, and poll evidence is scarce. However, one significant poll of a massive sample was carried out by YouGov on the eve of the referendum. It found that one view was almost universally shared by leave voters: they saw no downside to Brexit. They nearly all believed that, once we had cast off the shackles of Brussels, we would emerge into the sunny uplands. I fear that the evidence from business is beginning to prove that the more gloomy forecasts are likely to be right. I believe that the forecast that we will be a poorer nation will influence a vital group of leave voters to change their minds.

That raises the question of whether a new referendum should precede a general election. This must surely be a no-brainer, especially for the Labour Party. The choice in the referendum this time must be a clear one; not like saying, “Brexit means Brexit”. There may be some problems about the exact wording, but the obvious choice must be between Boris Johnson’s deal, if there is one—or a no-deal Brexit if there is not—and remain. How can this be clearly decided in a general election? Voters vote for different parties for a great variety of reasons; for some, Brexit may not be one of them at all. I remember the 1974 election, at the time of the three-day week and the miners’ strike. Heath said it would be about who governs Britain. It was, for a few days. Then people returned to the usual issues: the cost of living, jobs, and the NHS. In no way will, or can, a general election solve the Brexit problem. Indeed, in so far as it does feature, Labour may well suffer greatly if, as seems likely, its stance on Brexit is still uncertain. We seem to be moving towards a new referendum. It must precede, and not just be part of, the coming general election.