European Union Referendum Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak briefly in support of the amendments from both my noble friends.

As my noble friend Lord Hamilton said, the Commission’s denial that it will campaign is belied by the evidence. We cannot take that promise on trust. Jonathan Faull stated in a letter dated 4 September that:

“The Commission will play the role that it is given by the treaties, notably to promote the general interest of the EU”.

That could be interpreted as campaigning or it could be seen as being more innocent than that. On 2 October, Jean Claude Juncker said that the European Commission would have,

“input into information activities in the run-up to the UK referendum”.

As my noble friend Lord Hamilton said, in the Irish referendum in 2009 and the Croatian referendum in 2012, it was very clear that the European Commission did use finance to, in the case of Croatia, foster an,

“increased level of public and political support to the EU”.

The EU institutions have budgets worth £3.1 billion, which include clauses allowing promotion of the EU.

In this country, the European Communities Act 1972 allows EU institutions to engage in activities that are authorised by EU law. To the extent that they are operating under EU law, EU institutions are exempt from UK campaign controls. The Electoral Commission says that it has no regulatory powers that could be used directly against these institutions if they do undertake such activity. That question needs to be addressed.

On Amendment 21, from my noble friend Lord Forsyth, I agree that judicial review is clearly a nuclear option that is not going to do much good if these rules are transgressed. If purdah is to be taken seriously, a more effective, prompter enforcement mechanism must be found.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

My Lords, I do not want to say too much at this time of night but I want to make a couple of points.

First, on the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, the Commission can interfere, as he said, in all sorts of ways. One of the ways—this has some relationship to the alterations that were made earlier to the franchise—is through its entry into primary and secondary schools with what some of us would term propaganda material. The Education Act 1996 makes it clear in Clauses 406 and 407 that there should be balance. In spite of that, the Government, according to their Answers to my Written Questions, seem not to be very concerned with this and will do nothing to ensure that schools and head teachers make sure that there is balance on the question of Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Even now, the EU is seeking to advertise itself in our countryside. It wants farmers to put up huge advertising boards, saying, “You are getting all this money from the EU; you should be grateful and should therefore advertise the fact that this money is coming from the EU”. Not many farmers are going to be fooled by that, because they will know that, for every pound we get, we have first to give the EU three, so the grants to farmers are in fact some of our own money coming back. The rest of it, or much of it, goes to other farmers to subsidise their much less well-farmed areas.

There are all sorts of ways in which the EU can intervene in our affairs. It does so and it will continue do so. One way or another, by hook or by crook, the EU will interfere in the referendum when it comes.

European Union Referendum Bill

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill. I believe that the Government are clearly acting in the national interest in giving the people the final decision on this matter and I congratulate them on keeping their manifesto promise in this respect.

I also congratulate my noble friend the Minister on her opening remarks, which very crisply set out what can be achieved by this referendum. As she said, it is absolutely vital that it is seen to be robust and fair. We want to settle this question for a generation. I will possibly vote to leave unless the negotiations come up with good results but, if I do so and I lose, I will not complain unless the referendum has been unfair, and I am sure that others on all sides will take that view. So when the Minister says that we need to strengthen the perception that the neutrality of the Bill is beyond doubt, I heartily concur with that sentiment. The wording of the question, which achieves the maximum level of neutrality, is a good improvement. I welcome that as well and echo what my noble friend Lord Norton said about the inherent bias in “yes” and “no”.

However, that is precisely why Clause 6 needs to be scrutinised very carefully. This is the clause under which exemptions to Section 125 of the 2000 Act can be applied for and where the purdah rules can be altered, if necessary, in the run-up to the election. I am concerned about the power to make exceptions to Section 125 and echo what the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, said in his intervention on the Minister: that we need to see what those exceptions are as soon as possible and not just four months before the referendum. As the Minister said, we want a fair campaign so that the deck is not stacked in favour of one side or another. In his closing remarks in the other place, Minister John Penrose said that a 16-week referendum period with no announcements in that time will be allowed. Will the Government put that assurance in the legislation?

On the question of 16 and 17 year- olds, I was 17 in 1975. That means that I am one of the oldest people in the country and the House who has never had a say on the question of membership of the European Union. I am longing to have a say; I am looking forward to getting my chance at last. I am not sure that I would trust my 17 year-old self to vote sensibly on that matter, and that is probably partly why I think the Government are right to stick to the Westminster franchise on this—to disfranchise my 17 year-old self. It is the only way to solve the various conundrums that were raised by my noble friend Lord Balfe and the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, about how to set this franchise. The easiest thing is to go for the Westminster franchise, plus, of course, Members of this House.

The timing of this referendum is key. Over the next few years, the European Union is going to change beyond all recognition anyway. The integration of the eurozone is clearly required and necessary. Even if one does not think that it is going to happen anyway, one just has to read the report of the five Presidents or the state of the union speech of Mr Juncker, in which he could not have made it clearer that there will be a new integration of the eurozone and that the UK will have to seek a new status of some kind within that arrangement anyway, by 2020. In a sense, all that we are arguing about is how much independence we will have and what form it will take. Personally, I think that the leap in the dark is to leap in with that very uncertain arrangement.

Many of the speeches today have prematurely joined the battle of the referendum itself, rather than the question of this Bill. In the interests of brevity, I will try to avoid that temptation—except to say that I look forward to a chance to join battle and answer some of the questions that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, raised at the beginning of the debate about what we would look like if we were outside. For the moment, I will answer it with one word: independence. The answer to the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham, as to whether we would have a seat at the table, is yes, we would have a seat on the World Trade Organization instead of 1/28th of a seat.

In conclusion, I applaud the Government for bringing forward this Bill and urge them to stick to their guns and make absolutely sure that the referendum process is as robust and fair as it can be.

Queen’s Speech

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Young of Norwood Green, and what he says on apprenticeships is much appreciated. I should like to focus my remarks chiefly on the small business, enterprise and employment Bill, but I shall also touch on agriculture and the environment. In doing so, I declare my relevant interests as listed in the register, particularly on the subject of agriculture.

I begin by congratulating my noble friend Lord Livingston not only on his remarks about business in opening this debate but on what he said in Liverpool yesterday. If the press is to be believed, he said that this is,

“a creative country, a modern country, an innovative country, a country led by design”.

I welcome those remarks. He was of course talking about the revival of the economy of the north-west of England, but I hope that he will not mind if I also draw his attention to the remarkable transformation that we are beginning to see in the economy of the north-east of England. That is something that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham touched on in his excellent maiden speech, on which I congratulate him. There are more people at work in the north-east LEP area than ever before. We have seen the equivalent of six new Nissan plants in the north-east in the past 12 months. These are good jobs in software and offshore in engineering and technology. Overall, productivity in the north-east is up by 14% between 2009 and 2012, which is three times as great an increase in productivity as in the country as a whole. While mentioning productivity, I also want to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Bamford, on his excellent maiden speech.

Turning to the UK as a whole, I probably do not need to tell my noble friend the Minister about the vital importance of innovation. That is the theme I particularly want to talk about. Two-thirds of UK growth between 1997 and 2007 was due to innovation according to NESTA—the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. There is no way that we can grow out of the debt burden that still hangs over our economy without huge amounts of innovation. We are on the brink of several innovative revolutions in technology: in personalised medicine, on which we stand a good chance of being in the forefront; in 3D printing; in self-driven vehicles; in self limiting crypto-currencies, I read in some newspapers; and in collaborative consumption, where we can each use our spare rooms to become hoteliers and our used cars to become car rental companies. The other exciting thing that is happening all over the world is peer-to-peer networks—which we are very good at in this place, obviously, but I think it means something else. I looked up some numbers and discovered that, if you bought a pair of jeans in 1982 and were on the average wage, it took an hour and 50 minutes of work to earn the price of those jeans. Today it costs 41 minutes for an equivalent pair of jeans. That is what innovation delivers. It delivers a shrinkage in the amount of time that people have to work to fulfil their needs. That, of course, enables them to fulfil more needs and provide more people with jobs.

On the subject of innovation, it is worth pointing out just how crucial the “D” rather than the “R” is in R&D. We are very good at research in this country. We have the second most Nobel Prizes in the world, but we are not so good at development. We are not so good at turning those discoveries into innovation. The perspiration that goes into starting a business and commercialising an innovation is as important, if not more so, than the inspiration that goes into the discovery. I welcome the Government’s initiatives over the past few years, such as the patent box, in particular.

However, I also want to make a specific suggestion that I hope my noble friend will be able to look at, which is to look at various options for improving incentives for entrepreneurs. We are at the moment very generous to venture capital investors in start-up businesses through the EIS and the VCT scheme. By the way, we have to be generous to investors—otherwise in this country we would spend all our money on housing—but we are not quite so generous to entrepreneurs. If someone wants entrepreneur’s relief, he has to apply for it after he has sold his business and there is not a great deal of certainty about that. On the whole, the person sitting across the table from the venture capital investor is not getting such a good deal, or certainly such a certain deal, as the investor himself. In passing, let me say that it is important to resist the temptation to put the threshold for entrepreneur’s relief up to about 25%, as has been suggested, because it is the entrepreneur who lets himself be diluted as he tries to expand his business and ends up well below that figure. He is the one who is taking the greatest risk.

It is also worth noting that the one purchase that we all make that has not become smaller in the time it takes to earn is government. Government costs the average person more than food, fuel, clothing and housing put together, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance. I am sure that I am not alone in noticing that there has been a lack of urgency in the public sector over many years to try to reduce the amount of time that it takes for people to fulfil their needs when being dealt with by government. There is a tendency to say that it does not matter how long it takes to get planning permission, to get the right regime for a new development, to answer queries about tax planning or to build a nuclear power station. But time is surely of the essence for many businesses. We need a relentless pursuit of productivity in the public sector. Therefore, I especially welcome, as the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, said, the provisions in the small business, enterprise and employment Bill to help small businesses to access public procurement.

Finally, I turn to one of the greatest obstacles to innovation—the pessimism enshrined in law at the European level in the form of the precautionary principle. This means that potential risks are weighed in advance but potential benefits are not. The precautionary principle, essentially, asks us to measure the risk of innovating but not the risk of not innovating. George Freeman MP has produced an especially hard-hitting report making the argument that the European Union’s precautionary approach to biotechnology, both in agriculture and in medicine, is greatly harming innovation and condemning Europe to a back seat in the biotechnology revolution. In his report he says:

“Just as the genomic revolution is beginning to offer untold opportunities across medicine and agriculture to help us generate huge economic, social and political dividends for mankind by helping to liberate billions from the scourge of insufficient food, medicine and energy, the EU is developing an increasingly hostile regulatory framework which risks undermining Europe as a hub of biotechnology”.

That is an especially acute problem in agriculture. We now can see very clearly that the ban on genetically modified food over the past 15 to 20 years was a mistake in terms of both environmental and economic problems because it has greatly increased Europe’s reliance on pesticides.

I hope that innovation and dismantling the barriers to innovation will run through everything the Government do, and will continue to do so.