Relations with Europe

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, on securing this key and very interesting debate, and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hodge, on her maiden speech. Economic crime knows no borders and is a threat to us all, and I think we are grateful to her and look forward to hearing more from her as she makes her way around the Chamber.

I always find it interesting to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howell. He has decided to look at the European Political Community; I am also particularly interested in relationships, not just at a governmental level, and I want to focus on how political party relations across Europe can also make an important contribution to building relationships.

As a Lib Dem, I am one of the elected vice-presidents of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, or ALDE. I was first elected in December 2019—an interesting time. Over the last five years, I have seen the importance of Europe-wide party bodies to enable working together locally and nationally, building those relationships, especially for us Lib Dems.

Only ALDE—founded in 1976 as the ELDR—and the Greens alliance, have European membership beyond the EU. ALDE, with 52 MEPs, sits in the Renew group, and the Greens are with the European Free Alliance, including the Pirate parties, and they have 53 MEPs. However, all the other groups, including the EPP and the S&Ds, do not permit such a formal arrangement. ALDE’s role in bringing together sister parties across Europe has strengthened relationships. Using links in CoR, in the Council of Europe and within ALDE, we are able to develop projects together.

For me, the most interesting group in ALDE recently has been the non-EU bloc. The Motion for debate talks about Europe, not about the EU, but when you are a non-EU party working with a predominantly EU organisation, one’s view becomes somewhat different. We all have different relationships with the EU. There are the non-EU countries in south-eastern Europe, some of which have been waiting for accession since 1993, which live and trade side by side with EU countries, and then we compare them with the EFTA countries, which are contented with their trade agreements and their style. Then there are the countries such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, which are all facing real threats from Russia. Then there is the UK.

The Lib Dems and the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland are active members, but no one understands why we left the EU, and most of our sister parties think that we were contented with that lot. I should say that is what they thought in 2019; they do not think it now. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that Brexit broke that trust with our EU partners, and that is why as yet there is no route back, not least because of that lack of trust from our EU sister parties about the way the UK behaved. So, when we ask for special treatment, it is not surprising that we are told the EU will not bear that.

Most of my time is spent rebuilding trust at sister-party level that attitudes in the UK are changing, listening to them but also working with them on matters of common interest, including security, especially where UK forces are embedded in Europe, following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I work also with sister parties in Ukraine on their non-security needs—for example, we have put visiting Ukrainian MPs together with groups of Ukrainian refugees. Our young Liberal groups work very closely together to encourage Ministers across the EU and UK to look at youth mobility movements.

Bilateral and multilateral relations at this level enrich our parties and countries, and I hope will lay the groundwork for a stronger formal relationship once trust has been developed and all countries want to take the next steps.