EU: UK Membership

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, on initiating this debate, and the noble Lord, Lord Wrigglesworth, on his maiden speech. He may not remember that we worked together at Hamilton House in the late 1960s, and it is very good to have the opportunity to work with him again now. I am also glad that we have more than three minutes to speak on this debate; noble Lords who took part in the debate on the Prime Minister’s speech on Europe will remember that we were all rather rushed.

Simply putting a case for the benefits of UK membership of the European Union will not convince many people. It is important to recognise the levers that we have and those that we face, and not to argue this in a vacuum. For instance, we will never have a mass-circulation press that loves Europe. It is a fact and—in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, on Tuesday—we should “get over it”. The media are more balanced about Europe, but even that leads to hysterical reactions from some newspapers about pro-European bias in the media. We have also to accept that the UK will never love Europe. Except for Guernsey and Jersey, with huge consequences for those islands, we have not had foreign enemy troops tramping across our borders; we are an island, and proud of it. We can never appreciate the strong emotional element that applies to most of continental Europe about the need to bond on economic and social alliances.

That emotional commitment was palpable when I was a member of the European TUC for nearly 10 years. You have only to visit Jersey or Guernsey on Liberation Day—in Liberation Square, for example—to witness the effect that invasion has on people. We have to accept that our hearts will never be in the EU, and that we can live with that. However, if our hearts are not there, our heads are in Europe and I am sure that they will continue to be.

What are the levers which will effect this? One is the number of countries desperate for entry to the club, which will convince people that there must be perks. Another is the support for social Europe from those seeking to protect workers’ rights, which will win arguments. However, it is the support of significant sections of business which will win the day. Others have already mentioned last month’s CBI survey, in connection with YouGov, which indicated that 78% of companies—both small and large—favour staying in the EU. I will not elaborate on that except to say that the majority of companies believe the EU has a positive impact on their businesses without prohibitive taxes or tariffs, recruiting staff from across the EU and participating in EU supply chains. CBI companies were against attempts to create similar employment laws across the EU, working hours being the least popular. This is hardly surprising, since the UK has a higher proportion of overtime worked than most other countries, with employees working longer hours and all the social consequences we know about.

Businesses believe that the UK has influence on EU policies that affect them: 72% felt there was significant or some influence and 27% felt there was not very much or no influence. So support is not enthusiastic but it is absolutely solid. As I have been involved in negotiations most of my life, I realise that you cannot walk away from difficult problems and you cannot opt out when the going gets tough. As I have said before, the TUC and CBI meet as social partners at European level. They know about tackling difficult issues and, for a while, when some of the employment-related directives were being introduced belatedly into the UK, it might have looked as if the unions were making progress and the employers were not. Since then, the boot has been on the other foot. They will have differences on regulation of the market and workers’ rights but no one can afford to throw their teddy bear down just because a problem is difficult.

We can do some things now, without waiting for a referendum or fresh negotiations; I thank Richard Corbett for some of this information. First, there is already a requirement for EU proposals to go to national parliaments first, with eight weeks’ notice before they are dealt with in Brussels. We should implement this, so that Ministers appear before Parliament, or the specialist parliamentary committee, to explain the issues. Secondly, there is already a procedure to check on subsidiarity, to prevent the EU straying beyond its remit. National parliaments can object to European Commission proposals. Thirdly, the Government have a duty to maximise their impact in the European Parliament and are not doing so. Tory MEPs were trafficked onto the goonish fringes and this was an unworthy move.

We are all calling for more transparency in the EU, yet our own Government have failed to strengthen Commons scrutiny of Ministers and failed to publicise their proposals to safeguard the City of London. I could have mentioned the European arrest warrant or cross-border tax evasion, but there is insufficient time. We should not forget that tax fraud, tax evasion and tax avoidance are of such magnitude as to have an effect on government deficits. Acknowledging that employment protections are unpopular with employers, we cannot have a single market where workers’ rights are diminished in a race to the bottom. Unfairness leads to distrust in institutions and, as I have said before, employment protections have been in place for long enough to have become part of the workplace.

Finally, some have accused the Government of being asleep at the wheel on European issues and completely concentrating on the referendum. They are not, in fact, in danger of being asleep at the wheel but of jumping into the boot and closing the lid.