European Union Referendum Bill

Baroness Smith of Newnham Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 18. Amendment 13 is to do with the EU Commission and the EU generally in terms of financing, by one means or another, this referendum. We were reassured in Committee that there are two reasons why we should not worry about this. The first was that an undertaking had been made by the EU Commission not to interfere in this referendum and the second was that John Penrose had said in another place that the EU is not so stupid as to get involved in a UK referendum.

I agree with him on one thing: the EU is not stupid. Just to give an idea of how much it is intending not to interfere, it has an EU task force to do with the UK referendum which is made up of six administrators and two assistants. In 2014, the EU spent €560 million on self-promotion. The reason why it is not stupid is because it has spent money before interfering in other people’s referenda with enormous success. It spent €1.5 million to persuade the Irish to vote for the Lisbon treaty and €3.8 million over three years to persuade Croatia that it was a good idea to join the EU.

If you judge the EU, and the EU Commission particularly, on what they do rather than on what they say, the answer is that they have moved into the former offices of the Conservative Party in Smith Square. I have no doubt that there is a very large number of people sitting there, and do we really imagine that they are going to be sitting on their hands doing nothing during a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should leave the EU saying “It’s nothing to do with us. We’re completely neutral on all this. We’re just going to sit here and answer emails and provide information where it is requested”? Come on—let us live in the real world. In Ireland it went so far as to spend a very large sum of money on issuing 1.1 million pamphlets to the Irish about why the EU was such a good idea. The problem with all this is that the EU has set itself up so that it can interfere in our referendum, and because of the total lack of democratic accountability—

[Baroness Smith of Newnham (LD)]

My Lords—

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I will give way in a moment. We cannot actually stop the EU interfering in our referendum because it is written into its treaties that it is allowed to spill out information at will and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

[Baroness Smith of Newnham]

My Lords, I believe that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, may be conflating two different things. The first is the period of renegotiation that Her Majesty’s Government are undertaking at present and the second is the referendum. My understanding is that the task force is actually to deal with the renegotiation, which is at the request of the Government, not an initiative of the European Union, and therefore is not an interference in the referendum. I also believe that such interference would be misguided; it would not be right for the EU institutions to be involved.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

At the end of the day, the EU thinks that it is free to issue information. Information can take many different forms, and I do not see that there is anything that can be done. The Minister has already said that we cannot actually stop the EU financing activities because they are all done in the name of information—and what is the difference between information and propaganda?