European Union Bill

Baroness Williams of Crosby Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, perhaps I may refer briefly to the remarks made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on his amendment, and those of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, which would satisfactorily fall within the purview of Clause 3.

We have not addressed in any sensible way in this debate the issue of the referendum. I should make it clear that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and those amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Symons—I shall not for now discuss them further—are all attempts to address the issue of a referendum as something that is a special, rare and significant constitutional development that should embrace the interests and concerns of the bulk of the British people.

If there is to be an adequate turnout in a referendum, and if there is to be adequate understanding of, and information on, what it is about, one dare not spread the referendum concept over one relatively insignificant issue after another. We will bore the people of Britain absolutely stiff if we continue in the way suggested in what is in some ways, if I may say so, this somewhat ridiculous Bill. Perhaps I may give a couple of examples; I shall not detain the Committee for more than a few moments.

If one pursues many, many referenda, the turnout will steadily decline. The concept will become a joke and the subject of television satire, and more and more people will wonder what on earth they are being asked to do. We have already seen falling turnouts in referenda. For example, the number of votes in the Welsh and Scottish referenda was not particularly outstanding, even though at the time the matter was close to the hearts of the people of Scotland and Wales. Therefore, unless we change the Bill in the way suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and, I suspect, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, we will simply wreck the currency of referenda to the point where they become totally insignificant and are treated as nothing more than an addition of no great importance.

As well as boring the electorate into very low participation in referenda, there is a second matter that we should carefully consider. It is closely associated with experience in the state of California in the United States, where there is growing evidence that referenda are won on the basis of how much money is spent on them by special interest groups with an interest in the outcome. That was the story of the property law referendum in California. It increasingly became an issue between estate agents and customers but it did not interest large sections of Californian citizens. Exactly the same will happen here. Whether a referendum is carried will depend on the willingness of people to finance information, propaganda and so on in trying to get the electorate to come out. Quite quickly we will see these referenda become the politics of only the most extreme interest groups on either side. The whole purpose of referenda—to try to discover the broad interests and concerns of the British people—will effectively be destroyed by the fact that they become increasingly the referenda of conflicting interest groups.

The paradox is that those who support the Bill, believing it to be an important weapon in reducing the power of the European Union, will in fact rapidly destroy their own case through their ludicrous attempt to include every minor issue within the spectrum of things to which a referendum might be considered appropriate. Even from their point of view, which I do not for one moment share, it is in no one’s interest to do what is being done in the Bill—that is, to spread the concept thinly across a huge range of subjects, many of which, as the noble Lord, Lord Richard, pointed out in a brilliant and eloquent speech, will be of very little interest to anyone other than the small handful of people directly involved.

I plead with those who support the Bill, as well as with those who, like me, oppose it, to consider very seriously the constitutional consequences of what they are engaged on. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, set out brilliantly how we might endanger the whole role of Parliament by allowing a referendum with a small turnout to veto an existing Act of Parliament. That is a very dangerous path to go down. Even if one does not go that far, there will be a gradual destruction of the constitutional structures that are about making law with a relationship to the European Union as well as more widely, and people will find that they have kicked away the very structure that they claim to care so much about—the structure of representative democracy. I strongly suggest that we address this issue with due seriousness.

[Lord Grenfell]

The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, applied the test of common sense to the relationship between Clauses 2 and 3. Sometimes I wonder about the common sense on the other side of the House as I do not hear much of it in this debate. He concluded his remarks with a devastating argument against the inclusion of Clause 3 on the grounds that it is simply not necessary, and that with the amendments to Clause 2 it really should not be there. The great French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that perfection is reached not when everything that could be written has been written but when everything that need not be written no longer remains. I have that pinned on my computer at home when I write. If he had been listening to this debate he might well have come to the conclusion that Clause 3 fell under that rule and that it is not necessary. I shall certainly support those who claim that it should not stand part of the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

Instead of the clarity and transparency offered by the Bill, the amendments would leave us with the distant and disconnected approach, described by my noble friend Lord Risby and others, that has driven UK approval of these decisions in the past. All the long-standing accusations of decision-making behind closed doors without public consent would therefore still hold true.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I thank my noble friend for giving way for a moment. How would he escape from the horns of a very difficult dilemma? If, on the one hand, Ministers, in order to avoid a referendum, had to tell themselves that something was not in the national interests of Britain, would one not find oneself subsequently an extremely weak force in the European Union? If, on the other hand, they decided to press on with something that they regarded as being in the national interest and that would attract a referendum, would they not find themselves subject to the kind of fragmented referenda that we discussed earlier and which the Minister described earlier in his own speech?

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not think that that would be the case, for the very good reason that the great issues that concern our national interest can be delivered very largely by the co-operation and development of close working within the existing competences of the existing treaty. My noble friend has in her mind some thought that new treaty requirements would indeed come along that would somehow be in the national interest but which Ministers would be reluctant to push for fear that they would have to expose them to the British people. There might well be issues in the future, although I cannot see any countries at the moment being terribly willing to go through the complex treaty procedure for them, which Ministers believe are in the national interest and of value and which can be pursued only by treaty change. In that case, they would rightly be required first to come before both Houses of our Parliament so that it could be explained whether they were significant or not. If they were significant, they would then be required to be put to the test of a referendum, with the Government arguing that these changes, or this package of changes, were necessary to improve the national interest and the strength of this country. That is the kind of debate we should have had over the Lisbon treaty, but of course we did not.