Daesh: Genocide of Minorities

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I agree with all of that, and I want to follow on directly from the speech given by my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes). This is a vital motion and an important moment for the Minister. We want no more weasel words; we want him to accept this motion; we want him to accept what this motion calls for in clear and explicit terms, which is for the Government

“to make an immediate referral to the UN Security Council with a view to conferring jurisdiction upon the International Criminal Court”.

The Government’s attitude up to now has, I agree, been based on precedent, but I do not believe that precedent is enough in this case, given the horrors that are going on in the world. I would be delighted if the Minister—he can intervene now if he wants—accepted the motion on behalf of the Government. If he does, we have already won this debate, but there is absolutely no point in the Minister using his time to condemn Daesh, and mention all its appalling acts, only to say at the end of his speech, “I am very sorry, but because of legal precedent”—my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate, referred to the circularity of the argument—“the Government think it is for the court to take the initiative and that it is inappropriate for the British Government to take action.”

[Mr Burrowes]

There is one person who is waiting, and who says that he is there, ready to play his full part according to the proper statute: the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He is waiting for a referral from the Security Council so that he can investigate properly and independently and hold these people to account.

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[Sir Edward Leigh]

Absolutely. I see in his place the Minister, who is listening to what we are all saying. I know that he is about to deliver a strong and powerful speech. I know that he will not just condemn Daesh, but say “Yes, we have listened to the debate in the House of Commons, and we will act by making a referral to the Security Council.”

Let us look at the facts and the pure legal argument, which has nothing to do with the motion. The criteria set forth in the 1948 convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide are absolutely clear. The crime is defined as acts

“committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

The convention then lists five qualifying conditions:

“(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It is clear—it is blatantly obvious—that conditions (a), (b) and (c) are in effect, and that those things are going on in the areas under Daesh’s control. It is vital to recall that even if just one of those conditions is met, the declaring of acts as genocidal is allowed. On the basis of the clear legal criteria, there is absolutely no doubt that genocide is being committed. It is therefore the duty of Her Majesty’s Government, in terms of humanity and not just in terms of legal arguments, to do their duty now, to stop prevaricating, to accept the motion, and to refer this to the Security Council.

It would be intolerable for the Government to whip against the motion and force members of the payroll to vote against their own consciences, or abstain. It would also be intolerable if the Government, by some sleight of hand, allowed the motion to be agreed to, and then said that it was not binding on them. If the motion is agreed to—I sincerely hope that the Minister will not speak against it, and that it will not be whipped against—the House of Commons will have spoken, and the Government should act.

So many powerful speeches have been made, but the most powerful of all was by the hon. Member for Glasgow East (Natalie McGarry). Why was it so moving? Why was it so powerful? Because it consisted of the explicit personal experience of someone who talked about girls of nine being raped and killed by this murderous cult.

I myself have visited the area. Of all the Christian villages that I visited, 19 have been taken over by Daesh, and only one remains. We visited the tomb of the Prophet Nahum, and we saw what he had written:

“Your people are scattered on the mountains with none to gather them”,

and

“The gates of your land are wide open to your foes.”

Enough is enough. I call on the Government to act.

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[Sir Edward Leigh]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Ellwood]

I will not give way.

Although a UN Security Council referral to the International Criminal Court is one option, there are other potential options for bringing Daesh to justice. In the meantime, we are supporting the gathering and preservation of evidence that could in future be used in a court to hold Daesh to account. I believe there is a very strong case to be answered, but we must clarify what we mean by genocide. As other hon. Members have mentioned, this refers to acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, religious or racial group. However, we must also consider crimes against humanity, which refer to acts committed as part of a widespread, systematic attack directed against any civilian population. That includes murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence. Furthermore, war crimes refer to grave breaches of the Geneva conventions. It may transpire that all three cases apply in this instance.

That is why we will do everything we can to help gather evidence that could be used by the judicial bodies, who are the appropriate people to judge these matters, to make a judgment. It is vital that that is done now, before evidence is lost or destroyed. Ultimately, this is a question for the courts to decide; it is not for Governments to be the prosecutor, judge or jury. The Prime Minister also said:

“Not only are the courts best placed to judge criminal matters but their impartiality also ensures the protection of the UK Government from the politicisation and controversies that often attach themselves to the question of genocide.”

It is essential that these decisions are based on credible judicial process, but that does not mean that we wash our hands of this issue. Right now, our priority is to prevent atrocities from taking place, and that is why we are playing a leading role in the global coalition against Daesh. I make it clear that, in the long term, we must hold Daesh to account for the atrocities it commits. The evidence that we are helping to gather now will ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes always know that the threat of prosecution is hanging over them.

We should make no mistake: British and international justice have a long reach and a long memory. We will track down those who commit these acts and hold them to account, no matter how long it takes. It took over a decade to track down Radovan Karadzic, but last month he was finally convicted and held to account for his crimes.

The UK is taking a lead on the international response to this issue. In September 2014, we co-sponsored the UN Human Rights Council resolution mandating investigation of Daesh abuses in Iraq. Working with international partners, we are seeking ways to support the gathering of crucial evidence that can be used by the courts to hold Daesh to account.

We must ensure that Daesh is held to account for its barbaric crimes against the majorities and minorities involved—Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and other groups. Ultimately, the only way to put an end to these crimes and to liberate the people of Iraq and Syria is to defeat Daesh. We must continue to expose it for what it is: a failing organisation that is losing territory, struggling to pay its fighters and betraying Islam in all it stands for.

On that note, as I said last week, if we look at the profile of any suicide bomber, from Bali to Sousse, we see that they are sold martyrdom by extremists as a fast track to paradise. People who have scant knowledge of the Koran are promised a ticket to heaven with little, if any, understanding of or service to God. If we are to defeat extremism and stem the churn of vulnerable recruits, we must all emphasise the importance of the duty to God in this life as well as the next. Indeed, the Koran forbids suicide.

As has been said or implied in the House today, the UK has the aspiration and means to play a significant role in world affairs. Our historical links, now forged into bilateral and regional interests, mean that we are expected not just to take an interest, but to show leadership on the world stage. We are seen as fair, knowledgeable and trustworthy. We are playing a leading role in defeating Daesh on the battlefield and in defeating its ideology. We will hold Daesh to account in the courts for its terrible crimes, no matter how long it takes.

Libya

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 19th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

May I say to the right hon. Gentleman, whose question, I am sure, is well motivated, that he is approaching this in exactly the wrong way? We are not likely to get the buy-in we need if we, as a bunch of Europeans, go to Libya and say, “Here’s our priority agenda. What are you going to do about delivering it?” What we must do, and what I suggested to my European colleagues last night that we should do, is package the objectives that we want to achieve with the objectives that are priorities for the Libyans. That is the only way that Prime Minister Sarraj will be able to sell to the Libyan people a package that in any way questions Libya’s territorial sovereignty and that allows foreigners to operate in Libya’s waters. We must be acutely sensitive to the concerns in Libya about foreigners. I am in a rather strange position in that, on the one hand, I have one bunch of people in this House who are primarily concerned to ensure that we do not have any foreigners going into Libya, and, on the other, the right hon. Gentleman who is desperately keen to get some foreign naval forces into its territorial waters. The truth is that we must balance this very carefully and get a package that works for the Libyans as well as for the European agenda.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

The Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary speak in grandiloquent terms of Prime Minister Sarraj, a Government of national accord and even a House of Representatives. Any member of the British public watching “News at Ten” last night would have seen our Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister of national accord holed up in a naval base, unable to leave because they control none of the country. Apparently, they now control three ministerial buildings in a country the size of western Europe. Can we have a reality check, please? Can the Government at last realise that their bid to undermine authoritarian leaders such as Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, who had a deal with the Italian Government to return migrants, and now Assad has just involved the region in death and destruction? Can we just learn the lessons, try and find a strongman, and do what the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee wants—and what we all want—and find a way of creating some kind of safe haven for migrants to be returned to?

[Mr Hammond]

The Chinese have a saying that a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a single step. I urge my hon. Friend to view this process in that context. Self-evidently, I did manage to get out of the naval base in Tripoli yesterday and return to these shores.

My hon. Friend is being a little harsh on Prime Minister Sarraj and what he has achieved. There is a process going on whereby militias—who, only a couple of weeks ago, were threatening to shoot down any aircraft seeking to enter the airport in Tripoli bringing his Government back into the city—are now patrolling the streets outside that naval base and were present on the ground when I landed in Tripoli yesterday. They have recognised and given tentative consent to this Government process to go forward. Its success will depend on Prime Minister Sarraj making the right judgments and being patient enough to bring all the relevant parties with him as he develops a plan for his Government.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 12th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

This Government and the previous Labour Government have deliberately undermined authoritarian regimes such as those of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad, and they have unleashed totalitarian regimes as a result. Will the Government accept that Assad, however unpleasant, is not going to go? Will they accept realpolitik, pick up the phone and try to broker a deal between Russia, Assad and the other anti-Daesh movements in order to try to get some chance of peace in the benighted Syrian countryside?

[Mr Ellwood]

It is for the people of Syria to decide who should lead their country. The majority of people in Syria do not accept that Assad should be part of its long-term future. He has used barrel bombs, he has used chemical weapons and he should have no part at all in the long-term future of the country.

Government Referendum Leaflet

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Monday 11th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lidington]

The two campaign groups will have the publicly funded distribution of whatever leaflet they produce, which will be worth up to £15 million apiece to them. In addition to that benefit of free delivery, they will each have a £7 million spending limit—higher than any other permitted participant in the referendum campaign —and they will each be entitled to a television broadcast and to a Government grant, from taxpayers’ funds, of £600,000, which is something this House approved during our recent debates. I would say to my hon. Friend that her views on the subject of Europe are consistent and well known and are held perfectly honourably, but given the seriousness of what is at stake in this referendum vote, for the Government to be spending 34p per household on presenting their views in an accessible form seems to me to be utterly reasonable.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

Perhaps we should be reasonably relaxed about this. Most of these leaflets will end up in the waste paper bin straight away, because people do not like receiving propaganda, particularly if they are being asked to pay for it, but may I ask this direct question? If my right hon. Friend does not mind me saying so, I think his answer to the Chair of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs was frankly weasel words. We got a firm commitment that there would be broad equality of spending as far as the Government were concerned. That was our understanding and it was weasel words to say, “We’ll do that in the last four weeks, but not now.” Why is it fair that the taxpayer will give £7 million to the leave campaign for leaflets, but £16 million to the remain campaign—£7 million in the Electoral Commission campaign and £9 million now? Why is that fair? Does he not realise that this will leave a lasting taste of bitterness and unfairness?

[Mr Lidington]

I would advise my hon. Friend to look back at the Hansard reports of the Committee proceedings and the debates that he cites. He will see absolutely clearly, in black and white, that the Government have always drawn a distinction between the last 28 days of the campaign period and the rest of the campaign. Indeed, amendments were tabled to the referendum Bill in Committee and on Report that would have made the period of restrictions under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 much longer, but Parliament decided not to extend that period.

Daesh: Persecution of Christians

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd March 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ellwood]

I will write to hon. Members with details on questions to which I have not replied, but I must conclude.

I have given as much indication as I can of the direction of travel that we would like to go in. I am pleased that the Foreign Secretary has made his comments, and I repeat—I do not want to get myself into any trouble, so I am looking around carefully—that we are not judge or jury here. It is not for the Government to call this, which hon. Members will perhaps recognise as a frustration. It is important that voices are heard to make it clear what the expectations are and where we should be going on what is happening in Iraq and Syria.

To truly defeat Daesh, to eradicate its ideology, and to secure long-term peace and security in the region, we must demonstrate through our words and actions our support for all communities, whether majority or minority, Shi’a or Sunni Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, Kurds or others. We will continue to do all we can to liberate the people of Iraq and Syria from the persecution and appalling violence that they face from Daesh. We must all continue to expose Daesh for its criminal and fraudulent betrayal of Islam. In the spirit in which my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton introduced the debate, I also hope that we can take important steps towards bringing Daesh to justice on the international stage.

[Sir Edward Leigh (in the Chair)]

I am sure the House would want to associate itself with the Minister’s comments about the atrocity in Brussels.

Question put and agreed to.

EU-Turkey Agreement

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

As always, the Minister is putting in a very skilful performance, but the issue of whether Turkey should join the EU is terribly important. I am disappointed that once again the Foreign Secretary is not replying from the Dispatch Box. I do not think he has answered one urgent question of the last five. We like the Foreign Secretary so much that we would like to see more of him at the Dispatch Box.

On the question of Turkey joining the EU, the Minister has been absolutely clear today that it is Her Majesty’s Government’s considered opinion that Turkey should be a member of the EU. Apparently, we have allowed ourselves to be blackmailed into progressing this matter. Given the closure of the main opposition paper, Zaman, this week, will the Minister confirm as a matter of fact that because the EU believes so passionately in the free movement of people, once Turkey joins the EU, all 77 million Turks will be allowed to come to work and live here without any check or any opposition at all and there is nothing we can do about it?

[Mr Lidington]

As I said earlier, we are not yet at the point where anything has been finally agreed. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will make a statement after next week’s European Council. Support for Turkey eventually to join the European Union is an objective that has been shared by Conservative and Labour Governments alike since before I entered the House of Commons. My hon. Friend is not correct to say that this is going to be rushed. That is certainly not the history of previous accession negotiations: they take many years, and there is a right of veto for every member state over every single decision associated with an accession process.

One issue that has to be sorted out during an accession negotiation is precisely what the arrangements for movement of people are going to be. As the Prime Minister has said on many occasions, the United Kingdom is not going to agree to any further new members of the European Union until we have new and different arrangements in place to ensure that a new member joining the EU cannot again lead to the very large migratory flows that we saw after 2004.

The FCO and the Spending Review 2015

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Crispin Blunt]

My hon. Friend makes an entirely valid point. He sat on the Committee in the last Parliament and in this one, and he will know about the diminution of our expertise, for example on Russia. When he and I were soldiers back in the 1980s there was a wealth of expertise about the Soviet Union, but that has simply been stripped away. When faced with a crisis in Crimea and Ukraine, the level and depth of our knowledge were certainly a handicap.

When looking at future Committee reports and how we might influence future events, I hope that we will be able to report with authority and fulfil a much requested public need about Brexit. The Committee is conducting an inquiry into the costs and benefits of European Union membership for Britain’s role in the world—whether we stay in the EU or whether we leave. Hon. Members will already have found that people are asking where they can turn for independent analysis and who will give them the facts. Unhappily, the Government have placed themselves in a position where they are unable to give an independent view, since the entire institution is placed firmly on one side of the campaign. Happily, however, I preside over a Committee of 11, and the publicly expressed views of my Committee are balanced at five each on either side of the question.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

If my hon. Friend is seeking a cure for insomnia, may I refer him to my speech on Friday when I spoke on this subject for an hour in support of the Bill sponsored by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), which would set up an independent audit of the pros and cons of leaving the EU? That is what we need. Perhaps the Office for Budget Responsibility should be given that job. We accused the Labour Government of fiddling the figures before the Budget, so why not ask an independent body to give a genuine audit?

[Crispin Blunt]

My hon. Friend will be delighted to hear that that is precisely what my Committee will try to do. Given the way that we are exquisitely balanced, my aim, which is informally supported in discussion by members of the Committee—they cannot be formally bound until the Committee reports, but we all share the objective—is to produce as balanced a piece of work as possible, identifying the factors that the electorate should consider on both sides of the question, but without advising the electorate what weight they should attach to those factors. I hope to complete that work about two months before the referendum, and for the Committee to do a service to the wider public of exactly the type that my hon. Friend identifies, as well as to this House and the reputation of its Committees.

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[Pete Wishart]

Well, the estimates are the estimates, Madam Deputy Speaker. I struggle to think that when we talk about the estimates, the totality of the Foreign Office budget would fit into what we are actually debating and considering. This is a day set aside for the consideration of estimates. We have to debate this. We are abrogating our responsibilities as parliamentarians if we fail to have some sort of say and some sort of discussion and debate about how this House does its business.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is a most important point. When I was Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee—I am now a member of the Procedure Committee— I produced a report for the Chancellor on this. What the hon. Gentleman says is quite true and he is doing a great service to the House. The fact is that we spend £600 billion of the people’s money every year, but the one thing we are not allowed to talk about on estimates days is estimates. The hon. Gentleman is therefore making a fundamentally important point. When the hon. Member for Southport (John Pugh) tried to talk about estimates on an estimates day a couple of years ago, unbelievably he was ruled out of order. You have the power now, Madam Deputy Speaker, to say that on estimates days we are allowed to talk about estimates. You can give the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) authority to carry on giving his speech.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that point of order, but we are debating a specific motion on the Order Paper, which is Foreign and Commonwealth Office estimates. The hon. Gentleman has been a parliamentarian for a very long time. He understands how this works and he may feel that this is an injustice. There are other places where this can be debated, but today this is specifically about a very important estimate, which is the expenditure of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

There are plenty of ways in which the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) can debate estimates more generally within this framework, but he must stick to what is on the Order Paper. We are debating a motion and it is very specifically on FCO expenditure. If he can do that, he will not be ruled out of order. If he does not, then I am afraid he will be.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The answer, as the hon. Gentleman knows, is that this is not a general debate on estimates. This debate is on one particular estimate relating to FCO expenditure. That is, therefore, what we are debating here today. He also knows that the Procedure Committee is the place to go to for answers to more specific questions. There are other ways to have debates on the principle of estimates debates. Today, however, we have on the Order Paper the specific estimate for the FCO. That is what we are here to debate.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I just ask how I, or any other hon. Member, can question the Government on £600 billion of expenditure? By the way, under the Barnett formula what we spend directly affects the spend in Scotland. How can I start giving a speech about all this money we are spending?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

As the hon. Gentleman knows—he has been here a very long time—there are Treasury questions, Budget day, parliamentary questions, letters to Ministers, Adjournment debates and so on. There are any number of avenues by which these matters can be debated. Today, we are debating Foreign and Commonwealth Office expenditure on this particular estimates day.

With that, I think that is enough. If the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire wants me to rule him out of order I can do so, but if he can just stick to the FCO expenditure and bring his points in under that he will remain in order.

Syria

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Lady asked a series of questions. First, the latest UN Security Council resolution—resolution 2268—which confirmed the cessation of hostilities, underlines the importance of a previous one, resolution 2254, which is all about the ability to gain access to various areas where ownership is sometimes confusing. That is done on a very local basis to make sure that agreements take place and that UN and other convoys have the series of permissions they need, so that they are not halted at checkpoints, with the food being taken from them and used as a weapon of war. It is difficult for me to give a comprehensive reply for the whole of Syria, but these things are done on an area-by-area basis. The method for taking deliveries also reflects the threat level. Clearly, there are areas surrounded by Daesh, where it is impossible to have such agreements.

The hon. Lady spoke about the chemical weapons attack. A number of UN organisations are looking into a wider piece to do with the use of chemical weapons across Syria. They are in the process of completing a report to the UN, which is due shortly. If I may, I will write to her with more details on that.

On the work being done to provide international humanitarian aid, I go back to the conference we had, where we were able to garner an awful lot of support, including from Saudi Arabia, for making sure that money is filtered through the various UN organisations so that they can get through to the various locations.

The hon. Lady mentions a number of other extremist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham, and there is Jaysh al-Islam as well. They have not been considered as moderate; they have not been included in the discussions, and they were not represented in the talks where the Saudis brought the moderate groups together.[Official Report, 9 March 2016, Vol. 607, c. 1MC.]

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

May I just ask where the Foreign Secretary is? I know he is very busy, but the House of Commons must always come first. We are at least owed an explanation.

May I suggest that the Labour and Conservative establishments, in being such an outrider for the overthrow of unpleasant authoritarian regimes—whether Gaddafi’s, Assad’s or Saddam’s—have merely provided an opening for far worse, totalitarian movements? It is also arguable that we have had very little influence in the latest round of peace negotiations, as the Americans cosy up to the Russians. Will the Foreign Office now at least accept that there may be some merit in Assad being allowed to go gracefully in elections, however imperfect?

[Mr Ellwood]

First, may I say that I will not take it personally that my hon. Friend feels I am not adequate to answer today’s question? This is an urgent question, and the Foreign Secretary was not able to get here. I will certainly do my best to convey to him the fact that my hon. Friend would have loved to see him instead of me.

On the transition process, we ended 2015, after five years of hostilities, with opposition groups coming together for the first time. For the first time, we had international stakeholders, including Saudi Arabia and Iran, around the table at the Vienna talks discussing these matters. That was the first time a transition process was discussed, the first time an 18-month process was to be put in place and the first time life after Assad was actually considered.

It is important to recognise that it must be for all the people of Syria to decide their fate, whether they are Kurds, Druze, Alawites or Sunnis. We must remember that 80% of the deaths in Syria have been caused by Assad and his regime. That is why we say that it would be inappropriate for him to participate in the long-term future of the country. The whole purpose of bringing these organisations together to discuss the democratic process is that they will decide the transition away from Assad.

EU Membership (Audit of Costs and Benefits) Bill

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Friday 26th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely. That is another side of this very important argument.

I referred extempore to what the Government were reported to have said yesterday about the disparity between the figures, but let me now give the exact figures. A total of 630,000 EU citizens registered for national insurance numbers entitling them to work or claim benefits in Britain last year, yet it is said that there were only 257,000 new EU migrants. Incidentally, 209,000 of those national insurance number registrations came from residents, or citizens, of Romania and Bulgaria.

Jonathan Portes, of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, sought an explanation for this extraordinary disparity, but was told that the Government were not prepared to give more details because

“it might prejudice the outcome of the EU referendum.”

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I am sure that it would.

[Mr Chope]

Well, it depends what the answer was, does it not?

This illustrates the problem that we have with the unequal use of resources and statistics. Having refused to answer the simplest of questions from me last June, the Treasury is now refusing to inquire further into what is, on the face of it, an extraordinary disparity, while at the same time making the scaremongering assertions to which my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) has referred.

The purpose of my Bill is to introduce some objectivity and independence into the whole process of evaluating the costs and benefits of our membership of the European Union. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie), the Chairman of the Treasury Committee, has launched an inquiry into the economic costs and benefits. He is doing a lot of good work, and I look forward to the publication of the report, but, having read much of the oral evidence, I note that the answer given by a great many experts, whether pro or anti-EU, is that it is extremely hard to be sure one way or the other.

During the forthcoming referendum campaign, we might be well advised to note the information that is set out so ably in House of Commons Library briefing paper 06091, which was published in January this year. According to chapter 6,

“There is no definitive study of the economic impact of the UK’s EU membership or the costs and benefits of withdrawal. Framing the aggregate impact in terms of a single number, or even irrefutably demonstrating that the net effects are positive or negative, is a formidably difficult exercise.”

Why is that?

“This is because many of the costs and benefits are subjective or intangible. It is also because a host of assumptions must be made to reach an estimate. If the UK were to leave the EU, assumptions must be made about the terms on which this would be done and how Government would fill the policy vacuum left in areas where the EU currently has competence. If the UK were to remain in the EU, assumptions would need to be made about how policy in the EU would develop.”

That is a very important point. We often hear—and we heard from the Prime Minister this week—words to the effect that there will be no leap in the dark if we decide to stay in the European Union; it will all be as plain as a pikestaff. However, the House of Commons Library briefing clearly states that we do not know how policy in the EU would develop if we chose to remain:

“Estimates of the costs and benefits of EU membership are likely to be highly sensitive to such assumptions.”

If the Government, whose current robust line is that we must at all costs stay in the European Union, start presenting figures and data, how shall we be able to assure ourselves that those figures and data are objective? I think the answer is that we shall not be able to do that, because the figures and data will come from a biased source.

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[Mr Chope]

My hon. Friend makes a good point—

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Or Canada, which has an agreement.

[Mr Chope]

As my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) suggests, North America has its own North American Free Trade Agreement, which brings Canada, Mexico and the United States together. However, as Donald Trump and many others would bear witness, under that there is no free movement of people between Mexico and the US or between Canada and US, but there is still a free trade agreement.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

More than that, Canada has an agreement with the EU on trade and there is no free movement of EU nationals into Canada.

[Mr Chope]

Absolutely, and I look forward to hearing what my hon. Friend has to say if he is able to catch your eye later on, Madam Deputy Speaker.

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[Mr Chope]

Exactly. My hon. Friend makes the point brilliantly. One thing the Treasury is apparently willing to help on is the cost of vellum; I believe it is offering to pay £30,000 a year. That is the way the Treasury works.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Worth every penny.

[Mr Chope]

I am not commenting on that, but we will have plenty of £30,000 sums to spend when we leave.

Clause 5(b) talks about taking into account our

“competitiveness and ability to trade freely (including consideration of the UK’s restricted ability to negotiate trade agreements and to engage in free trade with other countries)”.

I have already covered that. Subsection (c) then deals with the issue of

“national security and defence (including the UK’s ability to decide which non-nationals should be allowed to reside in the UK)”.

That is a very big subject and I suspect some of my colleagues will wish to go into it in a bit more detail. At the moment, we do not have any control over non-nationals from the EU coming into our country. The figures published yesterday show a massive increase in net migration—it was again more than 300,000 in the year to September 2015.

We all supported the Prime Minister and the Conservative party manifesto on the promise in 2010, in a pledge repeated during the last election campaign, that we would bring net migration in the UK down to the tens of thousands. I looked today in the press to see what the Prime Minister’s response was to the latest net migration figures, which show that more than 300,000 people came in that year period, 257,000 of whom came from the EU. If we were going to get the figure down to the tens of thousands and even if we prevented anybody from coming to this country from anywhere other than the EU, we would still have to reduce the number of people coming from the EU by about two thirds—from 257,000 to just less than 100,000. With the most heroic assumptions, how is it possible to say that the very modest measures contained in the package that came back from the negotiations in Brussels could ever deliver a reduction of 157,000 EU migrants a year?

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

I suspect that, in the short term, not a fat lot would happen to the £62 billion trade deficit with the EU, as we would pretty much carry on in the same way. We would keep trading with it, and it would keep trading with us. I tried to check that out. I asked the Prime Minister, after one of his European Council meetings, whether he had had any discussions with Angela Merkel that would indicate that, if we were to leave the EU, she would want her country to stop selling BMWs, Mercedes, Volkswagens and Audis free of tariff to the UK. The Prime Minister did not say anything at all about that, so I presumed that he had not heard anything. Given his determination that we should stay in the EU, I am sure that, if he had had any inkling at all that the Germans were not going to continue selling us their cars free of tariff, he would have been more than happy to put it on the public record. As people can see from his answer, it appears that he had had no such indication from the German Government that they would stop trading freely with us.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The answer to my hon. Friend’s question is simple: if we left the EU, we would not have to pay a £10 billion a year subscription just to have a £70 billion a year deficit.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. At the end of the day, what this boils down to is people’s confidence in their negotiating abilities. I used to work for Asda, and I fear that, if some of my hon. Friends had been our buyers and had used their negotiating skills, we would have gone bust. In effect, what many of my colleagues are saying—and what Labour Members are saying—is that we have a £62 billion trade deficit, but we do not think that we can negotiate a free trade agreement without handing over a huge membership fee every single year. That is the easiest negotiation known to mankind. If they cannot negotiate that deal, what on earth can these people negotiate? If the Prime Minister were to claim that he could not negotiate a free trade deal with the EU based on that trade deficit every year—I am sure that he will not say that because he claims to be a good negotiator—he would not be fit to lead this country into those negotiations. That is what I would say to anybody who aspires to such a role.

--- Later in debate ---

[Philip Davies]

No, I do not accept that at all. The Prime Minister has done absolutely nothing to stop these people coming into the UK—literally nothing. There is nothing in place to stop them; there are a few people on a watch list whom we can stop coming into the UK, but they would be on a watch list whether we were in the EU or outside it. We need to develop a watch list for people from around the world, because this is not an EU issue. We can already stop those people coming to the UK, and we would always be able to stop them coming to the UK, if they are on a terrorist watch list. I am talking about the thousands and thousands of criminals who are unknown to the British authorities, who come through every week on an EU passport to commit their crimes. When I was out with West Yorkshire police a few years ago—this might seem fanciful, and it seemed fanciful to me when I first heard it—they told me they had a problem with people getting a short-haul flight from other EU countries to Leeds Bradford airport, going out into Leeds city centre and committing high-value crimes and robberies, and then being back on the plane out to their country of origin before the police have even finished investigating the crime. I had not even thought that that type of thing could happen, but West Yorkshire police told me that that was a serious concern for them.

Of course, it is easy for people do these things while we are in the EU—there is nothing to prevent them from coming here. They are known to their own national law enforcement agencies, so they are at risk of being apprehended in their own countries. It is much easier for them to commit crimes in the UK, where they are not known to anybody—they can come in and go out in a flash. We have to be aware that these are problems.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

To be absolutely fair—we should be fair, and that is why we need an independent audit—our own crooks can presumably do the same in those other countries?

[Philip Davies]

Yes, indeed. My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The problem is that there are much richer pickings in the UK than in some of the countries these people come from.

The other aspect of this is that, even if these people run the risk of being caught, they would, I suspect, much prefer to spend their time in a British prison than in a prison in their home nation. So this is a win-win, given their chances of being caught and what happens when they are caught. I am afraid that that does not quite work the same in reverse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for promoting the Bill. This is an interesting debate. I am not sure that anybody could rationally oppose the idea of an independent cost-benefit analysis run by independent people. If somebody, including the Minister, wishes to intervene on me and deny the rational basis of that argument, I would be interested to hear what they had to say.

We had a debate about Europe yesterday. I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, because this is the third time this week I have wearied the House with my views: I spoke yesterday, I questioned the Prime Minister on Monday and I am also speaking today. However, this is such an important issue and, frankly, it is our job to be here, even on a Friday morning, to hold the Government to account. I make no apology for that.

You were present for some of yesterday’s debate, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I recommend that you read it in its entirety in Hansard, because some very interesting arguments were made. I knew that my hon. Friend was going to promote this Bill today, so I asked the Foreign Secretary directly why we could not have an independent cost-benefit analysis of our membership of the EU so that we could decide whether we should stay. He said that that would not be possible because there were so many uncertainties involved in what leaving the EU would amount to. That is an interesting point of view, but it has not stopped many groups—I will refer to them in a moment—feeling that it is possible to have, or at least possible to make a decent fist of having, an independent analysis of what the decision either to remain in or to leave the EU might mean.

It is extraordinary that, while the Government tell us, quite rightly, that this is the most important decision we will take in our lifetime, constituents are already writing to me, asking, “Please can we have all the arguments laid out?” Most people in this House know their views, but millions of people in the country want an informed debate and would welcome some independent analysis of what this most important decision would mean. Apparently, unless there is going to be an announcement today—I doubt that that is going to happen—we are not going to have an independent analysis.

The question we need to direct to the Minister, therefore, is whether the Government are going to produce their own analysis. He and the Prime Minister are completely honourable people—they would never, ever wish to deceive the British public—but they are arguing for a certain point of view. Therefore, civil servants produce documents that argue a certain case. As the Minister has indicated, the Government’s viewpoint is absolutely clear: under its rules, the civil service works according to Government policy. Government policy is that we remain in the EU, so civil servants will defend that policy and produce briefing papers, analysis and all the rest in terms of that policy. Of course, civil servants would not consciously lie or deceive in any way, but we want to know from the Minister exactly what analysis the Government intend to produce over the next four months, what form it will take and what will be the nature of its independence.

The question that I put to the Foreign Secretary was this. I said that during the years when we were in opposition, we accused Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, of making assumptions before the Budget that were influenced—let us put it as gently as we can—by the direction in which he wanted to go. That is why we created the Office for Budget Responsibility, which is one of our foremost achievements, apparently. I agree that it is an achievement. The assumptions that lie behind the Budget are now in the hands of a genuinely independent body.

When I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee during those years of Labour Government, the moment the Chancellor stood up and started his Budget speech, a messenger would deliver to me on the Back Benches a fat envelope containing all the assumptions on which the Budget was based. The trouble was that they were assumptions written by civil servants who were working towards Government policy—the policy of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown. That is why we created the Office for Budget Responsibility. The question that I put to the Foreign Secretary, which he did not answer and which I repeat to the Minister, is: if this is the most important decision that we are going to make, why can we not depute the OBR to produce an analysis?

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has suggested a different format. Because this is a private Member’s Bill, it is, as we know, for all sorts of reasons unlikely to become law, but he has at least raised the question. It is now incumbent on the Minister to answer my hon. Friend. I am sorry, but I think that my hon. Friend’s creation is unwieldy, calling as it does for us to find an equal number of people who are in favour of leaving and of remaining. There may be perfectly justifiable arguments for that, but the Government already have independent bodies, such as the OBR and the National Audit Office, which could do the work. The NAO, which is well respected, would perhaps not be expert at dealing with issues of sovereignty, but it could certainly deal with other issues mentioned by my hon. Friend such as “burden of regulation”,

“economy (including consideration of public expenditure and receipts”

and “competitiveness and ability”. The Government already have in their hand a body or bodies that would be capable of producing such an analysis.

It is deeply worrying that Ministers who have decided to campaign to leave the EU are denied any civil service briefing on the matter. They are immediately thrown into purdah this week, and yet Ministers who are campaigning to remain in the EU have the full benefit of the civil service, which can apparently for weeks churn out propaganda. I do not use that word in a derogatory sense; propaganda simply means putting one’s point of view forward. The situation seems to me to be fundamentally unfair. Surely, the British way of doing things, particularly in referendums, is that we are fair.

We had a vote on purdah in the autumn, and my hon. Friend and I got into a bit of trouble for voting in favour of it, but we thought it was important. We thought that once the referendum campaign started, the Government should not be able to use its machine—its civil service—to argue for a point of view, because that does not happen in a general election. Perhaps we will learn from the Minister today when that purdah will actually start. Obviously, the Government are not in purdah at the moment. Civil servants are fully briefing, and the whole machine is churning out papers all the time.

All this is important because the referendum is supposed to bring a degree of closure to this subject, is it not? To do so, it must be seen to be absolutely fair. It is very important that both sides of the arguments are properly aired. Speaking for myself, if the British people decide by 55% to 45%, or whatever the figures are, to remain in the EU—after all the arguments have been properly put, and the no and yes campaigns have spent broadly the same amount of money—I will just have to accept that point of view.

However, this is a very complex area and the whole nature of the Government’s case is that leaving is all too risky. I made this point yesterday, but it is an important one: we should bear in mind that the Government are not approaching the referendum campaign with the sense of a great visionary movement in favour of the EU. The Prime Minister is saying, “Look, I am as great a Eurosceptic as you are, but I’m sorry, it’s all too risky.” When he says it is all too risky, he presumably means the costs of leaving in terms of national security, which is mentioned in the Bill, and particularly the very detailed debate on our competitiveness, the decisions of European Council meetings and the rest of it.

I want to emphasise that I see no rational argument against the Government commissioning a genuinely independent cost-benefit analysis. As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), our membership of the EU means paying a subscription of £10 billion a year in order to have a £70 billion a year deficit with the EU. Normally, when someone pays a subscription to a club, they do so to have a benefit: they are prepared to pay the cost because they get something back. Frankly, given that there is a deficit of £70 billion—I agree that it exists now and will almost certainly remain if we leave the EU, because of the strength of German engineering products or French food and drinks products and all the other reasons—that is quite a big subscription to pay for it.

We want an independent study. To go back to yesterday’s debate, the Minister for Europe said in his summing up, “I’ve sat through this debate, and those who want to leave the EU have not given any sense of their vision.” That is quite true, and it is incumbent on us—it could be done as part of such a study—to give the people and the House some sense of where we want to take the nation if we leave the EU. I accept that argument—the Minister for Europe kindly added that he said that “with the exception of my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough”—and I tried to give an alternative vision yesterday.

Such alternative visions need to be tested. I just have a point of view—I believe it is reasonable, but other people may say it is a prejudice—but there is no point my standing up in the House of Commons and articulating my alternative vision if there is no independent analysis of it. That is surely what the British people want and demand. I am asking them on 23 June to take the risk of leaving, and they therefore have the right to come back to me to ask such questions.

If we left the EU, I believe it would be quite exciting—I represent a rural area—to reclaim control of the common agricultural policy. In that context, I recommend the speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson), the former Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to the Oxford farming conference. He made a detailed analysis of what leaving the EU would mean for farming policy. He made the point that although food and agriculture is a huge and massively important industry—it employs more than 3.5 million people and accounts for £85 billion of GNP—agriculture policy is entirely determined by the EU. On that, this House has very little, or virtually no, independence from the EU. He was putting forward his view and arguing that alternative subsidy arrangements could be made. For instance, he argued that we should broadly spend on subsidies what we are spending now, but create a different subsidy system. He argued that we could divert more agricultural subsidies away from lowland farming to hill farmers in difficult farming environments.

I have been trying to wrestle with an understanding of farming policy for the 30 years I have been in this place. It is immensely complex, but again we have had virtually no detailed debate or analysis to inform our farmers on how they should vote. This is desperately important to them. There are hundreds of farmers in my constituency and tens of thousands of farmers throughout the country who want an answer, because they, for better or for worse, depend on the subsidy system.

[Oliver Colvile]

Does my hon. Friend recognise that it is not only the farming industry but the fishing industry that needs to be taken into account?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I will come to the fishing industry in a moment.

Farmers are genuinely worried. I suppose the Government have got quite an easy task. They can just say, “Don’t worry. You don’t like the present system. You’ve been complaining for years that it is regulatory and burdensome, and that for years you were paid by the EU to rip out hedges and now you’re paid to put them back. You have to spend all your time not out on the land but sitting in your office in your farmhouse dealing with farming subsidies. It’s regulatory, burdensome, late and difficult but,” I suppose the Government would argue, “at least you are supported.” There is an implication on the part of the Government that if we were to leave the EU, the subsidies would vanish.

The Vote Leave campaign is absolutely explicit about that. I am absolutely explicit about it and I give this pledge. One should be quite careful what one says on the Floor of the House of Commons, but if we leave the EU the level of subsidy to the farming community will remain exactly what it is now. That is a pledge. I cannot give a pledge on behalf of the Government, but I cannot believe that anybody would resile from that. We have no idea. We have no independent analysis. We have had no real attempt, apart from by a few right hon. and hon. Friends, at detailing how the subsidies would change.

My hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) mentioned fishing, which is even more important. I referred to this subject yesterday. I think I was the only one to mention it. This was the great debate we had on Europe this week with the Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary: we were limited to very short speeches and I had time to say perhaps one sentence about fishing. There was no detailed analysis yesterday of what leaving the EU would mean for our fishing industry, yet it is of absolutely massive and crucial importance.

People forget that in the final days of the negotiations conducted by Mr Heath, way back in 1971, he was worried that the talks were stumbling. In the final days, he handed control of our fishing industry to the European Commission with disastrous results for the port of Grimsby, which is close to my constituency, and for our entire fishing industry. I would argue that if we left the EU, it would be extraordinarily exciting to reclaim control of our fishing fleets and fishing industry, given that we are an island and that we sit surrounded by some of the most productive fishing grounds in the world. Again, there has been virtually no intelligent, thorough and informed debate of how we could manufacture or create an alternative fishing policy.

[Oliver Colvile]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Of course. I give way to somebody with far greater expertise in this area than me.

[Oliver Colvile]

The Plymouth marine laboratories were set up—I think in 1870—and they analyse whether we are overfishing our seas. If my hon. Friend wants, he could come and talk to them, but most certainly he might want to give them a ring.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I would be delighted to visit my hon. Friend’s constituency. Perhaps I could sail there in my boat from the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, where it is moored. But obviously we are deeply serious about this, because the last 30 years have been a traumatic experience for our fishermen. It is a matter of immense importance. Again, we need an independent audit.

[Mr Chope]

Bearing in mind what my hon. Friend said about Ministers, is there not an issue with the fact that the fishing Minister, who has all this expertise and is keen that we should leave the EU, will not have the support of his civil servants in doing what needs to be done to ensure a strong and independent UK fishing industry after we leave?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Exactly. It is extraordinary, given that we have this great industry and are a proud island race, and that much of our past and present is tied up in our fishing fleets, that the fishing Minister has already been put in purdah by his own civil servants and cannot talk about this subject at all. It beggars belief.

Apparently, the Government are not going to do any independent analysis over the next four months of what leaving the EU would mean for fishing. Presumably, at some stage or another, a Minister will make a claim—perhaps a fairly wild claim—and there will be no comeback, because the fishing Minister has been put in the corner, like a naughty boy with a dunce’s hat on his head, and told to keep silent. It is amazing. This is the most important decision we are going to make—yet silence.

In trying to answer the Minister for Europe, who asked, “Why don’t the leave people give an alternative vision?”, I have talked a bit about fishing and agriculture, but what about trade? I have quoted Winston Peters, a former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary of New Zealand—no slouch—who has talked in public about leaving behind the “betrayal” of 1973. Yes, we did betray them. We betrayed our friends in New Zealand and Australia, who, in two world wars, had come to our aid. He says there is the exciting prospect of recreating free trade between Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It is an exciting prospect. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made a good point about the declining proportion of world trade taken by the sclerotic, over-regulated and overtaxed EU. There is another world out there—the world of the burgeoning growth of China and India.

I will go into more detail about the Government’s case in a moment, but I would be quite happy for them to say, “This is all just pie in the sky—a romantic illusion—and it’s not going to happen. You wouldn’t have any influence on the world trade body, because you’d just be one voice out of 130.” Well, we have very little voice at the moment, because we are one vote out of 28—at least we would be there on our own—but I accept that the Government can make these arguments. Given the importance of this issue, however, surely we want at least some independent analysis, so that the people, before they cast their votes, know what the realistic prospects are of a United Kingdom outside the EU being able to negotiate good trade deals with the rest of the world. But we have nothing.

That was my introduction, Madam Deputy Speaker. I now want to go into more detail about the history of this independent audit and analysis. People now argue—there is some lazy thinking on this—that way back in 1957 when the treaty of Rome was being signed, we were casual in our decision not to join it. A sort of myth has been created, particularly by my personal friend, Michael Heseltine, now Lord Heseltine, and others that this was an enormous wasted opportunity. Actually, people in government at the time were attempting a reasonable audit and analysis of what joining the treaty of Rome would mean. This debate has therefore been going on for a long time.

One cause of worry in 1957 was article 3 of the European Community treaty, which would

“eliminate…customs duties and quantitative restrictions on imports and exports”

between member states, establish a common tariff and “common commercial policy” and

“abolish obstacles to freedom of movement for persons, services and capital”.

When we were having these debates in 1957, the view taken by the then Conservative Government was that that was a risk too great and particularly, showing the importance of objective analysis, too great a risk to the Commonwealth.

My personal view is that that was a right conclusion. Unfortunately, during the 1950s and ’60s, there was a lack of confidence in our future as an independent nation. We should bear it in mind that we were dealing with a generation scarred by the second world war—I accept all the arguments about that. The hon. Member for North West Durham (Pat Glass), who is going to reply to this debate on behalf of the Labour party, spoke most movingly yesterday about the scars of two world wars, and I can understand how that was an influence on people at the time. As I said, there was a lack of confidence, not just about peace in Europe, but about our own nature and the resilience of our manufacturing and service industries. That led directly to Harold Macmillan’s failed bid to join the then European Economic Community.

As we know, of course, we eventually joined the European Economic Community. What then happened after we joined it? We were told at the time that it was going to be primarily a trading mechanism. The British people were never really made to understand and appreciate that under articles 2 and 3, it was much more than that. This was effectively the end of the sovereignty of this House. It was completely different from any other treaty that we had ever signed. Those arguments were made by Tony Benn, Michael Foot and Enoch Powell at the time. To its credit, Labour tested this in the referendum, and the British people decided to join.

Let me move on to the treaty of Nice. Although there had been a reasonably detailed debate, as I mentioned, in the mid-1950s about the benefits or otherwise of joining, this is where I believe the debates got rather weaker and there was less and less independent cost-benefit analysis of whether we should take this ever closer union further.

Article 3 of the treaty of Nice created an explicit common policy in fisheries, when it had previously been included under agriculture. An environmental policy was also created. Under the guise of strengthening competitive industry through the promotion of research and technological development, the EU acquired competence. The EU was authorised to establish and develop trans-European networks. I was here and I may be wrong, but although I certainly know that no independent analysis was done, I am not aware how much analysis of any kind was done on the costs and benefits of these very important matters that furthered the integration of Europe and our involvement in it. The treaty of Lisbon completed the process by making all remaining pillar three matters subject to EU justice-making procedure.

There was a steady increase in the area of EC and EU activity, and thus a steady increase in the number of pieces of legislation until the 1990s. Until we set up the Scrutiny Committee—which is now under the distinguished chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash)—there was very little analysis of the vast plethora of legislation that was pouring out.

In a paper published by the Robert Schuman Centre, Professor Carol Harlow, of the London School of Economics, noted:

“On the regulatory side, an average of 25 directives and 600 regulations per annum in the 1970s rose to 80 directives and 1.5 thousand regulations by the early 1990s”.

In a study of the evolution of European integration, EU academics Wolfgang Wessels and Andreas Maurer observed that the increase in legislation had been accompanied by an increase in the EU’s institutional structures and sub-structures. While all that was proceeding apace, there was virtually no debate in the House of Commons or, I suspect, within the Government.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I were Ministers at the end of the Thatcher Government and in the Major Government. We remember going to the Council of Ministers, and we remember, as we sat there all night, a vast tide of more and more pieces of legislation which was subjected to very little, if any, independent analysis. Output peaked in 1986 with the single market legislative programme. It fell slightly after that, but it continues apace. Meanwhile, apart from the analysis conducted by the Scrutiny Committee, very little detailed analysis of what the directives involved mean for our country is available to Members of Parliament—if, indeed, they are interested, given the complexity of many of those directives.

[David Morris]

The figures that my hon. Friend is citing are truly frightening. Does he agree that there should be more Scrutiny Committees, and perhaps even a larger Scrutiny Committee whose members could operate a shift system when European regulation comes our way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I agree with that entirely. If we were to remain in the EU, we would need—and this would require the sort of analysis that would arise from a measure such as this Bill—to create much more impressive, comprehensive structures in order to deal with the continuing tide of legislation. People who want to remain in the EU assume that it is a static organisation. We apparently have an opt-out from ever closer union, but the European Court of Justice does not refer to ever closer union because it does not need to. If we remain in the EU, this wave of legislation will go on and on and on.

Rulings by the European Court of Justice have also given rise to a number of amendments to United Kingdom laws. One of the most significant cases in this regard was the Factortame case, which concerned the UK’s obligation under EC law, and the terms of the 1985 Act of Accession whereby Spain joined the European Community, to allow Spanish fishermen to fish in UK waters within the prescribed EC quotas.

We need much more analysis, much more control, and a much more intelligent debate about what is going on, because most people in the House of Commons are blind to it. Naturally, as Members of Parliament, we are all much more interested in the great debates about assisted dying, gay marriage or hunting, or even about whether to stay in the EU or leave it, or whether to bomb Syria. We are much more concerned about those issues than about the detailed nitty-gritty of what is going on under our noses. However, it does not stop. It does not rest. The machine keeps grinding on, with very little control from Ministers and virtually no control from the House of Commons.

Let me now deal with the cost of EU membership.

[Mr Chope]

Before my hon. Friend does that, may I ask whether he recalls—this is an example of what he has just been talking about—that in October 2000, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is now the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, assured the world that Europe’s new charter of fundamental rights would have no greater legal standing before EU judges than a copy of the Beano or The Sun?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That sort of casual statement is quite worrying, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend for telling us about it.

I was about to deal with the cost of EU membership. The following information is taken from various papers that I have been studying. The cost is set to be £3.1 billion higher over the next five years than forecast before the 2015 general election. This is not a static process, therefore. That change is due to a reassessment of the size of Britain’s economy relative to the rest of the EU, thus penalising the UK for its economic success. The bigger and more successful we get, the greater a magnet for migrants we become and the bigger the sub we have to pay, despite the fact that the deficit carries on much the same as it always has done.

[Philip Davies]

On that point, is it not ironic that the Prime Minister trumpets the fact that he has managed to get a cut in the EU budget but did not mention that as a part of that cut the UK’s contribution to the EU budget went up, not down?

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I am astonished that in this great negotiating triumph no attempt has been made to address the issue of the rebate, and I will give a few details on that in a moment. This was considered to be one of the most important issues—such as when Mrs Thatcher secured the reduction—but no attempt has been made to deal with it.

For 2016 the UK will pay £9.5 billion. It was only expected to pay £8.2 billion. Everybody casually rolls off the figure of £9 billion now as if we always thought it would be £9 billion, but it was not always going to be £9 billion; it was going to be £8.2 billion. It has suddenly gone up and nobody in the Government or elsewhere complains about that to our partners. I remember that when my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I were Ministers everybody talked about our “European partners”. This Government seem to have dropped that; they have dropped all the visionary case for Europe in terms of partnership and so forth. They all claim they are great Eurosceptics, but they do not tell us the casual little fact that we were expected to pay £8.2 billion and that has now gone up to £.9.5 billion. We are now estimated to pay just under £250 million per week for EU membership.

Civitas has debunked the Government claim that the EU makes each household better off by £3,300 per year. The Government can argue against Civitas and have an analysis of its case, but they do make that claim. It would be nice to have some analysis of where they get those figures from, but we have not been given that.

According to Open Europe, the top five costliest EU regulations enforced in the UK are: the UK renewable energy strategy, with a recurring cost of £4.7 billion a year; the capital requirements directive IV package, with a recurring cost of £4.6 billion a year; the working time directive, with a recurring cost of £4.2 billion a year. I appreciate that one of the cases made by the Labour party is that it rather likes the working time directive. That is a perfectly logical, good case to make, and I have no argument with them making it, but I would like to know—perhaps the Labour party, the Government and the people would like to know—whether this figure of a recurring cost of £4.2 billion a year is right.

The next cost in the list is the EU climate and energy package, with a recurring cost of £3.4 billion a year. I am quoting Open Europe, which may be wrong, but the Minister can debunk these arguments if he wishes. Then there is the temporary agency workers directive, with a recurring cost of £2.1 billion a year. These are not insignificant sums—£4.7 billion, £4.6 billion, £4.2 billion, £3.4 billion, £2.1 billion—but how much detailed analysis are the British people being given about any of this?

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Is it not also ironic that the Labour party seems to be so enthusiastic for our membership of the EU, yet it comes to the House every month and asks that the Government do more to help the steel industry and the coal industry when it is the policies of the EU that are doing most to obliterate the steel and coal industries in the UK?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I have mentioned Grimsby and fishing, but my constituency also abuts Scunthorpe. What about these poor people there? They are also going to be allowed to vote on 23 June, and are being encouraged to do so. They would rather like to know the detailed costs of what the EU means for their jobs and what the possible alternatives are. This is serious stuff for them—it is not just a debate in the House of Commons; it is about their whole way of life and their town.

[Mr Chope]

Does my hon. Friend share my view that if we had been independent, we would have been able to introduce our own anti-dumping measures against cheap Chinese steel imports and to do so within six weeks, whereas this has taken the EU years?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

It beggars belief that whole towns can be suffering a possible wipeout and yet we are apparently putty in the hands in the Chinese. We should have stopped this on day one, as it is so serious—this is steel we are talking about.

[Mark Tami]

Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that in truth this is about the failure of this Government, who are more interested in cosying up to the Chinese than protecting the steel industry in this country?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

We are impotent; it is not a question of cosying up to the Chinese, as we have no control over this. Whether we like it or not, China will be the greatest, biggest and most important economy in the world within the next 10 or 20 years. Whatever the Minister’s views, the fact that we are part of the EU means that he could do nothing to defend Scunthorpe. I accept that the Government may argue that we get other advantages, perhaps in steel, but let us have an analysis of what it all means.

Open Europe is not some sort of purely ideological campaigning group; it produces fine studies, some of the most voluminous available, and it attempts in a reasonably intellectual way to work out what staying in and leaving the EU involves. Open Europe says that according to the UK Government impact assessments,

“these regulations also provide a total benefit of £58.6bn a year.”

Open Europe is trying to be fair. It goes on to say:

“However, £46bn of this benefit stems from just three items, which are vastly over-stated. For example, the stated benefit of the EU’s climate targets (£20.8bn) was dependent on a global deal to reduce carbon emissions that was never struck…Open Europe estimates that up to 95% of the benefits envisaged in the impact assessment have failed to materialise.”

Where is the Government’s response to that?

Open Europe continued by saying:

“Taking the regulations individually, the impact assessments show that Ministers signed off at least 26 of the top 100 EU-derived regulations, despite the IAs explicitly stating that the costs outweigh the estimated benefits. These regulations include the UK Temporary Agency Workers Directive and the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.

A further 31 of the costliest EU-derived regulations have not been quantified. Between the over-stated benefits, the regulations that come with a net cost and the ones with unquantified benefits, it remains unclear how many of these EU-derived rules actually come with a net benefit in reality, showing that there is plenty of scope to cut regulatory cost to business and the public sector.”

I would echo that. I may be wrong and if the Government want to argue these points in detail, I, for one, would be delighted.

Open Europe went on to say:

“Although the cost of EU regulation too high in proportion to the benefits it generates, it is important to note that these rules can bring benefits including by facilitating trade across the single market, for example in the case of financial services”.

That is an argument in favour. I fully accept that and Open Europe accepts it, but we need a genuine impact assessment of the costs and benefits of all these regulations. Where does this leave us in the total picture? My view is—[Interruption.] I would be grateful if the Whip would not speak too loudly while I am speaking. She is not supposed to be heard, unlike me. She has the real power; I can just speak.

My contention is that people are worrying too much about this decision in terms of the impact on the economy. Again, there have been many studies on this, but I do not believe that the impact on the economy of whether we stay or leave will be as dramatic as has been made out. That is “Project Fear”—that we are all going to lose our jobs and so on. According to Open Europe,

“In a worst case scenario, where the UK fails to strike a trade deal with the rest of the EU”—

thereby having to fall back on the World Trade Organisation rules—

“and does not pursue a free trade agenda”—

fairly unlikely, I would have thought, but this is the worst case scenario—

“Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be 2.2% lower than if the UK had remained inside the EU.”

So 2.2% lower, which is quite significant, but I am not sure that we would all suddenly lose our jobs.

[David Morris]

The figure of 2.2% is near enough as much as the economy is expected to grow in the next 12 months. I am certain that if we leave the EU in the next few months, especially with an oil crisis on our doorstep, we could face financial catastrophe. Does my hon. Friend agree?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

This is the worst case scenario and I am being completely fair in putting it. I think it is unlikely.

[Philip Davies]

Will my hon. Friend give way briefly?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Does not my hon. Friend want me to go on with the best case scenario? Then I will give way to him.

According to Open Europe,

“In a best case scenario, where the UK strikes a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU, pursues very ambitious deregulation of its economy and opens up almost fully to trade with the rest of the world, UK GDP would be 1.6% higher than if it had stayed within the EU.

However, these are outliers. The more realistic range is between a 0.8% permanent loss to GDP in 2030 – where the UK strikes a comprehensive trade deal with the EU but does nothing else; and a 0.6% permanent gain in GDP in 2030 – where it pursues free trade with the rest of the world and deregulation, in addition to an EU FTA.”

These arguments about disaster and millions of jobs being lost are, I think, overstated, but I may be wrong. I keep making this point: the Government have vast resources, such as the National Audit Office and the Office for Budget Responsibility. We would like to know before we cast our vote.

[Philip Davies]

The Treasury now acknowledges that 3 million jobs depend on trading with the EU, not on being a member of the EU. If that is the case—I am sure there is a lot of truth in it—given our substantial trade deficit with the European Union, does that not mean, therefore, that about 5 million jobs in the EU are dependent on its trade with the UK?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Yes, that is the point that was made time and again during the debate yesterday. I am not sure the Government have entirely answered it to my satisfaction.

The Government seem to argue that were we to vote to leave the EU, that would be such a catastrophic snub to our EU partners that there would be a degree of vengeance. I think that is a childlike view of how policy is created in Paris and Berlin. Many people in France—I take a bit of an interest in this—have argued for many years that it would not be an absurd state of affairs for Britain to leave the EU, for all sorts of reasons. However, the Government argue that a dramatic vengeance game would be initiated.

By the way, if our European partners acted in that way, would we want to have anything to do with them? It is a ridiculous argument anyway. They would not behave in that way, because of the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies)—because of our trade deficit with them, particularly with our German friends. They are intimately bound up with us in terms of trade and there is every incentive to conclude a reasonable deal.

[Mr Chope]

It is not just about the trade issue. The Baltic states, for example, are very dependent on our NATO presence in helping them to defend themselves against the Russian threat. They would never countenance the rest of the European Union taking it out on the UK, when the UK is doing so much to defend their interests.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Perhaps I have banged on a bit too much about the economy, and should briefly touch on defence and security, as it is in my hon. Friend’s Bill and is a matter of acute concern. Apart from “Project Fear”, which is based on this false premise of a loss of millions of jobs—Lord Mandelson appears to have made that up on the back of a fag packet—which no one has ever quantified in any great detail, although we wait to hear what the Government say about that, there are all these arguments about security. David Owen, a former Labour Foreign Secretary, who has now come out in favour of leaving the EU, dealt with that matter and debunked it very well on his interview on the “Today” programme yesterday. He asked how the European Union has improved our security by creating, in an imperialist and expansionist way, a new trade association deal with Ukraine, which led directly to Russian fears of being encircled and to the annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. By the way, I do not countenance, approve or support in any way what Russia has done. The fact is that the EU gave President Putin that opportunity.

In a direct answer to my hon. Friend, is it really conceivable that, if the UK decided to leave the EU, our friends and allies in the Baltic states would want to throw us into some appalling doghouse and have nothing more to do with us when their freedom and security depends so much on us? We do have the strongest armed forces in the European Union. France and Britain are the only two countries that are capable of deploying world power. The Minister who is summing up this debate has considerable expertise in this matter because, as a Back Bencher, he spent years talking about it.

Although I cannot speak for the French Government, I do regularly speak to people in France, and I can assure Members that France has no interest or desire in not continuing to co-operate in an ever closer way, in terms of an ever closer union of sovereign states, in military policy. This whole argument that, somehow, the peace and security of Europe would be endangered if we were to leave the EU does not hold water. I will not repeat all the arguments that have been made many times before about our peace and security depending not on remaining in the EU, but on NATO. That is not a point that can be directly summed up in any cost- benefit analysis, but it needs to be articulated. We Eurosceptics are not nationalists. We love Europe; we love Europeans; we love European culture; and we want to have the closest possible relationship with our friends in France and Germany.

Let us go back to some of the detailed studies of the cost-benefit analysis. I am very grateful to the Library of the House of Commons for this. In fact, we should pay tribute to it because it is one of the few bodies that has actually attempted, with its limited resources, to collate all these studies. The study by the Institute for Economic Affairs—Minford et al, 2005—“Should Britain leave the EU” estimates a range of 3.2% to minus 3.7% of GDP in ongoing costs. I have dealt with Open Europe. The 2014 study by Gianmarco Ottaviano “Brexit or Fixit? The Trade and Welfare Effects of Leaving the European Union”, the Centre for Economic Performance and the London School of Economics estimated the trade-related costs to the UK of leaving the EU as being in the range of 2.2% to 9.5% of GDP. That is their argument, but it would be nice for it to be tested. In the literature review for “Our Global Future”, the CBI—again, I am not citing people who are naturally friendly to my point of view, but we need to test the arguments—found that the net benefit arising from EU membership is somewhere in the region of 4% to 5% of UK GDP.

[Philip Davies]

Does my hon. Friend have the figures that the CBI gave for the great benefits that we would have received when it recommended that we join the euro?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

We should have had more independent analysis of that. Conservative Members often criticise Gordon Brown, but we should never forget that he kept us out of the euro, against the wishes of his Prime Minister, Tony Blair. We were told that disaster would strike by some in the City of London, the CBI and so on, and they used precisely these arguments. Now the Prime Minister goes to the Dispatch Box and says as a great virtue that we are out of the euro, but we were told by all the powers of the establishment that not joining the euro would be a disaster, and many of the arguments used were exactly the same.

[Mr Chope]

Roger Bootle told the Treasury Committee on 27 October last year:

“A large number of supposedly very highly qualified people argued that there would be a mass exodus of the financial services industry if Britain were not in the euro. It did not happen. In fact, the reverse happened: it was the provincial continental financial centres that suffered, as business concentrated on London”.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

The Mayor of London and the Conservative mayoral candidate represent, or hope to represent, the powerhouse of the British economy. Presumably they deal with and talk to businesses in London every day, and significantly they have both decided that London would not be disadvantaged by leaving the EU.

I am not necessarily quoting people who are friends of mine, but in evidence to an inquiry by the Lords EU Committee into relaunching the single market on 27 July 2010, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills stated that

“EU countries trade twice as much with each other as they would do in the absence of the Single Market programme”,

That is based on the argument that increased trade with Europe since the early 1980s may be responsible for UK income per head being around 6% higher.

That is fair enough. We accept that we want to recreate the single market in some form. However, the Government immediately replied, “Well, I’m sorry but the rules of the EU are absolutely clear. If you want to be part of the single market, you have to accept free movement of people.” But that is not necessarily true. For example, it does not apply to Canada. As I understand it, Canada has created a good trade deal with the EU, but I am not aware that EU nationals are allowed to travel freely to Canada without a visa—I have some knowledge of this because my wife has a Canadian passport as she was born in Montreal.

The argument about what sort of access we would have in the single market is so crucial that we must have some independent analysis. Otherwise, we are making a decision based not on facts, but on prejudice. Those of us who argue from a Eurosceptic point of view are not in any way trying to convince the British people that they should make this choice in terms of nationalism, although many will, and that is their prerogative. We are arguing that there is a perfectly good, legitimate, intellectual, rational case for leaving the EU, but we want it to be tested by the Government.

I had better sit down as I have probably wearied you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I want to end with a study, which people here will not be aware of, commissioned by the Bertelsmann Stiftung of Munich—so this is not, as far as I am aware, some sort of UK Independence party front organisation, but a well-respected German institution. It is interesting that people around Europe—Stiftung in Germany and think-tanks elsewhere in Europe—are starting to take seriously the prospect of the United Kingdom leaving the EU. They are also writing studies that could form part of the independent cost-benefit analysis we want the Government to do.

In the second and third columns of its detailed analysis of what countries pay into and get out of the EU, the Stiftung demonstrates that Germany, the United Kingdom and France are the biggest absolute net contributors, paying in about 0.5% of their gross national income. Eleven of the 28 member states were net contributors in the 2013 budget, and the Stiftung gives various detailed figures for member states’ gross contributions. In terms of net contributions as a share of GNI, we always come second to Germany.

The Stiftung says:

“Because the United Kingdom benefits relatively little from CAP expenditures (for example, it received only €3.16 billion in 2013 compared to France’s €8.58 billion), Margaret Thatcher negotiated the introduction of a ‘UK rebate’ in 1984. At its core, this contains a refund of approximately 2/3 of the United Kingdom’s annual net contributions to the EU budget. For the years 2011-2013, the rebate averaged around €4.1 billion. A correction in how the rebate is calculated was introduced in 2008, which reduces the rebate depending on the costs of the EU expansion. According to forecasts by the UK’s economic and finance ministry…the rebate will hover around an average of €6 billion”.

The Stiftung provides various detailed figures and illustrates how the UK’s net contribution has risen. It says:

“One key element of the Brexit debate is that net payments have increased sharply since the global financial and economic crisis in 2008…If the United Kingdom exits the EU on January 1, 2018, this will change how the EU budget is financed”—

that must be the understatement of the year. It continues:

“According to estimates by the UK’s economic and finance ministry”—

Her Majesty’s Treasury—

“the United Kingdom will pay a net contribution of £8 billion for fiscal year April 2017-April 2018.”

These arguments are therefore being set out in detailed papers by think-tanks throughout Europe, but here—in the most important decision this country will make, in just four months’ time—the Government are apparently telling us that they do not believe there should be any independent cost-benefit analysis of what that decision will mean for the United Kingdom. Shame on them!

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I would argue that the civil servants we send there are among the best in the world. It is a huge privilege and honour to work in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, although many of the civil servants in Brussels come from other Departments.

I must say, however, that we are granted 12% of the jobs in the EU, in the various Commission roles and so forth, but, of late, we have not taken them, because there are language exams to be taken, and the language school in the Foreign Office was closed down. There were important top jobs to be had, but because our civil servants could not pass the two language courses required—one at a higher level, one at a more subsidiary level—we could not fill the very roles that would have allowed us the necessary influence in the EU, in the bowels of Brussels, to change, affect and advance legislation.

I am pleased to say that we are changing that—the language school is back in place and able to train civil servants to the correct levels—but when I wrote the pamphlet, before the 2010 election, we were filling only 3% to 4% of those jobs, meaning that 8% of the jobs to which Britain was entitled were going to other countries. One is supposed to relinquish one’s passport—metaphorically—when one becomes a civil servant in the EU, but of course one remains British at heart, or Italian or French, or whatever it is. It was a waste of an opportunity to scrutinise, understand and affect what was going on in the EU. I am pleased to say that the civil service situation has changed, and that we are now far more immersed in Brussels.

Let us look at some of the big ticket items that have been agreed—I shall come on to them in more detail later, if I may—such as the trade deal with Korea or the patent agreement that protects any invention. You might have a small invention that you have pocketed away, Mr Deputy Speaker, and not yet told us about, but you can be assured that you will be able to present it and it will be protected right across the European Union. It was British civil servants who were able to pilot this measure through, and it provides an example of the sort of work they are doing.

To answer my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), our understanding of these matters is important. When I was the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Europe, I remember organising cross-party visits for Members of Parliament to make the trip to Brussels so that they could learn about the EU, meet civil servants and understand how the European Parliament and various parts of the Commission work. Most of them were so delighted to get back on the Eurostar at the end of the day that they never wanted to see Brussels again, such was the scale of the bureaucracy. That highlights a challenge, but it perhaps also reflects the absence of a determination to say that we should be turning the situation around. We should not simply turn our backs on it and accept everything that happens; we should try to enhance British influence over what happens in Europe.

That is exactly what our Prime Minister has done in working with our allies and trying to effect change for the better. There are many countries, many Prime Ministers and many statesmen who agree with our free market liberal views on how the European Union should be conducted. They agree with us that it has become too politically empowered and not sufficiently transparent, and that although it is the largest single market in the world, it is becoming overburdened with red tape and bureaucracy. From a social perspective, furthermore, it is the most costly area in the world. Some 50% of social services in the world are found on our own doorstep in the European Union. That means that we are uncompetitive in comparison with other places in the longer term, which is exactly what the Prime Minister was trying to determine in his negotiations at the weekend. He explained what he returned with in his statement on Monday.

I am pleased that we have had yet another opportunity this week to debate these matters, and I am sure it will not be the last time. I am most grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch for stepping in for our hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), who was originally going to articulate his views on the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch has done so with the same gusto that he has always shown in previous debates on the European Union. It is a matter of record and knowledge that he is my parliamentary Dorset neighbour, and I look forward to him donning one of the amazing ties that the leave campaign is promoting and going on the campaign trail in Dorset in the run-up to 23 June.

We heard contributions from other Members, including from my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), who articulated important questions about the merits of the European Union which need to be answered by those who want to remain in the EU. That is important for the public, many of whom are yet to make up their minds on the merits or otherwise of continuing our membership of the European Union.

The speech of the day was, I thought, given by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh)—not simply because of its length, but its quality as well. He made some erudite points, and I thought he was extremely honest about what the British nation might expect from the leave campaign when it comes to articulating what it would mean if we did leave. He was honest in raising some question marks over what might happen to the common fisheries policy and the common agricultural policy. Many people support these policies now, so it is important for them to understand the consequences of leaving. It was very honest of him to pose those questions, and the nation must hear the answers in a proper debate.

The “Project Fear” label has crept into the discussion many times. We want to win the arguments because people have decided on the merits—the whys and wherefores—of both sides, rather than because they were unclear about the position, or because one side had decided to scaremonger. What worries me is that this might descend into something like an American presidential election campaign, in which the negative overshadows the positives and the educated points of view.

My hon. Friend also raised a number of specific questions, and I shall come to those later.

I am pleased to say that that my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) managed to get hedgehogs into yet another debate, although he was not intending to talk about a subject for which he has become famous. He also made the point that this is one of the biggest debates that we will ever have, and that it is therefore right for us to devote time and energy to looking at all the details.

I am saddened that more Members have not taken the time to join us on a Friday. I do not know where the Scottish nationalists are, but at least the Labour Front Benchers have made it, and I am pleased about that. In any event, I am sure that Members will have further opportunities to debate these matters in due course.

As I said earlier, we had a full and wide-ranging debate on Europe yesterday, opened by the Foreign Secretary. One speech that was pivotal, and stood out, was the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames). It was a powerful oration, not least because my right hon. Friend mentioned his grandfather. As Members will know, his grandfather, looking at the mess of Europe, was concerned about how countries could integrate to the point at which they were no longer independent but interdependent, and would therefore never go down the road towards war again.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

May I take up that point about history, for the sake of the record? In his own very good speech, my right hon. Friend did indeed refer to his grandfather’s speech. Winston Churchill was always a robust defender of European unity, but he made it absolutely clear that what he foresaw was continental European unity. No one has ever been able to find any quotation from Winston Churchill suggesting that Britain should join a European union.

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend has made my point for me. What I think our right hon. Friend was trying to articulate was, “Please do not try to second-guess what would be the view of someone who is not alive today and able to understand the issues of today.” He made the point, very powerfully, that it was disingenuous to try to judge in that way. He was frustrated that people had taken the famous Zurich speech—of which we are now in the 70th anniversary year, and in which Churchill talked of a continental Europe—out of context, and had reinterpreted it in order to make their own points. In fact, it has already been used by both sides in the debate leading up to 23 June. Similarly, people have said of Margaret Thatcher, “I am sure that, if she were alive today, she would say this, that and the other.” I think it unhelpful to lean on great statesmen who are not here today, because today’s circumstances are very different.

It is, however, worth reminding ourselves that from the devastation of war-torn Europe has emerged a union of 28 nations, which are living in peace now, and which have also lived through a ragged period of dealing with the growth and subsequent demise of communism. We have become part of the biggest and most powerful single market in the world, and it is important for us to remember that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough also gives me licence to touch on how this is playing out in other European capitals. Things can be quite parochial in the Chamber, and sometimes the things that we say here do not reach much further, but we are being watched, registered and monitored in other capitals across the world as we have this debate. I have to say from my role as Foreign Minister responsible for the middle east, north Africa and south-east Asia that there is some puzzlement about this debate, as Britain has a legacy of being at the forefront of decision making—being a P5 UN Security Council member, a leading member of the Commonwealth and playing such a pivotal role in NATO, and given that in every international organisation from the World Trade Organisation to the International Monetary Fund to the World Bank, Britain is at the forefront.

Other countries hesitate and look at us to see which direction Britain is looking in, knowing that we have a powerful, strong and important relationship with the US, that we have experience, and that we have an interest in, and understanding of, much of the world around us, yet they also look at us and see that we might want to opt out of one of the largest organisations in the world. The Prime Minister also articulated that point on Monday.

We do not make any reference to the fact that the UK could survive outside the EU. We are a great and powerful nation—the fifth biggest trading nation in the world. The question is the degree of that success. That is what we need to debate up until 23 June. Are we better off out and making decisions separately, or are we more powerful as part of this organisation and collectively exerting more influence from inside? That is pivotal in the debate we will have in the next three months.

Much has also been made about the security concerns and whether Britain’s security status and competence would rise or fall were we to leave the EU. When the starting gun was fired, and the debate opened up and people declared their position, some comments were made about the Paris attacks, saying that they would be more likely to take place in the UK if we were outside the EU. I think those comments were disingenuous; I will not go further than that. We need to have a sensible and measured discussion about security. I certainly do not agree with that sentiment at all, and I urge those on both sides of the argument to be very cautious about making flippant comments and scaremongering. We are of course subject to the pressures of the media and the sensationalism they seem to encourage so that they have soundbites for the evening news or the Twittersphere, but our allies are looking at this and it does not bode well for Britain if we scaremonger in this way.

However, we are living in a very dangerous and complex world, one that is far more complex today than it was a couple of decades ago. The consequences of the Arab spring are still with us, we have an emboldened President Putin—far more unpredictable than ever before—and we have the growing concern of extremism. When the Bali bomb went off in 2002 there were just over 20 listed extremist groups—listed groups of terror. Today there are over 50. These are registered, listed groups recognised by us as organisations of terror. That means that at the moment we are not winning the battle to contain them. Daesh is obviously the biggest, and it is a franchise; other organisations, such as Boko Haram, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and Ansar al-Sharia in Libya, are joining forces and gaining a franchise from Daesh. We need to think about how we collectively defeat that, and there is a question about the role of the EU in dealing with that.

Much has been said about the role of NATO—it was mentioned today. It is, of course, the cornerstone of our security endeavours, and we also have our strong relationship with the United States, but along with the growth of the European Union comes soft power. These things complement each other, and one does not replace the other. In certain areas where other countries are wanting to pursue a European-style army, we have made it clear that we would not support that, and neither would many other countries. Everybody has recognised that from a kinetic perspective NATO is the cornerstone of our security, but soft power comes with the ability to provide political leverage in introducing sanctions, and it is the work of the European Union that started the ball rolling in getting sanctions built up against Iran. Those sanctions eventually forced Iran to curtail its nuclear programme, come to the table and agree a long-term solution which denies the Iranians the ability to build a nuclear bomb. EU sanctions and EU discussions led to the P5+1 talks, which involved other countries such as China, Russia and the United States. That gives us an indication of the role the EU can play, and the counter-piracy operations off Somalia are another great example of this work, which can complement what NATO is doing.

We also need to consider the bilateral operations that work underneath the umbrella of the European Union, for example, the Border Force capabilities in Calais. One could argue that if we step out of the European Union, we could negotiate these things one by one, but carrying out bilateral talks with a number of countries is a lot more complex. The question is: would such an approach be as efficient as going to a single organisation—Interpol, Frontex or the European border forces—and at these meetings having a say not just in bilateral arrangements, such as those we have with France, but collectively? Internationally, what is the European Union’s view on the situation in Libya, with the movement of refugees and with the criminal gangs exhorting funds from refugees who wish to make the perilous journey across the Mediterranean? My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley posed the question as to the impact of extremist parties in Europe, as it could be argued that that has been a consequence of the movement of refugees. But the only way we are going to sort that is by dealing with the problem at source—by addressing what is happening in Syria. Again, I would argue that the EU can put far greater emphasis and might into providing a challenge and looking for solutions by working collectively, not only on managing the refugee crisis, but on addressing the challenges at source in order to mitigate what is going on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

I am not sure that is quite correct. Federica Mogherini, who leads on these matters for the European Union, is very much in alignment with that view. We discussed these things in Rome recently when we looked at Syrian and Iraq matters. My hon. Friend is right to say that there are a number of challenges—first, the genuine Syrian refugees caught up in the region. We should pay tribute to Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, for the massive burden that they have taken on. We have chosen to support those refugees who are most vulnerable. The challenge that has come across Europe comes not just from Syrians. Mixed in with them are Afghans and others from Africa, taking advantage of the patterns of migratory flow. We have said that if we open our doors to them, we are likely to encourage more. That is why we have been very firm.

The consequence is that thousands are still coming in across Europe every day and we need a solution to deal with that. If my hon. Friend visits Greece now, he will see the scale of the challenge there. On beaches that should be for holidaymakers, there are migrant camps and individuals everywhere, some in transit and some having put up a temporary home. EU countries are affected by that, which is why collectively we need a better solution.

Central to that is solving the problem so that people do not feel they want to turn their back on their country, thereby making it all the weaker. Many of the people who can make it and are making it to Europe are the ones with mobile phones, the ones who are fed and have a family. I do not doubt that they are going through an horrific time, but many of them are educated and if they depart from Syria, they deny it the doctors, nurses and engineers that will be needed once the guns fall silent and the country starts to rebuild itself.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

May I say that the Minister is replying to the debate extremely well? It just shows that sometimes there is an advantage in having to wait a bit before one gets on to the Front Bench because one understands this place better.

May I ask my hon. Friend a serious question about the refugees from Syria? I put this point to the Prime Minister and I am not sure I got an adequate reply. I want the Minister to try and deal with it. I am not so worried about east European migrants to this country because they work hard and integrate. I am extremely worried about the millions pouring in from the middle east, including Syria. I said to the Prime Minister that Merkel’s million would all have a right to come here once they get passports. The Prime Minister said that only 2% of people coming into Germany get passports.

The Minister cannot give me an answer now, but will the Foreign Office do some more work on this? Based on history, I think a much higher proportion of those pouring into Germany now will get passports. I would like the Foreign Office to keep an eye on this because those people would have a right to come here and it is an important issue.

[Mr Ellwood]

The first thing that has to be acknowledged is that the normal processes in place across Europe for dealing with refugees applying for status are going to be tested, because of the scale of the migration that we are dealing with. Under Germany’s current rules, they would have to wait a number of years—eight years, I think, but I stand to be corrected—before they can gain a passport. If they have a criminal record, they will not get a passport. So there is automatically a delay in the process of securing a passport. The German analysis is that in such a time frame, many will hope to return home or to remain in Germany. We need to keep the problem in context. If they are in Germany, have a German passport and receive benefits there, why would they want to come to the UK? These are big questions, but they are for further down the line. They should not be ducked. The scale of what we are dealing with is unprecedented since the movement of populations after the second world war.

I should just mention that much of the focus of the Syria conference that took place in the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre was on some of those questions as well. We raised an unprecedented amount of money—$11 billion was pledged in one day—from the international community. I spoke at one of the non-governmental organisation conferences, and much of the energy was focused on how the European Union deals with such challenges. If I am honest, the EU could be regarded as a fair weather organisation: when economies are doing well, that is all fine and good, but when something such as Ukraine comes up, that is when the mechanics of bringing countries together to achieve consensus has yet to be tested. That is where the European Union is having to learn far faster than NATO, which, from a security perspective, had the machinery in place to be able to react to these events on a more regular basis. None the less, my hon. Friend raises an important point.

I just want to talk a little about the consequences of exit, which is what this Bill is all about. In fact, as I mentioned earlier, we would have to delay the referendum. There is a trigger notice in article 50, which would prompt negotiation. A country cannot simply walk out of the European Union, nor can it tear up its membership card as one can do, presumably, with a political party. It needs to apply to leave, and in the good old European Union way there is a process to be followed. That process can last up to two years. It also requires the support of the 27 members, and that can take time. With all this, there is a question for those who are advocating departure: if the process were to last more than 24 months, what happens to businesses and where do they fit in? What will happen to deals, negotiations and reputations? How does the City of London continue to attract business if there is a question mark over the departure date—and that is before we have even considered what we might be entering into.

Michael Howard’s comments were referred to this morning. He talked about renegotiating to get back in. So, let us say that a country manages to get out of the EU in two years, it then might have to begin negotiations to get back in again. It took Switzerland eight years to consolidate its deal. That is time consuming. Arguably, the process can be faster. We are a far bigger country than Switzerland or Norway, so the process could be expedited. Again, there will be delays. There is a question mark over where we actually stand and what our relationship is.

It is just worth mentioning article 49, which does not get as much press as article 50 in the European treaty. It says:

“Any European State which respects the values referred to in Article 2 and is committed to promoting them may apply to become a member of the Union.”

Article 49 is all about what a country does to regain its membership. It says:

“The European Parliament and national Parliaments shall be notified of this application.”

All the national Parliaments then have a debate and discussion about a future British application.

“The applicant State shall address its application to the Council, which shall act unanimously after consulting the Commission and after receiving the consent of the European Parliament”.

So the country needs unanimous support. If one country were to say to us, “No, you can’t come back in on those terms” then we are stuck. Also, anybody who knows the European Parliament knows that it has myriad views.

It goes one to say that the European Parliament

“shall act by a majority of its component members…The conditions of admission and the adjustments to the Treaties on which the Union is founded, which such admission entails, shall be the subject of an agreement between the Member States and the applicant State.”

I could go on, but I think that the message is clear. There are an awful lot of hurdles to clear to complete the process. It is not a simple process.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend shakes his head. I hope that were that horrible scenario ever to take place, recognition would be given to Britain’s place in Europe, but other countries could quite rightly say, “Hang on a minute, We have dedicated teams looking at us. Why should Britain jump the gun?”

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Why is the Minister spending so much time arguing about a process for how we will get back in the European Union when we will have just left it? I am confused.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Ellwood]

That is why these debates are helpful. I can only make clear what the Government’s position is. I can also ask the Minister for Europe to place a letter in the Library to set out in more detail what the consequences would be. Given the number of emails, there is clearly huge interest in this matter across the country, so I am pleased to have this opportunity to address it.

Guidance to the civil service was mentioned. The example was given of the fishing Minister’s dilemma in being unable to participate fully in the debate on the European Union. Of course, he can participate fully, but to clarify—the Prime Minister also responded on this issue at Prime Minister’s Question Time—the Government have a clear position, which is to recommend to the country that people vote to remain members of a reformed European Union.

Quite exceptionally, Ministers are being allowed to depart from the normal rules on collective responsibility, in order to dissent from the official Government position on the referendum question. However, the civil service exists—we cannot get away from that—and it is there to support the Government of the day and the policy agreed by the Government of the day. The letter published by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and subsequently extended by formal guidance from the Cabinet Secretary to civil servants, does no more than give effect to that.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

On that point, when will purdah begin?

[Mr Ellwood]

I am coming to that shortly, when I will go into the details of the timetable, but I just wanted to clarify the position, because it may be raised again in relation to other Ministers who have different views as well.

European Affairs

Edward Leigh Excerpts

Thursday 25th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Yes, it has. First as Defence Secretary, and now as Foreign Secretary, I have seen how, in practice, working with EU partners is an important tool in our armoury. Of course, the EU will never, in any way, replace the security benefit that we get from NATO; it does a different thing. However, we have seen in the conflict over Ukraine that economic sanctions—which, in reality, are the only practical weapon available to us in responding to the challenge of Russia—when properly honed and consistently used by the European Union, will prove to be a very important weapon in our armoury against Russian aggression.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

This Government have rightly been critical of previous Governments for not having an independent audit of our national finances, and they have set up the Office for Budget Responsibility. [Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. That was a very discordant noise—nothing like as mellifluous as the voice of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), to whom I know the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) will shortly be apologising.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Well, back to my theme. We have set up the Office for Budget Responsibility. The Foreign Secretary is rightly doing a sort of cost-benefit analysis of this issue. Why do the Government not institute an independent study, by a genuinely independent body, to go in some detail into the effects of a Brexit, plus or minus, on, say, GNP? That would surely be very useful.

[Mr Hammond]

The problem with the challenge my hon. Friend presents—it is going to be a recurrent theme in this debate, I suspect—is that we simply do not know what the counterfactual is. We do not know what Britain’s situation outside the European Union would be. We do not know whether a deal could be negotiated with the remaining 27. We do not know what free trade agreements could be negotiated with other parties, and we do not know on what timescale those could be achieved. We do not know what damage would be done to our economy in the meantime. I fear that the objective analysis my hon. Friend is seeking might be very difficult to achieve.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hilary Benn (Leeds Central) (Lab)]

Almost 41 years ago, this House debated the terms of a renegotiation of our place in Europe prior to a referendum of the British people. On 7 April 1975, this is what the opening speaker in that debate said:

“for many hon. Members, as for millions outside the House, the issue is not limited to an assessment of the outcome of the renegotiations. Many…have already made up their minds…There will be a substantial body of opinion…who believe…that Britain should be in the Community for the greater economic good of Britain in a changing world…Equally there is a substantial body of opinion which is fundamentally opposed to British membership and which holds that no possible renegotiations could have changed the nature of the Community sufficiently to enable it to support British participation.”—[Official Report, 7 April 1975; Vol. 889, c. 821.]

Those were the words of the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who, incidentally, gave the British people a decision about their place in Europe. Those words remind us that some things never change, although then it was the Labour party that was split over our place in Europe and the Conservatives who were united, whereas now there has been a complete reversal of roles. History is repeating itself in mirror image.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

As we are talking about history, can we at least agree that the right hon. Gentleman’s late, lamented and great father and Enoch Powell were right during those historic debates in the early 1970s that this was a unique endeavour and that what we were signing up to in the European Communities Act 1972 was quite unlike any other treaty, because it established the supremacy of the European Court of Justice over this House? Can we at least agree that there is no halfway house—we are either under EU law or we are not? That is what this referendum is about.

[Hilary Benn]

Indeed, that is the case. The Labour party—not the Conservative party—decided that the British people should have their say precisely because that kind of transfer of sovereignty is a decision that should rest not with this House of Commons, but with the British people. The British people made their choice and decided by a significant margin to remain in the European Community.

I was about to mention the Prime Minister’s reception on Monday. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) is fond of describing some right hon. and hon. Members as the “desperate to be disappointed”. It is fair to say that on Monday, those people were indeed disappointed, because they were never going to be satisfied.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I agree that we must understand the lessons of history and if I, for one moment, thought that leaving the EU would make civil war in Europe the remotest bit possible, I would not be standing here advocating that we do leave. How could I, when I come from a post-war generation where my parents constantly talked about the war? It was the essential fact of their life. My parents were 25 in 1945. My mother had to flee Paris hours before the German tanks rolled in. Her best friend, who was Jewish, had to throw herself off a train and was killed as she was being taken to the death camps. My father also had to flee France. This was a defining moment in their life, and it is not surprising that that generation wanted to create more of a sense of European solidarity and never repeat the slaughter and horror of two world wars. We all know that.

There was also a lack of confidence, I think, in that post-war generation. In the lifetime of my parents and my early lifetime, in just 20 years the world’s greatest empire dissolved—our empire dissolved. And there was a lack of confidence about our economy. When I had my first job and I was sitting across the river looking at the Palace of Westminster dreaming one day of becoming an MP, I was having to work a three-day week and was working by candlelight. Then when I arrived here in the 1980s we were shadowing the Deutschmark and it was felt that, again, we would find life outside the European Economic Community, as it was then, or the European Union a cold and hard place, but now we are in a different world. We are now in a new world—I will not say a brave new world, but it is a globalised world—and we have regained our confidence as the fifth largest economy in the world.

Therefore, some of these arguments are based on the past and we must certainly learn the lessons of the past, but we must realise that there is now a different future, and that the EU may have played its part but it has moved on from what we voted for in 1975. It has moved on from what was an economic community into something much more unified in that sense, and much more powerful.

Interestingly, however, so few of the people here who advocate our staying in the European Union seem to have this vision; where are the speeches today or this week, or in the country that have that vision from those who favour remaining in the EU? Where are the people arguing for a single currency? Where are the people arguing for us to be part of Schengen? Where are the people arguing for much greater co-operation and, indeed, an ever closer union? Where are those voices in Parliament? Where are the voices of the Ted Heaths, the Barbers and all these great figures from our past?

[Mark Pritchard]

I am not arguing for an extension of Schengen or for a single currency, but I am arguing for us to remain in on national security grounds. Does my hon. Friend, with all his experience, agree that if the United Kingdom were to leave the EU, the EU would be less safe and if the EU is less safe, just over the horizon, that is not in the United Kingdom’s national security interest?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That is a weak argument, perhaps one of the weakest that those advocating our staying in the EU believe in. I am not going to repeat all the arguments about our security ultimately depending on NATO, but I will give one example, from recent history, in order to reply to my hon. Friend. Does he think that the European Union attempting, in a rather cack-handed way, to create an association agreement with Ukraine was a good move to make? Has it made Europe a safer place? Has it not led directly—I do not approve of this—to the annexation of Crimea? An imperialist Europe is not necessarily a force for security; the force for security is the best national interests of the United Kingdom, working with our partners in NATO, and that has been the case since the second world war.

I am concerned, first, by the lack of vision on the pro-European side, which is something quite new in this House. It was certainly not the basis and foundation of debates in the 1970s, when principled cases were being made on both sides. On one side were the Benns, Foots and Powells, and on the other side were the Heaths and the Barbers. If there is not such a divide between us and if we are united in this House in not wanting to be part of an ever closer union, we do not want to be part of Schengen and we do not want to have a single currency, why are we told that Armageddon will take place the moment the people—not us but the people—vote to leave? Why do we get these apocalyptic visions of what would go wrong? Why are the Government so intent on not having a cool, calm, independent cost-benefit analysis of what would happen if we decided to leave? I suspect, having read things such as the Open Europe briefing, that the difference is marginal. Open Europe suggests that, in the best case scenario, we might gain 1.1% in gross national product, if we became a deregulated, open society and immediately concluded a free trade agreement, and that in the worst case scenario we might lose 2.2% of our GNP. It is therefore quite a narrow debate. If it is a narrow debate, can we not just raise its tone? Can we not say, “Whether we leave or stay in is probably not going to have a dramatic effect on our economy”?

In that sense, it is exciting to think that we might actually be able to run our agriculture. I represent a highly rural area. Our agriculture industry creates 3.5 million jobs, provides 62% of the food we eat and contributes £85 billion a year to the UK economy. It would be rather exciting if this House and our own Ministers ran agriculture. What about fisheries? Do we remember all the arguments made by our friend Austin Mitchell, who represented Grimsby? Do we remember what Grimsby was like, when one could walk across the harbour across the decks of all the trawlers? Do we recall what happened to our fishing industry? Do we recall that it was given away in the last two days of negotiations by Mr Heath? Perhaps it would be quite visionary and quite exciting for us to create a low-tax, deregulated economy. There is a world out there. Winston Peters, a former deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand, has openly speculated about, as he says, forgetting the terrible betrayal of 1973 and creating a new free trade agreement not just with Australia, as New Zealand is now concluding, but with us as well. There is an exciting world out there, with India, China and so on. Do people not think—

[Mark Pritchard]

rose—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

No! No! Please.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I will not give way, because others wish to speak. My hon. Friend has already given me extra time just by standing up. [Interruption.] I will finish my speech, because I do not wish to abuse the procedures of the House.

On a final note, there is a world out there. Let us grasp it; let us trust the people; let us not be afraid and let us regain our freedom.

[Several hon. Members rose—]