European Union (Referendum) Bill

Debate between Gerald Howarth and Robert Neill

Friday 17th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Robert Neill]

I will give way shortly, but I want to develop my point a little first, at least to the extent of being able to finish a sentence.

At the end of the day, government requires the consent of the people. That is the fundamental point that the hon. Gentleman has made. When there has been a step change in our relationship with the European Union, as there has been since those days of Harold Macmillan, it is right and proper to give the British people the chance to reflect and think again.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his Bill, and am proud to be a sponsor of it. He has mentioned Harold Macmillan. Harold Macmillan, of course, negotiated our membership of something called the European Economic Community, and that is what people voted on at the time. They thought that it was a trading arrangement, but it has morphed into the European Union, which has become a vehicle to create a United States of Europe, and that is what the people of Britain do not want.

[Robert Neill]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I voted in that 1975 referendum. I would like to say that I lied about my age in order to vote, but I did not. I had just started out as a young lawyer, and had just been elected a young councillor in Havering. I was at the beginning of my working life. Virtually the whole of some people’s working lives—virtually a whole generation—has gone by without anyone’s having had a say. The nature of the EU has indeed changed from that economic community—that

“purely economic and trading negotiation and not a political and foreign policy negotiation”,

as the late Lord Stockton described it—into an entirely different animal, altogether more complex and demanding in its relations with both this country and the rest of the world. That is why it is right for us to have the chance to engage in a sensible renegotiation and put the new offer that is available to the British people, so that they can decide.