European Union (Referendum) Bill

John Baron Excerpts

Friday 5th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Alexander]

I will not give way, because I want to make progress. The Conservative approach to Europe undermines the prospects for growth, because, as my hon. Friend has just made clear, it creates unnecessary uncertainty that could undermine investment, because it risks Britain sleepwalking to the exit of the European Union precisely when the economic benefits of membership are most needed, given the stagnating economy. At least we have the courage to acknowledge that membership of the European Union is vital to the economy of the United Kingdom, not least because of the benefits of free trade and integration in the world’s largest trading bloc.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He is a reasonable fellow, but what he does not seem to grasp is the fact that this debate—this issue—is about the principle of a referendum, not the relative merits of in or out. He also seems to fail to understand that this is about trust between politicians in general and the British electorate, given that too many promises have been broken in the past, including Labour’s promise of a referendum when it came to the EU constitution and Lisbon. Why will the Labour party not trust the people on this issue?

[Mr Alexander]

Why does the Conservative party not trust the Conservative Prime Minister? When will it release the Downing Street One? That is the question. He is sitting on the Front Bench like a hostage, not a leader.

Let me address the hon. Gentleman’s point. He was generous enough to describe me as a reasonable fellow and I return the compliment. As a reasonable fellow, he will be keen to defend and protect the jobs of his many constituents who work at places like Ford’s Dunton technical centre. I am sure that he is concerned for those jobs. Perhaps when he has the opportunity to speak he will explain to them why the European chief executive of Ford has said:

“All countries should have their sovereignty, but don’t discuss leaving a trading partner where 50pc of your exports go… That would be devastating for the UK economy.”

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman’s constituents will be very interested in that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Denham]

No, I will make a little more progress.

Why has this situation come about? Why has supposedly the most powerful politician in the land come begging his MPs to support a private Member’s Bill? The Prime Minister’s position on the issue seems clear enough. He made a speech in January in which he said that after the next election, if there is a Conservative Government, he would aim to renegotiate our relationship with the EU, with an in/out referendum by 2017, come what may in those negotiations. That might not be wise—there is absolutely no guarantee of any negotiations being clear by 2017—but it is certainly a clear position, and it came from the Prime Minister.

Why was that not good enough for the Conservative Members who have turned up today? Of course, many of them just want to leave the EU. They do not care when, as long as it is as soon as possible, and they do not trust their own Prime Minister. As soon as the Queen’s Speech was published, they were after him. The hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) was first off the mark, moving an amendment regretting the failure to mention a referendum Bill in the Queen’s Speech. He was very clear why one was needed. He wrote in The Daily Telegraph:

“The Prime Minister made a historic pledge to the British people during his January speech,”

but

“where the Prime Minister’s pledge falls down is its believability.”

Let me repeat that:

“where the Prime Minister’s pledge falls down”—

this “historic pledge”, let us remember—

“is its believability.”

What an extraordinary statement! The reason we are here today is because the majority of Tory MPs do not believe that a historic pledge made by their own leader is believed by the British people. That is the only reason we are here, and that is why the Prime Minister is humiliated by these proceedings today.

[Mr John Baron]

I am afraid the right hon. Gentleman quotes very selectively from that piece. Having written it, I will correct him for the record. What I went on to say was that the issue was believability, not because there is an issue between the Prime Minister and his Back Benchers, but because the issue has been between politicians in general and the electorate, because far too many promises in the past have been broken, particularly by the Labour party and the Liberals, at every single general election. If the right hon. Gentleman is going to quote me, he should please do it correctly.

[Mr Denham]

I quoted absolutely verbatim from the hon. Gentleman’s article. Let me respond to his further point. I would expect a Conservative MP to say, “You can’t really believe what Labour MPs say”, and I would expect Labour MPs to say, “You can’t really believe what Conservative MPs say.” That is what we do here in this House. It probably does not do us much good with the general public, but that is what we do—we throw these things about. What I do not expect is a Conservative MP to say, “You can’t believe a Conservative Prime Minister,” and that is what the hon. Gentleman did. The Bill has arisen from the decision of Conservative Back Benchers—

[Mr Baron]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. It had better be a point of order, Mr Baron.

[Mr Baron]

It is a point of order Madam Deputy Speaker—or I hope it is. I seek your guidance. I have been misquoted by the right hon. Gentleman. [Interruption.] I promise the House that I have been directly misquoted. [Interruption.] I wrote the piece, so I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how one can correct the misquoting by the right hon. Gentleman.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The issue is a matter for debate, as the hon. Gentleman knows. I believe his name is down to be called in this debate and he will have ample opportunity at that point if he feels that the record needs to be corrected. I think he is experienced enough to know that these matters tend to be a point of debate rather than a point of order.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Horwood]

I do not think I had better. I am really looking forward to seeing the variety of different Conservative positions being expounded in the remainder of the debate, and if I give way to everybody—[Interruption.] Somebody is telling me to keep it short, and I think that the best way to do that is not to give way on every point.

The Bill also needs to deal with a problem relating to the franchise. Some 1.4 million British citizens reside elsewhere than in the UK, but according to the terms of the Bill the referendum will be based on the Westminster franchise. As far as I can tell, that has only about 19,000 registered overseas voters, so more than 1 million Britons, whose lives will be fundamentally affected by this change—they are British passport holders resident in other parts of the EU—will be disfranchised in this referendum. By this formula, the Bill will give votes to Cypriot and Maltese citizens living in this country, because under the Westminster franchise Commonwealth citizens have the vote, but it will not give the vote to French, Italian or German citizens. So there are a lot of inconsistencies, and this issue has not been debated at all so far.

The House of Commons Library briefing also raised the question of whether or not the Bill is even legally binding. Even the hon. Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) has conceded that this parliamentary vote would not bind its successor Parliament and further parliamentary votes, probably on secondary legislation, would be required to give effect to the referendum in any case.

[Mr Baron]

The hon. Gentleman has now made one of the longest speeches. May I ask him, with all due respect: could he please cut it short, if only because a long list of Members also wish to speak?

[Martin Horwood]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his advice, which should probably have come from the Chair rather than him. There is a slight problem, however, as most of my time has been taken up responding to interventions from his colleagues, so perhaps he should encourage them to be a little quieter.

The problems continue. The uncertainty that the Bill creates for business is clear, even if we make a number of big assumptions about the referendum process: first, that the Conservative Front Bench will not change its position between now and 2017, but having changed it three times in two years, that is a big assumption; secondly, that the timetable for the referendum does not have to be changed in any case, although we may find in 2017 that we are in the middle of a renegotiation or treaty change process resulting from changes in the eurozone, and at such a juncture, it would be nonsense to hold a referendum, as another referendum might be provoked in only a matter of months or years, so we would not really know what we were voting for in those circumstances; and finally, if the political landscape had not completely changed in any case we might have a different Government with different priorities and there might be a recovery in the European economy, and we may find votes for the UK Independence party subsiding and that Europe is not quite such a big priority—it is not a terribly big priority for most voters according to existing polls—so the idea of spending yet more hundreds of hours of parliamentary time banging on about Europe might not seem quite as appealing.

Even if all of that is true, and we move towards a referendum by 2017, that still condemns British business and British jobs to four years of uncertainty—what a message to send to investors. The CBI is quoted in the Independent newspaper, i, this morning, and raises the problem of the uncertainty caused for British business:

“British businesses don’t want to find themselves at the margins of the world’s largest trading bloc operating under market rules over which they have no influence.”

That is the prospect that we are going to live with, unresolved, apparently for up to four years. That is one of the problems with the Bill. This morning, The Daily Telegraph, I think, quoted the leader of the Norwegian Conservative party, who pointed out that the supposed solution of the UK trying to have a status more or less equivalent to Norway’s was worse than being in the EU. Norway pays hundreds of billions of euros to the European Union for access to the single European market, and finds out about the rules through so-called fax democracy.

There are many, many problems with the Bill, which does not really resolve the main question. It is, as we all really know—rather like Harold Wilson’s Bill in the 1970s—about papering over the cracks in the Conservative party itself. It will not really work. The Prime Minister has spelled out a reasonably modest set of ambitions for renegotiation that will never satisfy many of his Back Benchers, who clearly want to use a much more ambitious and unilateral agenda for negotiation as something that will provide them with an excuse to campaign for exit.

UK businesses have access to free trade in the world’s largest single market, worth nearly £11 trillion in gross domestic product, with over 500 million consumers. One in 10 British jobs are linked to the single market. Some £495 billion-worth of British trade is with other EU member states. To put that in jeopardy—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Baron]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. With the greatest respect, would you remind Members that this is a debate about the principle of a referendum, not the relative merits of being in or out of the EU?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

I can see frustrations building up in the Chamber. I think that Mr Horwood is trying to give us an encompassing view of why the referendum may be good or bad. I am sure that even he recognises that a lot of people wish to speak, and hopefully we can move on. In the meantime, it is Martin Horwood.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) on securing this Bill. He has consulted widely on the Bill’s make-up, which has done him and it credit. I am sure that he will prove that we can address the issue of Europe and still do well, even when representing a marginal seat. Many commentators do not realise that although Europe, as a subject on its own, may rank only 10th or 12th in people’s order of preferences, it is very much entwined with our conversations about the economy or immigration. That is a fact, as we know when we knock on the doors in our constituencies.

The Bill is absolutely right and long overdue. As many hon. Members have said, the public have been waiting for too long to express their view on whether the UK should remain a member of the EU, because the EU has fundamentally changed since we first joined it in 1973. We were told then that the emphasis was on free trade, but it has since morphed, bit by bit, into one of ever-closer political union—a process that has resulted, over a period of time, in the salami-slicing of our sovereignty.

[David Simpson]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Baron]

I am going to crack on and be quick. I want to speak for just a couple of minutes because I am conscious that other Members want to speak as well. I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

The EU is now seen as too meddlesome in our everyday lives, too burdensome for our businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, and too costly for our taxpayers. Yet the political establishment in this country has, in essence, closed ranks over the past 30 years and denied the people their say. That is fundamentally wrong. They have not had a genuine choice about this at any of the general elections of the past 30 years or so. This arrogant and somewhat condescending approach by the political elite has not gone unnoticed by the electorate. I therefore congratulate the Prime Minister on being the first political leader to offer an in/out referendum; I am convinced that other leaders will follow suit. I also thank him for listening to his Back Benchers, the party faithful, and, most importantly, the country as a whole in embracing the idea of a referendum in the next Parliament and legislation in this one. This party has moved closer to the electorate, and it is now up to the other parties to decide whether they are going to step up to the plate.

Legislation is terribly important because it is more believable than election manifesto promises. There is a deep public scepticism when people hear promises being made by politicians about the EU, because too many have been broken in the past. They remember Blair’s promises on the EU constitution and Lisbon, when a referendum never materialised. They remember—or are constantly reminded, I should say—of Liberal Democrat promises at every general election on the need for a real referendum, which, strangely, never materialise even when they share power.

[Martin Horwood]

rose—

[Mr Baron]

No, I have spoken for too long already.

In conclusion, I take issue with the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham), who is no longer in his place. He claimed that, because I had suggested that this historic pledge by the Prime Minister was unbelievable—I have great respect for the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), but I am afraid she was absolutely wrong about this—I was somehow criticising the Prime Minister. Let me make it absolutely clear for the record that, having congratulated the Prime Minister on his January speech, I then went on to say:

“However, where the Prime Minister’s pledge falls down is its believability. British voters are deeply sceptical of politicians making promises on Europe: too many have been broken in the past.

People bitterly recall Labour’s broken promise…on the EU Constitution…and they also remember…the Liberal Democrats’ 2010 Election manifesto.

Passing paving legislation in this parliament for a referendum in the next would be a concrete way of demonstrating serious intent.”

That was what I said in the article that the right hon. Gentleman took out of all context.

This is an issue not of trust between the Prime Minister and his Back Benchers—I have no doubt we will get an in/out referendum in 2017—but of trust between politicians in general and the electorate, for understandable reasons given our lamentable record in keeping good our promises.

This brings us to the nub of the issue. What will Labour and the Liberals do? Will they support this Bill? Will they honour past promises to the electorate? Will they allow the electorate their say, or are they still stuck in the mindset of the previous political establishment, which could not trust the electorate with this issue? Time will tell, but I say this to them: ignore the electorate at your peril. I suggest that they do what is best for the country and I predict that the Labour party in particular will change its position on this issue before the next general election.