European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Baker of Dorking Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 31st January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I remember the enthusiasm with which I voted for the 1972 Act and how I campaigned vigorously in the 1976 referendum on the Common Market. In the succeeding 40 years I moved the other way and I voted leave. I remember the Third Reading of the 1972 Bill. The debate was mainly about Commonwealth trade, not the great issues of Europe and all the rest of it. It was about Australian lamb and New Zealand butter. There were two Back-Benchers in that debate who forecast that if we were to join the Common Market there would be a substantial and irreversible transfer of sovereignty and power. They were Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. Over the following 30 years, their forecasts were correct: there was a substantial transfer of sovereignty.

Later in my political career I was involved in one such case. I was Home Secretary during the Maastricht negotiations and I was very keen to ensure that the responsibility of the Home Office for immigration, prisons and the criminal justice system should remain under British control. I had assurances from Douglas Hurd and John Major, given in great good faith, that that would happen. They had agreed with Europe that those issues should be put into a separate pillar. There were going to be three pillars. One would cover all the issues of the Home Office and they would be reserved to nation states. The night before the treaty was signed, I was rung up again and that pledge was reconfirmed. In all fairness, the European authority did set up a separate pillar, but it disappeared within 15 years. One should not be surprised at that because the very powerful institutions that the European Community had established, particularly the Commission, were not really interested in dispersing power from the centre. They believed in centripetal policies drawing powers into the centre. They were not very concerned about the periphery. Analysis of the British referendum shows that the periphery of the forgotten, the overlooked and the not-asked voted against the centralising powers of Europe.

When, as Home Secretary, I met the other Ministers of Justice, we were supposed to form a committee to be a check on the Commission because the Commission was always there. The trouble with the other Ministers was that they kept disappearing. Some were promoted, some were sacked and some were arrested. They were not about and they were not an effective control. They would always chide me on not being a good European. They were the last lot to do that because the Italian Minister went to jail for a huge financial fraud in Naples, the Irish Minister of Justice was sacked for fiddling his election expenses and the Spanish Minister for Justice won the booby prize as he went to jail for murder.

I voted leave for political reasons. I found that our institutions, such as the House of Commons, the courts and the judicial system, were much closer to the British electorate than their European counterparts. When qualified majority voting was introduced, our position at the table in negotiation was reduced very significantly. We lost far more votes than we won, so our position was diminished.

The decision to leave has been taken and I think it will not be changed. Jeremy Corbyn will not support a second referendum, and he is wise not to do that. I would not. I believe it is quite possible that in a second referendum the leave vote would go up, not down, because the way we have been treated by Europe over the past 18 months has been a pretty humiliating experience. Mr Barnier acts rather like a headmaster with a reluctant pupil. Parliamentary democracy should now prevail over plebiscitary democracy. Those who still want to be in the European Union, or to rejoin it if we leave, would be joining a very different body because already the centralising power has increased. Macron, Schulz and the former Italian Prime Minister want one fiscal policy and one Fiscal Minister, and if a Fiscal Minister is appointed one day, our Chancellor of the Exchequer would have to bow to him.

Before I sit down, I shall say something about the political situation and the position of the Prime Minister. I cannot recall any Prime Minister being subject to such vicious attacks, scornful dismissals, offensive vituperation and personally wounding comments on an almost daily basis. She is held in contempt by many people. She is not alone in that. Our last three Prime Ministers—Blair, Brown and Cameron—are also held in contempt, some of them in utter contempt. It seems to go with the job. The Prime Minister has been written off a hundred times yet could she form a Government? Yes. Could she get a Queen’s Speech? Yes. Could she get Article 50 through? Yes. Could she survive the Tory party conference? Yes. Could she restart the stalled negotiations before Christmas? Yes. These are not inconsiderable achievements. They are quite considerable. Faced with this avalanche of disdain, many people would have resigned, and she had an easy exit through her illness, but she has stayed on the bridge, I think from a sense of duty—that may be something to do with being a vicar’s daughter—to ensure that the electoral decision in the referendum, the largest democratic engagement ever in our history, is implemented.

She is the only Tory leader capable of carrying through the Government over the next year. The Conservatives are split, and the Labour Party is split. The Liberal Democrats are not split, yet gained no electoral advantage at all. Perhaps they have missed something. The Prime Minister has set herself one very simple target, namely that Britain will leave the European Union on 29 March next year, an act that for the last 50 years was not thought possible. That will be her moment of history, just as Ted Heath’s moment of history was joining the Common Market. It will be a major turning point in our history that will determine the path that our country will take. I know that some Conservative Eurosceptic MPs want to have all the freedoms on 29 March. I say to them, because we share some agreement, that they should perhaps remember the words of Oliver Goldsmith in the 18th century. They should not be,

“too fond of the right to pursue the expedient”.

It is not often in our history that our two Houses have to make a momentous decision, and that decision should be a parliamentary one, not a referendum one. It will affect which path exactly is to be taken. We have been doing this as an institution for more than 700 years. We have to decide which path to take. We have great sense of history in this House, and I think we recognise that the European Union is a form of empire. In the great roll call of history, it is the empires that collapse and disappear, and it is the nation states that survive.