EU: Recent Developments

Lord Bishop of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 16th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Guildford]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for this debate, and indeed warmly welcome it, including his stress on the necessity for fiscal discipline within the eurozone and his explanation of the crucial December agreement, which has already been referred to many times in the debate. In any case, Guildford is very pleased to speak in a Guildford debate.

I draw attention to your Lordships’ EU Committee report, which was published two days ago and to which I am much indebted. It draws attention to what may be a serious anxiety shared by other Members of your Lordships’ House—that the United Kingdom will be marginalised by reason of a shift of discussion to forums in which we have elected, for the time being, to have no voice. While I am glad that the UK is not opposing the proposed agreement of last December in terms of its support through European Union mechanisms, I hope, along with the EU Committee, that we shall follow its course very carefully and see where both our best interests and those of the whole EU lie in the longer term.

I suggest that it would be disastrous if the result of the pressure of what I will carefully call excessive Euroscepticism resulted in our ultimate isolation. However, I deeply sympathise with the Minister because such “islanders’ fear” is hardly new. Just over 30 years ago, in the Palais des Congrès in Brussels, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, said that in Britain:

“The European Community has a communication difficulty in expressing its underlying vision. … It is going to be hard to make progress if there is no vision of where we are going sufficiently strong to harness the energies which are easily diverted into mutual suspicion and selfish kinds of nationalism”.

In that same lecture he bewailed the fact that:

“Little Englanders still exist who believe that all would be well if we withdrew from foreign entanglements”.

He added the obvious statement:

“The complexity and interdependence of economic and political life in the modern world make isolation an impossible option”.

Plus ça change!

It is still obvious to me that if there is a leak in the ocean liner below the eurodeck, it will soon enough affect the sterling passengers as well, as the Minister has himself stressed, adding significantly that the EU is our largest market.

However, in your Lordships’ debate today, which is largely about economics and politics, the voice of the churches and, indeed, of faith communities, may seem an irrelevance. I argue that that is not the case, although I declare an interest here as the Anglican vice-president of the Conference of European Churches, which is wider than the EU.

Robert Runcie could not be dismissed as a wet pro-European without patriotism. He did not earn his MC in the Scots Guards for Utopian idealism but by knocking out a Panzer single-handedly in Normandy. Yet after the war he returned to Oxford and immediately volunteered to go back to Germany in the Oxford-Bonn reconciliation exchange. That was the European vision he spoke of in Brussels: a Europe of reconciliation, compassion and meaning. With such a vision we have the potential for communities of virtue.

This was also the Christian vision of the founders of the European institutions: Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Spaak and de Gasperi. They were inspired by a vision of what I would loosely call Christian democracy—that is not necessarily a party political tag—which gave life to otherwise dead institutional and economic structures. Without such fresh vision, I fear that Europe will eventually lapse into petty parochial haggling and dangerously extreme forms of nationalism.

I am an amateur historian, so I conclude with the following reminiscence. Not far from this place, in Westminster Hall, the Man for All Seasons, Thomas More, was tried, to be eventually beheaded at the Tower of London. At his trial in this Palace of Westminster, he spoke movingly of his true patriotism. He remained the King's servant—though, of course, God’s first—but he also had a wider vision than King Henry VIII. Thomas More said at his trial:

“And for the Kingdom I have all other Christian realms”.

As we properly debate the economics and politics of the EU and wider Europe, may I make a plea for a revival of the vision of Europe which fired the EU’s founders and which is deeply rooted in Europe’s many cultures and, now, its many communities of faith?