European Union Referendum (Date of Referendum etc.) Regulations 2016

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl. We sit together on the same Sub-Committee, and I endorse everything he said about financial regulation.

It has been a most extraordinary debate. We have had three very original, very lucid, very remarkable speeches from a personal point of view on the subject: one by the noble Lord, Lord Jopling; another by the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool; and the third by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack. I found those particularly inspiring. However, we also had a complete abdication in the debate from those advocating our leaving the European Union. I always believed that the normal rule for rational human discourse was that, if someone had a proposal to make a change, it was for him to argue the case to explain why the change would represent an improvement and how the benefits could be secured. We have heard absolutely none of that.

Let me get across some of the major activities that we have in common with our partners in the European Union, which we would no longer have if we left. We played a major part in the political co-operation in common foreign policy activity, which has been very useful for world peace. The European Union has been part of the quartet in the Middle East: it played a major role with the United States in achieving accommodation with Iran, which is very important, and in achieving the Minsk agreement with Mr Putin. I put this question to the eurosceptics, such as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont: why is it that we would be better off in performing that role—whether for world peace, or in our own interests—if we no longer sat in the Council of Ministers and were no longer a party to the discussion or to the processes of policy formation and delivery? Similarly, we in the European Union have done a great deal to help the development of emerging countries, both through trade agreements—Cotonou and post-Cotonou—and through the largest aid programme in the world. If the eurosceptics win this referendum, is it their intention that we pull out of that activity altogether? Presumably we cannot be part of a trade agreement, Cotonou or otherwise, if we are no longer part of the European Union. Would we cease to support the projects that are now being supported there, or would we perhaps decide, all on our own, to replicate the structures of project evaluation and supervision and thereby spend a lot of money, which could have been spent for the benefit of the countries we are trying to help? Is that a sensible thing to do—is that in the national interest?

On the environment, we had great success in the Paris conference, and the EU has been shown to be a major force in this field. If the eurosceptics win the referendum, do they intend to abandon our present policy on the environment altogether? I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, wants to do that. If they do not want to abandon it, what sort of role do they see for our country? The people in this country are entitled to ask that question. If we are still going to support, from outside, the European Union and its policy initiatives in this field, why would it be an advantage to us to do it from outside? Why would it be an advantage not to be in the Council of Ministers, nor to be discussing these matters with the Commission and developing a coherent and common position?

I turn to the very important issue of the Justice and Home Affairs Council, Europol, the common arrest warrant and so on, which are matters of life and death. We know that the eurosceptics hate those measures. They fought like cats against them, in this House and the other place, and never wanted to accept them in the first place. What are they going to do? That is one area where the man who I think wishes to be leader of the out campaign, Boris Johnson, has actually given an answer, in yesterday’s Telegraph. He says that he is going to form a series of bilateral intergovernmental agreements. The idea of having 28 separate bilateral agreements is obviously absurd; I will not waste the time of the House by explaining why, because everyone can see that. It shows that Mr Johnson and his colleagues have not even begun to think this through. What is required is an integrated structure of communication and response systems of information and intelligence- gathering and distribution. It has to be a permanent or long-term structure in which people are trained and which can be exercised if it is going to be of any use when a crisis suddenly arises. In this field, I do not think that there is any understanding of the national interest among the eurosceptic spokesmen, either in this debate or by Mr Johnson in his famous article yesterday.

Let me turn to the economic issues, which noble Lords have rightly discussed, although in an extraordinary way. The noble Lord, Lord Lawson, actually said earlier that we can get the same benefits through the World Trade Organisation that we can get through the 45—he did not say that, but I know that there are 45—trade agreements that the EU has with other markets around the world. That is completely wrong; it is simply factually incorrect. I do not know how such a distinguished man, who has been a Chancellor of the Exchequer, can make such an elementary error. The WTO is not a substitute for those agreements and, if it was, it would probably take seven or eight years to negotiate such agreements. Again, there was a sense of complete unreality on the part of the eurosceptic spokesmen.

The eurosceptics owe us an answer on our relationship with the single market—which we all know is so important for the employment of millions of people—future investment flows and the location of business decisions. Are they going for the Swiss model, or the Norwegian model, or some model of their imagination? What effort have they made to see how viable that model might be? They owe it to the British people not to lead them into the dark or on to treacherous ground and abandon them when it is too late and the decision has been taken. We need to know now what the alternative plan is and we have not had a single whisper about what it might consist of.

Obviously, this is a very important matter; anybody who thought that it was not should at least pay a little attention to the fact that all our major trade partners, in the EU and outside it—in fact, all the major decision-takers in the world, with one important exception—have urged us publicly to stay in the European Union and pointed out the damage we would do to ourselves and to others if we left. That is true of Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Barack Obama and Christine Lagarde. Are we simply going to ignore all that advice? If we are going to take this matter seriously, we need to have a serious debate in which the British public can focus on factual, material and genuine arguments and not on just a lot of emotionalism. In this debate the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, talked about colonialism, but that is just an emotive term, bearing no relationship whatever to reality. Quite extraordinary things have been said. Every day the Daily Mail publishes pictures of refugees, asylum seekers or foreigners generally, making them look as sinister as possible, and it will of course go on doing that until June. However, that is not the way to take a very important decision, which is going to affect the lives of ourselves and many future generations in this country.