European Union Bill

Lord Deben Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

What would the referendum question be, were such a suggestion to be made? Would that referendum question be capable of a reasonable yes or no answer for the majority of the people of Great Britain?

[Lord Liddle]

The noble Lord, Lord Deben, has made an apposite intervention. I do not know what the relevant question would be but this is something in the real world that Ministers might have to address. It could enormously strengthen the Union’s capacity to deal with climate change and energy issues.

Amendments 23J and 23L are further examples. Amendment 23L is on piracy. We know that there is a growing problem of piracy, particularly in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. We know that an EU force is attempting to deal with this problem but that its efforts are inadequate. What is the reason for that? Is it a lack of resources or commitment on the part of the member states? That is possible, but another explanation is that the basis on which the force is patrolling this area does not match the tough circumstances that need to be dealt with. There is no agreement between the member states on the terms of engagement between the EU force and the pirates. There is no agreement on the circumstances in which force can legitimately be used.

These are difficult issues to tackle within the European Union because they touch on terribly sensitive issues to do with defence and armies, areas where the European Union has rightly been cautious in getting involved. I am not in favour of a European army, nor is the Labour Party, so do not try to say that this is trying to open the door to that.

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[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I am grateful for the noble Lord’s contribution. I said that it was how some people felt. That was the formula I used; I did not myself endorse the conspiracy theory. The implication was that the conduct of the Government was such as to make it possible for constituents to develop that conspiracy theory. In relation to his most recent remarks to me, I accept that piracy is a matter for international law. Piracy has always been against international law. There should not be a problem there. His implication was that we needed to co-ordinate with the Indians and the Chinese, which we do to some extent. We might need to co-ordinate with them more. That is true and I acknowledged it explicitly in my recent remarks. I said that in this context, as in others—I suspect the noble Lord used to teach this to his students—it is much more effective, if we want international agreement and consensus on a matter, to act as the European Union rather than as one country or as 27 different countries. That is the point I was making.

However, there is a third point that I must make in relation to the noble Lord’s comments to me, which is that I was specifically addressing the need for powers to make it an offence to make ransom payments. I think that he, and anyone with any knowledge of the world, will agree that the chances of getting 150 or 193 countries to legislate identically for anything are virtually zero; that is not going to happen. If you wish to make it a criminal offence to transfer such payments, to collect money for the purpose of paying ransoms, to provide money for the purpose of paying ransoms, to make ransom payments, and to enforce those criminal offences, you need to obtain agreement throughout the European Union as an essential starting point. That is not a matter of international law; it is very much a matter of European law. If we do not have the powers to do that at present, it is very desirable that we should develop them. However, if we needed to develop them, we would run into the issue that, if the Government succeeded in passing this Bill, Article 48 would no longer be usable in that context if Great Britain were to be included.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, it might encourage your Lordships’ House to hear that I do not intend to talk about piracy; I seek to talk about the amendments that deal with the environment and climate change. These differ from earlier amendments. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, as it seems to me that most of the areas that he covered were unique competences of the European Union, whereas we are now talking about a number of areas where there is joint competence. I say to my noble friends that if we were arguing that the British Government felt that we had sufficient powers in the European Union to do most of the things that we wanted to do, if we saw no reason to extend powers, and if the Government were going to commit themselves not to do that, I would have real sympathy with that.

If the Government went on to say that there might be occasions on which we have to go along with things that seem to be sensible extensions, I would have sympathy with that too. However, I find entirely unacceptable the concept that we cannot go along with anything unless we have a referendum. I find that unacceptable with regard to the environment, for the reason that I gave when I interrupted the noble Lord. Many of the issues about which we are talking are almost incapable of admitting a question of the kind of which a referendum admits. I do not like referenda. As the Committee knows, I am opposed to referenda on any grounds in any circumstances. I am a believer in parliamentary democracy. One of the sadnesses of this Government is that they have betrayed what seems to me to be a fundamental part of our constitution.

Referenda have always been used in partial circumstances for particular reasons. Napoleon III was the best user of referenda before General de Gaulle. This is a foreign activity much disliked by sensible people in the United Kingdom. I yield to no one in my dislike of referenda. They are always partial and always undertaken for a particular reason. The provision that we are discussing is included because the Government want to make it difficult to do anything in this area. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, thinks that this is not so. The difficulty is that the Government speak in different ways to different people. They say to some people, “This is a wonderful step forward for those who are Eurosceptic”, and to other people, “This does not matter very much anyway because we are not going to need it”. Therefore, I find it very difficult to take this debate seriously. However, it is crucial with regard to environmental issues.

I have one or two suggestions as to why that is the case. For example, we are going to have a real issue with the transfer of electricity across the European Union. The superconductor systems, which will enable us to pass electricity very fast without losing power, will be very important in enabling us to meet our energy requirements and the requirement to cut the damage we do to the atmosphere and to mitigate climate change. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, does not believe in climate change. He is a sceptic on a wide range of subjects. It will not therefore worry him, but it worries me considerably if we cannot do something about this

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[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

I wanted to make a point about his example and did not want him to lose his train of thought. If the superhighway had to go through France’s territory—leaving aside the parody of the need for a referendum there, because it is a policy question, not necessarily a competence question—and the French did not wish to sign up to that because they felt that one of their strategic industries, nuclear power, would be at a loss, would it be right, in the spirit of European Union co-operation, to use qualified majority voting or some other passerelle or clause to force the French to allow their territorial sovereignty to be infringed by others? That would seem to be curiously anti-European and against the spirit of European co-operation.

[Lord Deben]

That would mean that we had no common trade policy. Every country could say that this decision was contrary to their national interest. The French have managed to make the sale of Orangina contrary to their national interest. What the noble Baroness suggests would destroy any possibility of the scheme. It would not touch their sovereignty. They would not have to use the electricity. All that they would have to do was not prevent someone else using the electricity. It is otherwise a curious definition of national sovereignty.

Secondly, if we do not do that, my national sovereignty is being infringed, because my climate is being changed. Unless we find ways of using non-fossil fuels, my climate will be changed. This is a question on which we have to accept that our national sovereignties are all imperilled—but I do not want to go further down that road, or someone will suggest that I am not keeping to the amendments.

There is a whole series of issues here where the Government are making it more difficult to stand up for Britain's interests within the European Union by setting this entirely unnecessary and manufactured way to enable them to say to the rest of the world, “We are not going to be pushed around”. I think that the Government are perfectly capable of not being pushed around without the Bill. I think that my noble friend is quite wrong to apply Canute to a bit of the Bill. The whole Bill is a Canute Bill. It suggests that you can in some way stop the necessity of the nations of Europe working together by setting in train a system which makes Britain uniquely unable to play its part in the European Union. It is all right saying that other people have all sorts of methods, and the rest of it, but they have been much more careful in writing their legislation, and they do not have a situation where even the simplified system is called into question, which is the way that this legislation operates.

I want to say just two more things. The first is that if ever there were a policy that needs change, it is the common fisheries policy. It is hugely important, and it is based on a European competence, but there are some things on which the European Union does not have competence. For example, it does not have competence to enter member states’ ports with European inspectors, but there is no way to have a sensible common fisheries policy without that. Who has been against that? We do not want people entering our ports. I cannot understand why, because we try to keep the law, but evidently we will not allow that. If we were to do that, we might do something about the very policy which is, for most of us, the least satisfactory of European policies. That is why, given the environment, it will be very important. Evidently, we are not going to do that unless we have a referendum asking people whether they are prepared for French inspectors to come into English ports. Of course, they will say no to that, because the question does not say what I want it to say: are we prepared for British inspectors to go into French ports? They would say yes to that. It depends what the question is. That again comes back to the danger of having referendums.

My last point is that the trouble with this bit of the Bill, unless it is amended as we suggest, is that, as the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, rightly said, it gives the opportunity for anybody who does not like the European Union, who has an obsessive belief that somehow it is the epitome of evil instead of being our most exciting and remarkable peacetime achievement, to find any change, any aspect that is altered, any suspicion or scintilla of alteration proof positive that there should have been a referendum. Therefore, instead of doing what the Government think will happen under the Bill, instead of ensuring that people feel happier about the European Union, it will give endless opportunities for the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and others to suspect that there is something much deeper, much worse, much more wicked. Frankly, it is like the Jehovah's Witnesses. It is a perversion of the realities and the truths. Once you have caught it, you cannot see the realities and the truth except through that prism. The Bill helps that. The bit which does not allow the European Union to take proper steps to strengthen its effectiveness in mitigating the effects of climate change and pollution is particularly damaging, and it is especially damaging for the nation that leads in these matters—Britain. I want Britain to lead in these things and not to say to the rest of Europe, “Frightfully sorry, old boy, we can’t manage this because it means a referendum and we’re within two years of an election”.

[Lord Judd]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. That was a powerful argument, well put, and one with which I found myself completely in agreement. These amendments go to the centre of what is wrong with this lamentable piece of legislation. It is not just a question of a lack of vision; it is a matter of selling the British people short. If there is one fundamental reality in relevant politics, it is that we live in a totally interdependent world. The job of government is to help the British people to find a place within the reality of that interdependence and to work out how the interdependence can best be handled. That should be central to our education system and to the whole message of politics.

The trouble with the Bill, as we said powerfully at Second Reading, is that it does not provide any flexibility. Here I slightly differ from my noble friend Lord Liddle, who is doing a formidable job on the Bill and makes me very proud to come from the same county in England. However, it is not simply flexibility that we are talking about but leadership of the British people in meeting the realities that confront us. The trouble with the Bill—and we all know it—is that it is an effort to reassure the British people that government will protect them against the European Union. Instead of asking how we can strengthen the well-being of the British people through the part that we play in Europe, and instead of coming out of negotiations and saying, “My God, look at what we have achieved for the people of Europe and therefore for ourselves in this context”, we come out saying, “Look at what we’ve managed to hold off in looking after British interests”. That kind of argument is all tactical and totally lacks strategy. From that standpoint, it seems to me that these amendments are central. Not one issue is mentioned in them that can possibly be carried forward on behalf of the British people within the context of the nation state alone. They require international solutions.

In responding to my noble friend’s very important intervention on piracy, kidnapping and ransom, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, seemed to suggest that these are matters of international law. Of course they are, and they are absolutely central to the future of my children and grandchildren. Of course we have to get the international and global policies right, but surely the noble Lord does not want to align himself with the argument that establishing firmly in the European Community a stepping stone towards making that wider international policy effective is somehow unnecessary. It is vital, and we have done it with, for example, arms exports. It was in the context of the whole issue of arms exports and the damage they could do that we saw the establishment of the European code on arms exports. A lot of work is still to be done on it but it is a starting point. It illustrates to the world what can be done and it enables us to move forward practically to a wider, more successful policy within the United Nations.

The issue that we must come back to is that these amendments are vital because they try to ensure that we bring home to the British people that their interests lie in strong collective action at the international level. I repeat that the trouble with the Bill is that it faces in the opposite direction. It is saying, “We will make some concessions to Europe where necessary, but we do not see our future in international co-operation and effective international instruments: we see these as something that reluctantly we have to concede from time to time—and, my God, we will insist on the opportunity always to test public opinion if we are asked to take an obviously sensible step”.

These amendments deal with the heart of the Bill. It is a sad day in British history when we have this wretched piece of legislation before us.

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In order to help the noble Lord, Lord Deben, on a referendum question, I should have thought that it is very simple. You simply have to ask the British people whether they want to go on spending masses of their hard-earned taxpayers’ money on supporting an energy source which is not only supremely inefficient but massively more expensive than any other energy source. I think that that is quite a simple question.

[Lord Deben]

Might the noble Lord not suggest that there could be a better question: do the people of Britain want to have their climate changed and their health impaired by the continuation of extremely dirty power stations, which happily we are going to close down?

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

The noble Lord says, “happily we are going to close down”. I hope that he has got a generator in his house so that he can watch his television and read his books because with wind power that simply will not happen. Nuclear of course is a different matter, but let us not get into that debate right now.

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[Lord Deben]

Very simply, the EU does not have powers to insist that we improve the electricity transfer between countries, yet that will be an essential part of our future energy needs.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, Article 170 says:

“To help achieve the objectives referred to in Articles 26 and 174”,

et cetera,

“the Union shall contribute to the establishment and development of trans-European networks in the areas of transport, telecommunications and energy infrastructures”.

That seems to me very much to give the competences needed.

[Baroness Brinton]

I am grateful for that intervention from my noble friend Lord Wallace, which was much more informed than I could possibly have given.

[Lord Deben]

It was a perfectly right intervention but that does not actually give powers to compel. It says that the countries shall do it but there is no mechanism at the moment to insist that they do it. That is the issue.

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I fundamentally disagree with that point. The key point here, which we have come back to day after day on this Bill, is that this is about the process not the policy. The process has been absolutely clear and I still wait to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on where these are not covered by existing treaties.

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[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Yes, but we should not have gone along with that decision because we should not have been in the policy in the first place. I therefore insist that most of the fish which swim now in European waters and are fished by European boats used to belong to us and they could and should belong to us again. I do not wish to detain the House—

[Lord Deben]

The noble Lord really must not say that. It is not true. Most of our fishing grounds have always been shared with our neighbours—the French, the Belgians and the Germans—and we have always had to come to terms with them. All that the European common fisheries policy does is to have a sensible mechanism. It is not that the policy being common is wrong but that the policy is wrong. You have to have a common policy; otherwise you can only make these decisions with the marlinspike. It is just not true that we had 75 per cent of it before.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

The noble Lord and those of his view have been saying this now for 30 years. It has not happened and it is not going to happen. The solution for this country is to leave the common fisheries policy and take back our waters to the median line and whatever we had before in territorial waters into our own control. Then, when our own fishing industry, which has been decimated by the common fisheries policy, has been rebuilt, we can share any surplus and lease it out to people who want to buy it.