EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report)

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the committee’s report. As the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said, we are not deciding whether we are in or out; right now we are looking at the process by which the negotiations will be carried out. The report points out that the structure with which we are negotiating is a very complex, multitiered one. As Henry Kissinger once said, “You never know who to call to find out the mind of the European Union”. On the one hand we have the trinity of the president of the Council, the president of the Commission and the head of the Parliament to talk to, then there are the 27 countries. On the other side, there is not only the Westminster Parliament but also the devolved Administrations, so it is a very complex process.

I do not know whether we have the time to do an adequate job in this respect, with negotiations starting, as it were, after the election victory, and given that we are setting ourselves a deadline of having a referendum by the first half of 2017 to avoid the fact that in the second half of that year we will hold the presidency of the European Union. It would be reassuring if the Government could tell us that they have a strategy, the machinery and the lines laid down that will, in good time—that is, by the end of 2016 or very early in 2017—let us look at what has been agreed and what has not. As I said, this is not the time to go into what we should or should not insist on. One thing that would be clear from this process is that if we stay in—as certainly I hope—we ought to go much further in reforming the governance structure of the European Union than at present. At present it is neither fish nor fowl; it is not a confederation; it is not a federation. The whole euro crisis has shown that it is a very inadequate form of governance and perhaps we could reform it. Of course, we will have our own agenda to negotiate with the assembly of bodies we are negotiating with, and I wish the Government luck in whatever they say.

I will add just one more thing because I do not want to go on for too long. There is a question about whether the Government can take Parliament into their confidence. That is a tricky one, I understand, because to take Parliament into their confidence as the process is going on might disrupt the process. I have a helpful suggestion for the Government. I think they should constitute a small committee of privy counsellors in both Houses of Parliament and, on Privy Council terms, let them know what is going on. They can be trusted—let us hope—not to blabber, and to give the Government good advice on what they, as representatives of Parliament, think about the process. That may be an adequate bridge between consulting Parliament and not being able to tell everybody what is going on.