European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill [HL]

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, this afternoon’s debate has been thoroughly stimulating—and we still have a way to go—as was our debate on Monday. Perhaps I might be forgiven for spending just a few minutes trying to draw some threads linking Monday’s debate to what we are discussing today.

Monday’s debate was thoroughly thoughtful, and two contributions in particular stuck in my mind. The first was the claim by the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who sadly is not in his place, that in real terms more has already been spent on bailing out the eurozone than was spent on reparations and reconstruction after the two world wars. If that is so—and I look forward to seeing the figures—it is a statistic and a reality that should give us all pause for very considerable thought.

There was also an emphatic contribution on Monday from the noble Lord, Lord Judd—who sadly is not in his place either, but his words echo on—in which he spoke of the “ethical commitment” to Europe based on lessons he drew from his experiences of World War II. He put his points with eloquence and great passion. The speeches of both noble Lords got me thinking about the historical perspective that they raised. Can history teach us any lessons, even though the crisis that we are witnessing and going through today is very different?

Ardent supporters of the European Union base their very genuine beliefs on an ethical view. The EU, they say, is the best way to avoid the extremism and intolerant nationalism that led us down the road to disaster in the 1930s. It is a very genuine view but there is a danger of taking too narrow a view of ethics and events. The ethical side of the debate in the 1930s—and it was a very black and white debate then, too—was claimed by the anti-war lobby, the appeasers.

When Neville Chamberlain flew back from Munich waving his little piece of paper, he was applauded by archbishops and moralists, and summoned by the King from Heston Aerodrome to Buckingham Palace, where he was brought out on to the balcony to accept the cheers of tens of thousands of grateful people. In October 1938, Neville Chamberlain was the most praised, honoured and seemed to be the most ethical politician of his day. It did not make him right of course. Indeed his strong and rigid ethical views, which he held most sincerely, ended up blinding him, and leading him and the entire world astray.

The point I want to make is simply that while I have enormous respect for the sincerity of those who support the EU as being the only alternative, I do not believe that they are right. I hope that does not make me swivel-eyed. For instance, in October 1938, Winston Churchill was hugely unpopular. The Conservative Party was planning to deselect him in 1938—not something that we talk about a lot nowadays but it is absolutely true. He was derided as a swivel-eyed warmonger and a man of the past. We heard similar claims from one or two noble Lords in Monday’s debate and mutterings about political reactionaries who apparently lurk at home wearing union jack waistcoats. I frankly thought that was a pity in what was otherwise a fine debate.

Then I began to think about what the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, said and what happened after World War I and World War II. After World War I, we punished Germany with reparations and crippling austerity. The economic consequences were disastrous; the political consequences far worse. We should not be so naive as to think that such appalling outcomes are impossible today. Democracy is a delicate flower and in many parts of Europe the soils are thin.

Towards the end of World War II, a similar discussion about the future of Europe was held. In February 1945, the great leaders, Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, gathered at Yalta to map out the shape of post-war Europe. That summit too came desperately close to repeating the follies of 1919. Stalin wanted to tear the industrial heart of Germany, pack it up to the last bolt and rivet, and ship it back to the Soviet Union. He wanted to reduce Germany to a rural backwater. Roosevelt was of much the same mind and wanted to break up the odious German state into a number of powerless and pathetic provinces. However, the swivel-eyed, warmongering Churchill had a different vision. He was outnumbered and isolated at Yalta but he remembered the terrible mistakes of 1919 and fought furiously. Although Yalta was largely a disaster for the West, he was able to prevent Germany from being ripped apart and dismembered; although it was of course divided. It was a delicious irony that it was that old warmonger—the man who had stood out against the ethical orthodoxies of his day—who saved Germany and with it, eventually, free Europe.

Many of you will know the history of that time better than me, so I will come quickly to the conclusions that I want to reach and the lessons that I think we can draw. First, ethical values are not held simply by one side of this argument. Secondly, there is nothing to be gained but sorrows from pushing states too far down the road of blind austerity and crippling reparations. In 1919, and indeed in 1945, we talked of Germany; today we talk of Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy, but, for the moment, particularly of Greece. The ESM is a sticking plaster in that solution but it is not by any means a solution in itself. We all know that and I support it for what it is. However, I fear that sticking plaster that it is, there are few, if any, sticking places left. If—and, I suspect, when—Greece is forced out of the euro, whatever else happens we must not turn our back on the Greek people, any more than we turned our back on the German people in 1945. Otherwise, that fuse of extremism that we have heard so much about could all too easily be lit once again.

I would gently encourage—not lecture, I hope, but encourage—all the authorities in Europe, and particularly those in Germany, to remember the lessons of the post-Versailles period rather than naively insisting that all financial obligations should be met, no matter what. In the period between the wars, that policy proved to be no more than whistling into the teeth of the gathering storm, and the tune has got no better since.

I believe that the eurozone is set on a downward slope and cannot survive in its present form. There will be more pain but my final conclusion is yet one of hope. We have all been through worse than this, or at least our fathers have, and found the imagination not simply to survive but to flourish once again. Instead of sticking stubbornly to the premises and prejudices on which the creation of the eurozone was based, let us look forward to a different, more flexible, more creative and more tolerant Europe; a less bureaucratic, less centralised and less overmuscled Europe; a Europe that is so much more than a eurozone. Whether the ESM will play any part in meeting that hope, I know not. I can only keep my fingers crossed and my savings in sterling.