European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, I feel a bit like a shaggy old dog stirred from his hearth by a shadow at the kitchen door, the whistle of a familiar refrain and the instruction that it is time to go ratting again. I am in good heart, though, because although it has been a long day, it is not a Friday, we are dealing today with a Bill that has been endorsed by the voters at an election and—dare I say it?—it is a better Bill than the one that I had the honour and pleasure of presenting to your Lordships a year ago. Time and reflection have helped to tweak it, and perhaps it is appropriate for me to apologise to one or two noble Lords who came forward at that time with reasoned and perhaps sensible amendments to that original Bill. We knew that it was never going to work as a Bill, but it was the first light before the dawn.

I am the tail-end Charlie on this and I do not wish to go into too many details of the Bill since that has been done so eloquently by so many people today. However, I will say in passing that I look forward to the efforts the Minister will put into justifying how it is consistent to acquiesce to votes for 16 and 17 year-olds for a referendum on Scotland but not on Europe. I wish her luck—she may need it.

I am a passionate European. I was struck, as I often am, by the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. We were schoolkids together—no, not at that school, at a grammar school in Hertford. His words have always been something of an inspiration to me. He asked, “What do we mean by Europe?”. For more than 2,000 years Europe has been the centre of the world. In fact, for almost 2,000 years it was the world: Plato, Homer, Mozart, Picasso—the great artists, the philosophers, the statesmen, the writers, the musicians —Shakespeare, Chopin, Beethoven, the Beatles and all the rest. It has been a pretty formidable and often glorious history. We have been the birthplace of democracy. It is said that the Greeks invented democracy, although it appears that they have been in a measure of chaos ever since. We have been the champions of basic liberties. We introduced the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Okay, I accept there have been a few historical hiccups along the way—things that were less than beneficial—but in Europe we have been, and still are, a beacon of hope for those around the world who are less fortunate than we are.

It is 2,000 years of extraordinary achievement, and yet during those years we have had so many different forms of institutions. You can still hear the footsteps of Socrates and Michelangelo and the Venerable Bede, even though the streets they walked along have long been worn away and the institutions they served have gone. The republics, the monarchies, the empires, the leagues and the confederations are nothing but ancient echoes. The world has moved on. I think it is a great flaw in the wider debate about Europe that we have been having for so many years that it has focused excessively on institutions and not on those deeper issues, because our Europeanness is defined not by our institutions but by our culture.

That is why I was very distressed with the words of the German Finance Minister Herr Schäuble when he was talking about Greece. He said that elections would change nothing and that there was no alternative. I hope that his words lost something in translation because they are pretty cold, hard and unnecessary. The history of Europe tells us that there is always an alternative. In every corner of Europe that you go to nowadays there are voices saying that our institutions are wrong: both sides of this great debate agree on that. We must change, we must go off in one direction or another, but what we cannot do is stand still.

There has never been a better time for a British Prime Minister to argue that there has to be a better way for British leadership in Europe. I wish our Prime Minister well in that undertaking. It is an enormous task. We are playing with history here. This is not a light or an easy decision, but he is absolutely right in that whatever he manages to do, the people must be given the final decision. That is the essence of this Bill here. It is the people, not the institutions, who are the final source of political authority. We have just had this wonderful discussion between the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, and my noble friend Lord Lawson about ever-closer union. I have to tell the noble Lord that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, is absolutely right. Right at the top of the treaty of Rome in 1975 the preamble talks first and foremost about ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe. Notice the plural—the peoples of Europe.

There are other words that I think are relevant:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”,

and that,

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it”.

Those were the wise words of the authors of the Declaration of Independence and I think they are as relevant today as they were 240 years ago. They seemed to make quite a success of it—and entirely without the benefit of a government paper setting out the consequences of their actions.

I am a passionate European in a way that my father and my grandfather could never have been. If I may take the Bard’s words at liberty, there is a lot of good in the state of Denmark—which means that I desperately want the Prime Minister to come back with a deal that I can accept: a clear, strong, substantial deal and not vague promises that might disappear like vapour trails in an evening sun. That would be good not just for Britain but for Europe as a whole—and then let the people decide.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Dobbs]

Forgive me for interrupting, but I would also remind the noble Lord that the United States, in order to achieve a single currency, actually required a civil war to do it, which is scarcely a model that one wishes to follow.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I should remind the noble Lord that, when I have given talks in Washington and elsewhere on European integration, I have often said—sometimes years ago—that, if we ever achieved a United States of Europe, I had no doubt that the policy process would work almost as well as the policy process in Washington. I hope that the noble Lord understands the point.

We have teased out of this debate what issues we have to deal with in Committee and on Report. We are now agreed that there is to be a referendum; the question is now settled; and the date is beyond Parliament’s control, except when the negotiations have been agreed and the Government come back to us. Therefore, we are left with a number of manageable issues.

On the question of purdah, clearly, if we have a long campaign, the Government have to go on negotiating with their partners in the European Union, and Ministers will have to say some things. In that area we will need to explore what the correct outcome is.

On the franchise, on which a great deal has been said, it is quite clear that the current British franchise is a mess. It is a historical, imperial legacy which means that someone who was born in Rwanda or Mozambique and moved to London last year can vote on whether we stay in the European Union. When we are in London, we stay in Wandsworth, where you hear French spoken extensively in the streets, which has been the case for 20 to 30 years. However, French people who have been working and living in London for 20 or 30 years, paying taxes here, contributing in every sense to our economy, cannot vote. There are a whole set of issues there which we need to explore in detail. This is not an ordinary vote. As has been said during this debate and elsewhere, this is a vote about the future of this country, and therefore we need to look at the franchise for this exceptional vote in exceptional ways.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, and other noble Lords raised the question of threshold, which clearly we will have to explore a little, although it is a very difficult issue. Whatever happens at the end of it, if we have a narrow majority, either with a low or a high turnout, it will not settle the issue. However, we all know that referendums do not settle the issue. Six months after the 1975 referendum, the Labour Party was still arguing against staying in the European Union, and look at what happened in Scotland, where the referendum did not settle the future of that country.

The issue of the provision of information is extremely important and very difficult, and again we need to spend some time on it. We have to ask for a White Paper; certainly we need to look at the implications of leaving and, if possible, the prospect of staying. However, I bear hard scars from the problems of having to try to create dispassionate evidence on Britain’s relations with Europe. I spent two years in government negotiating 32 reports on the balance of competences between Britain and the European Union. Some 2,500 pieces of evidence came in; the Conservatives put that in the coalition agreement because they were convinced that this would provide the evidential basis for knowing what sort of powers we would want to repatriate from Brussels back to Britain. The overwhelming evidence submitted to the balance of competences review—from business, universities, financial and legal services—was that they think the current balance of competences is pretty good, thank you. The evidence submitted by easyJet began: easyJet would not exist if it were not for the single market in the European Union.

How did the press and No. 10 react to this? They did their best to bury the balance of competences reports in full. They were usually published at the beginning of the Christmas or the July Recess, just to make sure that the press were looking somewhere else instead. That is part of the problem in trying to get dispassionate evidence into our debate: myths float by us, undisturbed by reality.

I saw in a Church of England blog, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London referred to yesterday, that a lay member of the synod of Canterbury said that one of the reasons why the BBC is so biased in favour of Europe is because it receives so much significant funding from the European Union. I look at that with amazement. That is clearly going round in some circles as part of this wonderful phantasmagoria of the EU as a monster, reaching across the Channel to seduce honest Englishmen, strangle our free institutions and reduce us to serfdom under German—and perhaps also French—domination. Therefore, we will struggle between evidence and myth as we go on through this debate.

I will remark on one of the myths, which I have heard several times in this debate: “We thought we were joining a Common Market, and no one ever told us that this was a political project”. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself, in his speech to the Conservative Party conference last week, said:

“When we joined the European Union we were told that it was about going into a common market, rather than the goal that some had for ‘ever closer union’”.

Last night, therefore, again I dug out Sir Alec Douglas -Home’s speech on 21 October 1971, on the first day of the Commons debate on the issue of principle of joining the European Economic Community. He said that,

“when Germany, France, Italy and the rest sit down to talk about their problems of security, and their attitude to world problems … it is vital that we should be in their councils. During the last year I have … been in the councils of the Ten, because they have anticipated the larger Community. Matters are talked about there which concern the defence of Europe and the defence of Britain. Matters are talked about—for example, the Middle East—which have the greatest implications for our country. It is essential that we should be in the councils when these questions are discussed, and that a decision should not be taken without us”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/10/71; col. 922.]

I say that for all those who think that we would be better off as a sort of Switzerland with nuclear weapons, which I think is what—