European Union Bill

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

I have the greatest affection for the noble Baroness, but I think that her attempt to justify the fact that the terms of the coalition agreement have not been met in this case is neither muscular nor robust. I think, therefore, that our friends on those Benches have something to think about. What I am suggesting that our friends on those Benches think about is the merits of the amendments that this side is putting forward. We are offering a mechanism by which a lot of the unacceptable trivia in the Bill could be assessed in a proper way by an independent committee that would advise Parliament about whether they were fundamental or matters that would not require a referendum.

I suggest that there is possibly a germ of consensus in the coalition agreement. We on this side have moved our position from when Labour was in government because we now believe that matters such as passerelle clauses and simplified revisions of the treaty should be approved by a proper Act of Parliament. That is a significant move on this side of the House towards greater parliamentary accountability. I should have thought that the Lib Dems ought to seize that as an advance in accountability. We should confine referenda to these fundamental issues that your Lordships’ Constitution Committee said needed to be defined. An independent committee would be a good way of doing this.

I am sorry to have gone on at such length—

[Lord Dykes]

I intervene only briefly and thank the noble Lord for giving way. Is he not perfectly correct in general and in the specifics he mentioned? There is no apparent transfer of power, notion or concept built into the EPPO proposals. That is the European Union being allowed by the sovereign member Governments to deal with matters to do with any financial misdemeanours affecting Union finances. There is no extra transfer of power there at the margin at all. Why are the Government so obsessed? My noble friend the Minister kindly and co-operatively said at the end of the previous Committee session that he would focus on the important areas that the noble Lord has emphasised today in his remarks. However, he then goes back to say, “Ah, we must have the whole list as well. They are important as well”. There is no logic to it, particularly with the EPPO proposals.

[Lord Liddle]

I think the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, is right on that subject. The problem is the people who believe in the thin end of the wedge, but the way to deal with that is to have a proper process for deciding what is significant and requires a referendum and what does not in the form of an independent process that people will respect. That is what we are proposing in these amendments. It is a sensible compromise for the way forward that I hope the Government will consider seriously. It would resolve an awful lot of the big problems that people have with this Bill. I beg to move.

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Finally, I do not share the contempt that the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, has for the decisions of all British Governments of about the past 30 years or the belief that they all sold out—or contempt for all the Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords which voted to ratify those agreements. I worked for quite a number of those Governments, including the ones in which he served. I do not believe that Mrs Thatcher sold out the national interest when she agreed the rebate or when she agreed the Single European Act, so we really should not treat these matters in quite such a negative way. I do not remember serving a British Government who sold out the national interest.

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords, I wish to intervene briefly on these matters. Although the amendments have been described as probing, I hope that the Government will be able to give a considered response to this interesting set of ideas, particularly the second amendment, which needs attention from the Government. On the most recent Committee day, hopes were expressed that the Government would respond to the constructive suggestions made in a raft of amendments. I hope that the Government will respond in that way today.

Ministers are definitely responding in the sense of having discussions outside the Chamber about what might be parts of the Bill in future. I hope that that will continue and people would be grateful for that. Any answers that could be given in the Chamber to take us further forward to make the Bill more sensible, more proportional—to use that important adjective—and more balanced would be very welcome.

As an example of messages sent by my noble friends the Ministers, I appreciate that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, kindly sent me a copy of the Daily Express attack that was mounted on his correct and sensible words in the previous Committee session. This is relevant to these amendments as well. I will not quote every word that Mr Patrick O’Flynn wrote in the Daily Express on Saturday 14 May because it would take too long, but he said that perhaps Mr Clegg’s ambition of changing the House of Lords would be justified after all. Although the Daily Express would not normally support that kind of thing—I am paraphrasing—on this occasion he was attracted to Mr Clegg’s ideas because he had just discovered that,

“the current way of selecting peers—appointing establishment time-servers—has turned it into a hotbed of European federalists”,

referring to the debates in the most recent couple of Committee sessions. He continued:

“The Lords is now full of people I have always regarded as ghastly pro-EU creatures … turncoats such as Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Dykes”,

Ministers,

“such as Lib Dem Lord Wallace and returnees from the Eurogravy train such as Labour’s Lord Tomlinson. Much of the time they spout rubbish about paying homage to Brussels. They were at it again on Monday”—

that was 9 May—

“turning their guns on this newspaper’s crusade to get Britain out of the EU. Lord Wallace complained about the opposition of the Daily Express to the flying of the EU flag from British public buildings … Pearson reminded the pro-Brussels coven: ‘Millions of people in this country actually welcome the campaign to leave the EU which the Daily Express has started’”.

I think that the total number of people who supported the Daily Express’s dodgy little campaign was 370,000, which is one and half times the average size of a London borough, representing the whole nation. That shows how few people actually read the Daily Express. Mr O’Flynn then concluded that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson,

“challenged Dykes to admit ‘that the absence of the European flag on most of our public buildings reflects the wishes of the British people’”.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, before the noble Lord continues with his line on the Daily Express, when he mentions those 370,000 people, does he realise that that is the most successful newspaper campaign of this kind that there has been? Each one of those people took the trouble to take a pair of scissors, fill in the form, cut it out, put it in an envelope with their own stamp on it and send it to the Daily Express. He should not dismiss this campaign so easily. It is growing, it is going to go on and it is going to win.

[Lord Dykes]

I think that there have been examples of much larger figures when money has been offered by newspapers, although on this occasion the Daily Express at least had the grace not to offer any money. We know that the whole thing is got up by the British press, a small number of headbangers in the parliamentary Conservative Party in the Commons, UKIP, the BNP and other entities like that—not many people. I am returning to the amendment as quickly as I can, but I am quoting the Daily Express’s remarks to show the background to the whole campaign. Clause 6 would directly affect the status of all the provisions in it and make them subject to referendums. It has nothing to do with the common sense or logic of it.

Another letter, to the noble Lord, Lord Flight, on his points, was sent from my noble friend Lord Howell, who has kindly sent copies to other participants on these debates. The very acceptable reply gives ample intellectual and practical cover for the notion of the Government now having the imagination to remove some of the other sub-subsection areas from the classification of being subject to a referendum. We therefore concentrated on the three, four or five areas which could be retained—we differ on those, although some people say we differ only on the euro—starting with euro inclusion, which is generally regarded as the most important, as already supported widely in the Chamber in recent debates. We will therefore reduce the future nightmare for hapless Ministers suffering agonies of confusion in the Council of Ministers and receiving the wrath of their counterparts for paralysing the Union on literal trivialities.

When a Bill is complex and incomprehensible, and far too verbose and heavy because it has to cover so many points, I feel sorry for the government draftsmen who have to assemble it—in quite a short time, I imagine. They would probably regret it, and wish to look at it again. When you feel it is complex and incomprehensible, you turn to the Explanatory Memorandum, but that does not help at all. In respect of what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, was saying when he was particularly concerned about subjection (5)(i) and (j) of Clause 6, paragraphs 78 and 80 on page 18 of the Explanatory Memorandum show once again how obnoxious Clause 6 is compared to the earlier clauses. I will not go into detail, or I will take too long. However, the last part of paragraph 80 refers to moving from unanimity to qualified majority voting:

“This is in line with the provisions of subsection (5)(b) above. Such a move would not require a referendum, however, if a referendum had already been held to approve a decision to move from unanimity to qualified majority voting in accordance with subsection (5)(i) in the same area of enhanced co-operation. To do so would in effect mean holding a referendum on whether to change the role of the European Parliament or not, and would not be a transfer of power or competence”.

I suppose that you might say that that would be literally true, subject to carefully re-reading it again. However, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, talks about throwing the key through the window. That would not, of course, be a good idea because some sensible pro-European pragmatists would pick up the key. They would find it in the street, come back in and unlock the secrets. You have to put it down a hole to ensure that the whole thing is abandoned. An explanation like that shows the bad quality of a badly drafted Bill, particularly this clause.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I probably would not have risen except for the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, to which I will return in a moment. As for the amendment, at this time of night it is confusing and difficult to understand what its result would be. As far as I can see, it attempts to introduce parliamentary control over the items which might well attract a referendum. I hope that that is right, because I am of course always in favour of better parliamentary scrutiny. The problem is that all our experience so far shows that, one way or another, the Government manage to evade parliamentary scrutiny. For example, last week they overrode the European Union Committee’s reserve on the matter of patents. They did not do so on any reasonable grounds, except that the Hungarian presidency wanted them to do so. The Government overrode the parliamentary scrutiny of the House of Commons.

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[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I remember the 1975 referendum very well. I took part in it myself. If Mr Farron believes that we should have a referendum because our relationship with the European Union has become poisonous, he is right and I agree with him. However, it is not only UKIP—there are Labour Members who are opposed to our membership of the European Union and, indeed, quite a lot of Liberals. When he believes, rightly, that our relationship with the European Union has become so bad that we need a referendum, I would hope that people, particularly from the Liberal party, would stop criticising those who believe that, after 50 years or so, it is time the British people had another chance to say whether we should stay in or get out.

[Lord Dykes]

If the result of the referendum was a yes vote, which I believe the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has suggested would definitely be the case, the noble Lord would refuse to accept that verdict, as he did with the 1975 referendum.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

The noble Lord is absolutely wrong on this. The 1975 referendum was held because of the failure to hold a referendum before we went in. The Labour Party was having great trouble—I remember it well because at that time I was a member of the Labour Party—and to heal the split that had grown up within it, the device of a referendum was put into operation. However, that occurred only two years after our entry into the Common Market and we had not felt the effects of that. Now that we have been in it since January 1973, people have experienced what it means, what it costs and how it affects them. That is why so many people now are beginning to believe, or already believe, that we need to test the view of the British people on the matter. What is wrong with that? People like the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, have said that the European Union is the best thing since sliced bread and that the country is behind it. They said the same about AV but, when people voted on it, they found that they were not with them at all. I believe that they should test the people’s opinion. I promise that if we have a referendum on being in or out of the European Union, and the people say that we must remain in, I shall go away and have a nice retirement. Until then I shall continue to press for a referendum. I hope that eventually the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and others like him, will come round to the same position as that of his party’s president.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords, I should like briefly to return to what the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, said when he saw fit to expatiate on the Daily Express’s anti-euro campaign. At an earlier stage in our debates, he said that he had examples of 125 anti-euro headlines in the hated, Murdoch-ite, Barclay-ite and Desmond-ite press that some eminent think tank had proved to be wrong in every respect. He promised to let us have those figures and the factual debunking of those 125 stories. I wrote to the noble Lord about 10 days ago and asked for those figures, and still I have not received them. Can he provide them to the House or just to UKIP Members?

[Lord Dykes]

My Lords—

[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford)]

My Lords, I have a feeling that we have reached the stage in the debate when we could leave the press and the Daily Express, and move to the precise issues and amendments in the debate.