EU: Reform

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dykes]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what priority areas of United Kingdom reform ideas they will discuss with European Union partner countries.

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to speak in the last debate of this afternoon. I express gratitude first to my noble friend Lady Warsi, the Minister in charge, for coming today. I am sorry that she has to be the last speaker and I hope it will not take too long for that to occur. My colleague and good noble friend Lord Teverson was originally going to speak, too, but had to withdraw his name for a noble reason. He is attending in Paris the awarding of the CBE to a distinguished French senator, Josselin De Rohan, who is retiring soon and whom I also know, so informally my noble friend is also representing me at this occasion. It is a very good Anglo-French occasion anyway and Josselin De Rohan, like most members of the Gaullist or UMP party in Paris, is an enthusiastic European as well as a patriotic Frenchman. The two go side by side in France with most people. I do not know why some people in this country seem to have difficulty with that.

I also thank very much the excellent Lords Library team for its helpful briefing pack, which I hope has been of help to other colleagues in this debate.

In a way, this debate is an unusual way of linking psychologically to tomorrow’s complexities on the EU referendum Bill’s Second Reading. We have a huge list of, I think, 77 worthy speakers and there is a complicated situation about what may happen after the next general election. Once again, we see some politicians in the UK—some, I emphasise—contorting, wheeling, skirting and scheming to overanalyse our long-standing membership of the EU. It is not all of them but enough to get the attention of those who are, interestingly enough, the non-UK personal taxpaying owners who dominate some of the more unsavoury right-wing papers in the UK, which all pronounce in an anti-European mode. No other member state, least of all those who joined when we did or shortly afterwards, such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, has expended so many hours wringing their hands with extraordinary quasi-geopolitical despair about whether it was a mistake to join in the first place.

In that context, I was also rather glad that my noble friend Lady Warsi, in replying to today’s third Question, tabled by our good friend and colleague the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, avoided any response directly to the acquis communautaire suggestion, which could be described as hair raising, to say the least.

We do not do this kind of thing over membership of the IMF, the World Bank, the UN, the WTO or NATO, all of which impose serious and onerous treaty obligations, so why do we do it over Europe? Why is working closely and inextricably with foreigners in Europe so dangerous and why are some of us so insecure and, indeed, immature about this subject? It is a mystery to me so I hope today that my noble friend the Minister will afford us some cheering and cheerful answers to these obfuscating mysteries and leave us in a good mood when we depart.

However, I was glad when the Prime Minister, in his Bloomberg speech almost a year ago, sounded unusually positive on Europe. He quoted Churchill after the war, referring quite rightly to the new economic challenges that faced the oldest continent and saying that we, too, are a continental power. He stressed that he was no isolationist, which he showed in his actions after that. Everyone involved in running both the national Governments and the European Union institutions to strengthen the EU’s long-term cohesion accepts that continuous modernisation and reform is a vital ingredient. This is not rocket science so why does one small part of the bigger of the two governing parties in Britain get so apoplectic about items that are mere tangible common sense?

At the same time, we have to ask ourselves honestly why the UK and many politicians remain so scared of the euro, a strong international currency. Is it a currency with too many duties for us to perform to manage to be a member? Latvia has just joined with great courage. Why do we seem to favour the easy option of regular devaluations? These are serious questions about reform and modernisation. Has not the foolishness of repeat devaluations got us into a terrible position, many years since that first started in 1947? Do we in this country really want to force the other member states to invoke the Lisbon treaty machinery permitting countries to leave, since in many of their eyes—sadly, I have to say this—we are now the bad and unreliable member of the club?

I am grateful to my distinguished colleague Charles Kennedy MP, who I am delighted to remind the House is both rector of the University of Glasgow and president of the European Movement in the UK, for his arresting new year blog a few days ago. He complained that no one in HMG explains what they mean by reform and said that free movement of labour, goods and capital—labour is particularly in the news nowadays—is both a sacred treaty principle and a legal requirement. That is a reality to which the British diaspora—the by now at least 2.5 million British people whom we informally estimate are residing in the other EU countries—would also attest.

The editorial on 4 January in the Figaro newspaper said quite rightly that surely what we all need is a strong EU-wide strict frontier entry policy, agreed rationally between all the member states, rather than piecemeal individual exceptions because senior politicians in certain countries do not have the nerve to stand up to atavistic, xenophobic motives based on false hearsay and rumours. Indeed, the recent remarks about Romanian and Bulgarian potential immigrants to this country have been deeply disturbing to many people.

All the while during this 2013 period, our German embassy friends have rightly agreed with British official suggestions to widen and deepen the single market—there is strong agreement between us and Germany on that—but they warn against threatening to leave the club rather than simply ensuring that the rules are modernised and that continued integration takes place. Indeed, the new FRG grand coalition in Berlin shares these British ideas precisely because Germany itself has harmonious relations between companies and trade unions rather than the atmosphere of mutual distrust between the two bodies that still haunts us in Britain. Once again, that means more integration, not less, a subject about which we appear to remain very confused.

Alarming questions remain as a result of Mr Cameron’s recent rather clumsy démarches on the EU scene. Is the Tory referendum planned for 2017 just PR rubbish or a serious attempt to give the long-suffering public a real say, as they had in 1975—yet again for narrow internal party reasons—under a different party? Why does the infamous EU Act of 2011, which a number of us oppose strongly, specifically exclude enlargement treaties from the referendum lock? If Turkey were to join the EU, why would that not be an enormous new delimitation of the out-of-date and quaint definition of “true national sovereignty”, whatever that means in the modern world? Can the Government accept that most reforms in the Union are part of a continuous legislative and procedural evolution as well as being comprehensively covered in the extensive Lisbon treaty provisions, which consolidated all the accumulated treaties since Messina and Rome and include more of a role for national parliaments?

Sharing sovereignty is not losing it; it is a net gain. Each country becomes even more influential and strong precisely because it is part of the larger modern comity of the whole Union. Before anyone complains too loudly about a so-called lack of democracy—the democratic deficit—with the unfairly criticised European Parliament, we are reminded in history how long it took the USA after its revolution, albeit that it was gradually developing into being a single country, to get the electorate voting in more than mere handfuls of percentages, with a restricted property qualification to boot for many decades, evolving gradually from individual states to a single polity.

The background to this sad subject has been anything but cheering and uplifting, and austerity and slowdown in the member states’ economies have been an inevitable concomitant. The signs are now, gradually and painfully, getting better in many parts, including in Britain. However, an ominous aspect remains. At a time when virtually all sane and sensible representatives of our UK business and corporate community are so pro-European—the CBI is a good example of that, bearing in mind its views a few years ago—politicians’ recklessness has left us now teetering on the brink of resolving our incoherent European policy stances, at best as a semi-detached and irrelevant member country or possibly even with complete separation. Are we not therefore paying a very heavy price for years of insouciance by the pro-European politicians in this country who have always been ready to postpone indefinitely a strong and necessary defence of a full role for the UK, instead of always pretending to be half-committed? The moment of truth is coming, and I am sure that the Minister will help us today.