European Union Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I will address Amendments 23C, 23D and 23E, as did the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who gave us a brilliant illustration of why flexibility in this area is not only desirable but necessary.

I have, off and on, had quite a few dealings with the issue of energy in the European Union, and I have to say that we have got it comprehensively wrong. In the 1970s we fought desperately—of course, Mr Tony Benn was the Minister at the time—to avoid the European Union having any responsibility in this field whatever in case it stole our oil, which it was never going to be able to do because European law is perfectly clear on that point, and so we prevented any policy emerging then. Then, when the Single European Act was passed, we allowed—I agree that by then we were not favouring it—energy to be kept out of the single market at that stage because of the objections of the French and the Germans, and that was a disastrous mistake. Now, when we have discovered that we are not one of the three major oil and gas producers in the world, we have discovered, surprisingly, that we could do with a common energy policy, but it is quite difficult to get; and, as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, has said, it is in an area of shared competence. So it may very well be that, sometime in the not too distant future, we will want to support some changes that will give more powers to Brussels in the area of energy security, competition, interconnectors and all these things; yet here we are subjecting all that to a referendum requirement under which the no campaign would no doubt say yet again, “This is the European Union coming to take all our North Sea oil”, and so on. The result may very well be negative because that campaign would be very emotive. Heaven knows what the Scots would think about it—quite a lot, I should think.

I do really feel that this illustrates the case for flexibility—and the same is true on climate change. It is rather clear that the European Union will struggle under its current institutional arrangements to find a way forward through the next 30, 40 or 50 years on climate change. Things are going to be very different. Crises are going to emerge and Europe is going to have to find a response to them. Some of those responses may involve new powers for the Union as a whole. And yet again, this will be made extraordinarily difficult by the provisions of the Bill.

I am not saying that these particular amendments are the last words in wisdom on this particular issue, but I do really think that the Government ought to be taking this a bit more seriously. We have not had a single serious response from the Government since we began this Committee stage on any point that has been raised. I am waiting now for the response to this debate to have, for the first time, a serious response to the substance, because we have not had it so far. Those are issues of major importance. I think that if the Government were to go away and reflect on this now, they would see the wisdom, at the very least, of truncating the list of issues on which there need to be referendums.

[Lord Empey]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. A lot has been talked this evening about energy. Maybe I am missing something, but any of the energy sources that we will need for our future security will come from outside the European Union. In other words, they will be merely transmitted through the European Union, and that will largely be down to the authorities in each country, including planners, as to whether they will allow these things to pass through.

I was involved in a gas pipeline that transmitted from the United Kingdom to the Irish Republic and from the different parts of the United Kingdom to the Irish Republic directly. The European Union contributed financially towards it, because it could be done under a whole range of headings—infrastructure, the cohesion fund, economic development, climate change issues, carbon reduction. There are many mechanisms already in existence. I may be wrong on this, but I feel that the energy example is not necessarily the most relevant.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I am afraid to say that I believe that the noble Lord is wrong on this. He has used a particular example of which he has very great experience. It is extremely interesting for the House to hear that example, but it is not very typical. It does not deal at all with the issue, for example, of whether it might be in the interests of the European Union in the not distant future to give a negotiating mandate to a body—whether it is the Commission or the presidency or whatever it is—to negotiate for energy supplies from outside the European Union, particularly gas, and to negotiate as a single unit. That would require new powers. It is as simple as that, and is, I am afraid to say, nothing whatever to do with building a pipeline between Ireland and Northern Ireland, interesting and important though that was.

I think there is serious matter in the energy field, the climate change field and the pollution field to reflect on here and a need for greater flexibility. I plead with the Government that we do not have the preprandial/postprandial schizophrenia that we have had in recent Committee stages in which in one session we are told that we need not worry about this enormous number of referendums because none of them will ever take place and we will stop anything happening in Brussels that will cause them to take place and then immediately afterwards we are told that we need not worry because the European Union does not work that way, and there will be a big package and we will all be able to find some nice sugar-plums in it for ourselves. I thought that was where we came in and decided that that was nothing that we wished to encourage in future. I think the Government need to make up their mind whether they are trying to lock the door and throw the key away, which is what this Bill does, and the consequences of that are pretty damaging for this country, or whether they are trying to propel the European Union towards another big institutional package, which I do not believe to be in the interests of this country. I would like to hear a response on Amendments 23C, 23D and 23E.