EU: UK Membership

Lord Empey Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, perhaps I may take the opportunity to congratulate the noble Baroness on her incisive and informative maiden speech. I am certain that her knowledge of European affairs will not go unused in this House as Europe is one of the subjects that has the capacity to get the blood flowing in the veins of your Lordships—as they may have noticed already. The noble Baroness enjoys a distinguished academic career. Having studied at both Brasenose College and St Antony’s, Oxford, she now holds the significant post of director of the European Centre at the University of Cambridge. Lecturing in international relations allows the noble Baroness to bring contemporary knowledge to your Lordships’ House for the many debates and discussions we have on this subject, and today is no exception.

The noble Baroness has two more distinctions that I wish to mention. She is the seventh “Smith” to be a current Member of this House, and I can assure her that she is in very distinguished company. She is also a serving city councillor in Cambridge, and as a former city councillor myself, I welcome the expertise that local representatives add to our deliberations. I have absolutely no doubt that the noble Baroness will bring her widespread experience at the local government level to our debates as well. We wish her good fortune as she branches out on a new and, I hope, rewarding part of her career.

I turn now to the debate secured for this afternoon by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. I always listen carefully to his contributions, but I must say that I was somewhat dispirited by his passionate promotion of the objective without any apparent recognition of the collateral damage that the passage of time has done to the initial ideal. Anyone who was around at the end of the war could not but have realised that things had to change. Europe had been laid waste in the 20th century and our predecessors naturally had the instinct to do something to ensure that it did not happen again. To a very large extent, that particular objective of our predecessors has, so far and thank God, been achieved.

However, the EU is like any bureaucratic organisation —something to which the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, has just alluded. When we initially entered into the relationship, we were dealing with six nations of a very similar nature to our own. They were close by, they were developed countries, and there were a lot of similarities. The European Union of today is a totally different creature. It is vast in its expansion and the differences between one nation and another have grown dramatically, so the idea that you can simply apply the same rules today that were applied at the EU’s initiation is just not realistic. It is like applying the same rules to trains when they were steam driven as we do to our modern electric ones; it does not work. The disparity between the nations is such that what we are actually doing is taking young and perhaps qualified people out of the underdeveloped parts of the Union and bringing them here and to other developed countries. That cannot be consistent with the objective of levelling everyone up instead of levelling them down.

My anxiety is that to dismiss, as some seem to be doing, the vast movement of populations that has taken place—millions of people, not thousands—and to imagine that that has had no significant impact on the ordinary people of this country is totally unrealistic. I think that that attitude is the recruiting sergeant for the UKIPs of this world. It is what encourages them and helps them to gain ground. Let us look at some recent elections. Those who stood on a solidly pro-European platform have been almost obliterated. If we genuinely want co-operation—I want to see co-operation between the peoples of the European Union—it has to be done in a way that brings the people along with it. It should not be a source of division. If we want it to work, it should be a source of pride and achievement. But this country has a vast deficit with the rest of the European Union. We have hitched our wagon to a star that unfortunately is not rising at the moment because the European Union economy is stagnant and is becoming a smaller and smaller proportion of our trade. Sadly, when this country joined the European Union, we treated our former trading partners such as New Zealand and the Caribbean countries shamefully. We swept them aside overnight, and that is a source of worry for me.

My final point is this. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, must reflect on the fact that last week his own party spokes -person, the shadow Home Secretary, made a speech about immigration in the other place. But she must remember that she was part of a Government who took the decision to allow free and open access to this country by the accession countries. That fuelled massive levels of immigration that we have not been able fully to absorb. If you fill a place up, what happens is that services become pressurised, and that starts agitation. We can see it happening in other countries. Marine Le Pen did not exist as a political force a number of years ago, and yet it is clear that in her party and others throughout the European Union there are the stirrings of the very forces which led us to the position in which we ended up in 1939-40. This debate has to be treated seriously. We cannot dismiss the concerns of the people in an arrogant fashion. We have to listen and realise that there is a problem, and we should put our minds to how to resolve it.