European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Flight Excerpts

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

Naturally, since I rose to speak to some amendments on the Marshalled List, those are the amendments I am speaking to. If I did not repeat on each occasion, “Those citizens living abroad in other EU countries”, then I am sorry but that is what I intended.

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, this is clearly controversial territory and I look forward to hearing the Government’s rationale as to why the line has been drawn where it has. I have to say that I cannot see the argument for allowing British expats in EU countries to have the vote, but not all expats. There does not seem to be much difference between your career taking you to Berlin or to Singapore. Indeed, those who have gone to Singapore are often more likely to return to live in the UK in due course. Where to draw the line is a tricky question. The Scottish referendum was arguably wrong to exclude Scottish citizens who were at that time living in England. If we are to have expats, we should have them all, not just a particular category.

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[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

If the European Union did not sign a treaty with us but put restrictions on trade, it would be very much the loser. We are trading with the European Union at the moment on the basis of a deficit of £70 billion a year. Why would Europe not want to trade with us? It traded with us before we joined, when 35% of our exports went to Europe. Why on earth would the European Union wish to stop trading with us? Of course it would not. That is nonsense and I wish people would stop talking about these 3,500,000 jobs which are going to be lost.

[Lord Flight]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way. I suggest to him that this lost confidence is in reality merely a scare campaign by the yes vote. There is no evidence that this country has lost confidence in looking after its own interests. It has emerged as the most successful economy of the past four or five years. It is no more than a scaremongering tactic; it is not true.

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[Lord Davies of Stamford]

My Lords—

[Lord Flight]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

Could we hear from the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford? I know that he has been trying to get up for some time.

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[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I come now to my second point, which relates to what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. A citizen of this country is entitled to think that the politicians who he or she pays for will do an honest job in a case like this, by not merely providing an opportunity for a referendum to take place but providing what we can by way of elements to enable that individual elector to take a decision.

I want to re-emphasise the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Wigley. Any Government who are half competent—or even a quarter competent—will, in circumstances like this, produce their own study of the cases for joining or leaving, along with the costs of leaving or not leaving and so forth. Any Government who were 10% competent would be going through those exercises and, as he said, given that those studies will have been undertaken, they must not be kept under lock and key in Whitehall. The public in a democracy have a right to know to what conclusions the Government have come in their own studies. They have a right to have disclosed to them material information of that kind, which may be available in Whitehall or elsewhere in the interstices of government. On those two counts, it is absolutely essential that we do what we can to ensure that such reports are identified, undertaken and, above all, made available to the British public.

[Lord Flight]

I wrote to the Treasury about the reduction in the guarantee to £75,000 to have the reason confirmed. I have had a letter back from the Treasury saying that it is doing its best to negotiate that it cannot go any lower than £75,000, so I wish it luck.

I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Higgins but, to be candid, for even wider reasons the exercise is unlikely to be of huge use. First, if you are to have papers about staying in, you have got to have papers about coming out. Secondly, and fundamentally, the issues that are so important are matters of judgment. We do not yet know what the agricultural arrangements may be or what trade agreements there may be with America and India, and so forth. You could take an educated guess but a factual paper must not have educated guesses in it. A whole lot of historic dead data about the EU one way or the other will, candidly, not excite anyone in the slightest, but it is not the job of the Government to publish opinions. It is the job of the campaigning entities to express those expectations and opinions.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

The whole point is that the individual campaigns will not have access to the material which the Government will have produced. It is essential that the public have access to that; if they cannot have access to it through the campaigns, the campaigns themselves will not know what material the Government have on the subject.

[Lord Flight]

Most of the factual information is already there in various forms, so it would not have to be reprinted by a government department. The crucial point is that the campaigners will set out their expectations and judgment as to what will happen one way or the other. As the noble Lord pointed out, leadership in this situation one way or tother is likely to win the referendum campaign.

The proposals seemed to start by suggesting that there should be a whole set of papers on either the advantages of staying in or the problems and risks of staying out. If we ended up with a fair and balanced covering of both sides, I think it would be pretty much a waste of time.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, the key to producing reports is who writes them. The answer is that the Civil Service writes them. Two things are wrong with that. First, the Government at the moment look as if they are going to advocate that we should stay in and the civil servants, if they are doing their job, will slew the reports in such a way that they advocate that we should stay in—so they are going to be biased and of little value for that reason.

The other point is that the EU is very bad at creating jobs. At the moment, it is looking at astronomically high levels of unemployment, particularly youth unemployment. There is one exception to that, which is creating jobs for civil servants. This makes the Civil Service even more biased than it might have been otherwise.