European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I would be very happy to read it; what I would be interested in is who has written it. I note, for example, that three of my honourable friends from the other end of the corridor were kicked off the Council of Europe recently because their views did not accord with those of the establishment. But I am certainly happy to read what the noble Lord suggests.

I want to put some more figures into the debate that arise from our earlier discussions and are relevant to the amendment. They relate to the number of EU laws that EEA members such as Norway and Iceland have to accept. The Icelandic Government estimate 10%—5,000 legislative Acts in force, divided by 23,078 legislative Acts in consolidated EU acquis.

There seems to be a debate about the extent to which this applies to these countries, but as the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, said, all of this is completely irrelevant. We are not Iceland; we are not Norway; we are Britain. We are a country with a long history and relationships around the globe in a global marketplace in the Far East and elsewhere. It is utterly ridiculous to suggest that we would get into some sort of trade war with the EU and be vetoed by Portugal or Spain. It is a shallow argument that demeans our country, and will be hugely counterproductive if it is deployed, as we discovered when perhaps overenthusiastic unionists tried to deploy the same argument in Scotland when they said that Scotland would not be able to survive on its own.

Iceland has a population that is smaller than that of Edinburgh, for goodness sake, and here we have it on the authority of the Icelandic Prime Minister himself that Iceland is much better off outside the EU. So I do not think that these arguments apply. It has been suggested that the British Government could produce a report on what it would be like if we were outside the EU, and that we should not embark on taking control of our own destiny unless we had such a report, which would by its very nature be speculative and might very well underestimate the opportunities. Thank goodness we did not have this kind of thinking in May 1940.

This United Kingdom has a huge range of relationships and great talent and ability, and it is wrong to suggest that we cannot work with our colleagues in Europe outside the EU. It is not we who are leaving the European Union; it is the European Union that is leaving us. Of course it is. In order to maintain the integrity of the single currency, the euro, which the noble Lord and others would have had us join—what a mess we would be in if we had done that—the EU is having to introduce a more integrated system. Therefore, it is not a matter of whether we are able to have influence and to punch above our weight within this organisation. This organisation is changing; it has to change because countries are so obsessed with maintaining currency union that they are prepared not only to sacrifice the jobs and living standards of young people in the southern European states but to give up their autonomy. We are not prepared to give up our autonomy.

When we joined the EU, we joined the common market, which was a free trade area. That free trade area is being turned into something else. It is being turned into a country with its own currency and the ability to raise taxes and to control its own fiscal issues. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, said that you cannot join a golf club and then not pay your subscription. We did join the golf club—but they want to play tennis now. They want to play a completely different game, which is not what we joined for.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord is making a long campaign speech, and I hesitate to interrupt him. I merely remind him that Edward Heath, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home and others said as we joined the European Community that it had clear political connotations and that our foreign policy would be affected. I will send him tomorrow the speech by Alec Douglas-Home in 1971.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

The noble Lord may very well be correct that Edward Heath said this and Alec Douglas-Home said this, but most people thought that they were voting to join a common market. Certainly, Scottish fishermen thought that they would keep control of their fish stocks and that their industry would survive, and it has been destroyed—and facts are chiels that winna ding, as they say north of the border. The fact is that what we thought we were joining is not what has come to pass.

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[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I am now having doubts. I am not surprised that the noble Lord supports the amendment, because it is a very sensible one. All that it does is seek to ensure that when the Prime Minister has finished his negotiations we have some kind of government publication that tells us what they were about, what their outcome was and what the implications would be for our continued membership of the European Union with those changes, if he so recommends, or the alternative.

The amendment is drafted in neutral terms and I hope that my noble friend might be able to accept the principle. I do not think that it is too much to ask. In my noble friend’s Second Reading speech, he hinted as much. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said in the early part of the summer that there would have to be some sort of paper. There are none of the issues that we have had to discuss earlier this evening arising from the debates that we had on publications of the benefits of being in and out. This is completely straightforward. What did the Prime Minister want? What did he get? What will be the effect on our relationship with the EU and what is the outcome? I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I, too, agree with this amendment. I anticipate that when the negotiations are complete, the Prime Minister will publish a paper and I think it highly likely that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, will disagree fundamentally with what the Prime Minister says.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I went to the Public Bill Office and said that I wanted to put down an amendment very similar to this. It would have called for a White Paper, which this amendment does not. When it was pointed out to me that my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s amendment was already tabled, I added my name to it. This smacks very much of Amendment 1, which I put my name to and which was supported very early on by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. The Liberal Democrats supported it, too, and I suspect that the Front Bench of the Labour Party is going to support it. This amendment ties in with everything that the Government have said already. The only worry I have is that my noble friend the Minister may say that the Government have given an undertaking to this and that it does not need to be in the Bill. I have to say that we will all be very reassured if it is.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise to the Committee for being late to our proceedings. British Airways cancelled my flight so I drove down from Scotland.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has the advantage that he has read this competence review. Can he therefore explain why, for example, it is necessary that the guarantee on people’s money held on deposit in this country, which previously stood at £85,000, has to be reduced to £75,000 because the euro has fallen in value? Surely that should not be decided at a European level.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, politics is precisely about the level at which a whole set of decisions are taken. Until the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher launched the single market initiative, international regulations were largely American decisions on standardisation which others—such as ourselves, the Germans and the French—had to accept. Now, these regulations are often negotiated at EU level and then, in turn, negotiated with the United States. The various reports go into some detail on the advantages and disadvantages of acting at the national, subnational, European and global levels. That is part of what happens across the world. I merely point out that some of this analysis has been done. It is extremely important that, as the debate continues, there should be further analysis.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

Before we leave that point, is the noble Lord seriously arguing that a Government who guarantee through a guarantee scheme in this country deposits put by pensioners in their banks should be left powerless to decide the level of guarantee; and that the review of competences, if it allowed for that, was in any way competent?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord may not have noticed that banking has become a little less national and a little more international over the past 40 years. That is part of the reason why the negotiations over the amount of bank reserves have taken place. That matter has been negotiated for the past 100 years through the Bank for International Settlement and a range of other bodies. Since modern banking developed, there has always been a range of international agreements on aspects of banking, although not in so much detail.

A small number of think tanks have provided some valuable advice. I have great respect for Open Europe, a largely Eurosceptic think tank in origin but which respects the evidence it finds and produces worthwhile reports. Similarly, I have great respect for the Centre for European Reform. There are others on both sides that are less reliable. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington, that Migration Watch stands out by the careful way in which it tries to find out the most accurate figures. That is highly desirable. We need accurate figures. The question of what is happening on immigration to this country—how much is long term and how much is short term, in the case of Spanish and Portuguese workers here who may go back when their economies recover—gets us into the range of speculation, but at least we know where we are at present. That is what we need for this debate. It is not easy. We know that there are conspiracy theorists all round. There are great fears about what might happen. However, dispassionate analysis and evidence, where we can find it, are essential to intelligent debate, and that is what the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and others are about.

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[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

My Lords, I normally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, and I have the greatest respect for him and indeed the Treasury. He is right to say that the Office for Budget Responsibility has been a success. I would therefore be very concerned if we were to accept the amendment and taint the reputation of the OBR by giving it this impossible task. Perhaps the noble Lord could contradict me but if I were to take the Bank of England, for example, an organisation that has a formidable reputation, and I were to look at the forecasts it has made about the progress of the economy over the past 20 years—indeed, over most of my lifetime—the only thing that has been consistent about those forecasts is that they have been consistently wrong. The notion that this body called the Office for Budget Responsibility can look into its crystal ball—I am reminded of that character that used to appear on the National Lottery, Mystic Meg—and predict the future is asking a very great deal of it. As my noble friend Lord Blencathra has said, it is hard to see, given the existing responsibilities of the OBR, how it would be able to set about this task—with the necessary expertise, at any rate. As he listed its responsibilities, it seemed to me that the OBR has quite enough on its plate without adding to it.

I support my noble friend, though, and indeed my noble friends Lord Hamilton and Lord Flight, in the amendment that seeks to bring a balance to this. I am not going to repeat the arguments that we had in considering the previous amendments, but if you are walking in the woods and you see a bear trap, it is probably not a good idea to put your leg in it. None of the arguments that one hears about the EU is couched in terms of, “If we weren’t in it, we would want to join it”. That was what struck me about the Prime Minister’s remarks about Iceland and Norway over the weekend. No one in Iceland or Norway wishes to join the European Union.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government of Norway have consistently had a large number of Ministers who wished to join. There are all sorts of reasons why a substantial chunk of its population does not agree. I myself was involved in discussions with the last Icelandic Government, who also wished to join. So “no one” is a mild exaggeration.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I do apologise to the noble Lord. He is still in ministerial mode; I was talking about the people. I know the people of Iceland extremely well; I have gone there every summer to fish for the past 12 years. I know exactly what has happened in Iceland. I note that the noble Lord also, in his typically selective choice of argument, talks about the last Government of Iceland, not the present one, whose Prime Minister himself made the point to our Prime Minister that they were perfectly happy outside the EU because they had all the fish and, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, the opportunity to deal with their financial services crisis as they saw fit, which did not involve bailing out the bondholders and the bankers, and very successful they have been.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, distracts me from my bear trap.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the very thought that the noble Lord would ever intervene on someone to distract them is something that I would not conceivably believe.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

I have to say that the noble Lord is probably the only Member of this House who I think might possibly put his leg in the bear trap while it was still in the wood. No one is making the argument in this country, in Iceland or indeed in Norway that if we were outside the EU we should join now on the terms that we are already subject to. That is the point about the bear trap.

However, we are in the position where our leg is in a bear trap. The argument from the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, and from many of the people who have spoken today on these matters seems to be that it would just be too painful to take our leg out of the bear trap, and that the best thing is for us to stay where we are and bleed to death. I think we ought to consider what the benefits would be of taking our leg out of the bear trap, and that is what my noble friend Lord Blencathra’s amendment seeks to add to Amendment 22. I see that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, wants to intervene, and I happily give way to him.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Forsyth of Drumlean and Lord Wallace of Saltaire

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we have had a very interesting and constructive debate.

I will just comment on the “ever closer union” issue, having first studied how the European Union treaties were negotiated as a graduate student. Originally in the treaty it was,

“ever closer union among the peoples of Europe”,

because those who had come through the war, often spending the war in London while their states were occupied, wanted to go beyond the nation state. They left the nation states out because Belgium had failed under occupation, as had France, Germany and Italy. The reinsertion of “states” into “ever closer union” was a later recognition that actually you needed to retain the nation state. It was a shift back, away from the original emotional, enthusiastic, idealistic federalism of those who came through the resistance and the war to a recognition that legitimacy depends on states as well and that there are limits as to how far one can go beyond the state. So while we are looking at the history of the evolution of all of this, that is part of this very wonderful phrase “ever closer union”, which means so many different things to so many different people. That is why it is an ideal phrase; we can interpret it in so many different ways and perhaps we should not get quite so hung up on it.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. It is a very interesting theory about this development of the “ever closer union”. Why did the original draft of the Maastricht treaty, before it was amended at the request of John Major, talk about “towards a federal union”?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It is not a theory; I am actually giving the noble Lord some history. I have great admiration for him and his wonderful interventions —he is the best Commons debater in the Lords, I have to say. There were those of the original generation who really did want to build a United States of Europe and they followed the American lead in this. After the war, the Americans had wanted to press on Europe the idea that the Europeans should follow the American lead and build our own United States on their model, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, has hinted. All of us resisted American pressure because we did not want to go anywhere near that degree of integration.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I should remind the noble Lord that, when I have given talks in Washington and elsewhere on European integration, I have often said—sometimes years ago—that, if we ever achieved a United States of Europe, I had no doubt that the policy process would work almost as well as the policy process in Washington. I hope that the noble Lord understands the point.

We have teased out of this debate what issues we have to deal with in Committee and on Report. We are now agreed that there is to be a referendum; the question is now settled; and the date is beyond Parliament’s control, except when the negotiations have been agreed and the Government come back to us. Therefore, we are left with a number of manageable issues.

On the question of purdah, clearly, if we have a long campaign, the Government have to go on negotiating with their partners in the European Union, and Ministers will have to say some things. In that area we will need to explore what the correct outcome is.

On the franchise, on which a great deal has been said, it is quite clear that the current British franchise is a mess. It is a historical, imperial legacy which means that someone who was born in Rwanda or Mozambique and moved to London last year can vote on whether we stay in the European Union. When we are in London, we stay in Wandsworth, where you hear French spoken extensively in the streets, which has been the case for 20 to 30 years. However, French people who have been working and living in London for 20 or 30 years, paying taxes here, contributing in every sense to our economy, cannot vote. There are a whole set of issues there which we need to explore in detail. This is not an ordinary vote. As has been said during this debate and elsewhere, this is a vote about the future of this country, and therefore we need to look at the franchise for this exceptional vote in exceptional ways.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, and other noble Lords raised the question of threshold, which clearly we will have to explore a little, although it is a very difficult issue. Whatever happens at the end of it, if we have a narrow majority, either with a low or a high turnout, it will not settle the issue. However, we all know that referendums do not settle the issue. Six months after the 1975 referendum, the Labour Party was still arguing against staying in the European Union, and look at what happened in Scotland, where the referendum did not settle the future of that country.

The issue of the provision of information is extremely important and very difficult, and again we need to spend some time on it. We have to ask for a White Paper; certainly we need to look at the implications of leaving and, if possible, the prospect of staying. However, I bear hard scars from the problems of having to try to create dispassionate evidence on Britain’s relations with Europe. I spent two years in government negotiating 32 reports on the balance of competences between Britain and the European Union. Some 2,500 pieces of evidence came in; the Conservatives put that in the coalition agreement because they were convinced that this would provide the evidential basis for knowing what sort of powers we would want to repatriate from Brussels back to Britain. The overwhelming evidence submitted to the balance of competences review—from business, universities, financial and legal services—was that they think the current balance of competences is pretty good, thank you. The evidence submitted by easyJet began: easyJet would not exist if it were not for the single market in the European Union.

How did the press and No. 10 react to this? They did their best to bury the balance of competences reports in full. They were usually published at the beginning of the Christmas or the July Recess, just to make sure that the press were looking somewhere else instead. That is part of the problem in trying to get dispassionate evidence into our debate: myths float by us, undisturbed by reality.

I saw in a Church of England blog, which the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London referred to yesterday, that a lay member of the synod of Canterbury said that one of the reasons why the BBC is so biased in favour of Europe is because it receives so much significant funding from the European Union. I look at that with amazement. That is clearly going round in some circles as part of this wonderful phantasmagoria of the EU as a monster, reaching across the Channel to seduce honest Englishmen, strangle our free institutions and reduce us to serfdom under German—and perhaps also French—domination. Therefore, we will struggle between evidence and myth as we go on through this debate.

I will remark on one of the myths, which I have heard several times in this debate: “We thought we were joining a Common Market, and no one ever told us that this was a political project”. Indeed, the Prime Minister himself, in his speech to the Conservative Party conference last week, said:

“When we joined the European Union we were told that it was about going into a common market, rather than the goal that some had for ‘ever closer union’”.

Last night, therefore, again I dug out Sir Alec Douglas -Home’s speech on 21 October 1971, on the first day of the Commons debate on the issue of principle of joining the European Economic Community. He said that,

“when Germany, France, Italy and the rest sit down to talk about their problems of security, and their attitude to world problems … it is vital that we should be in their councils. During the last year I have … been in the councils of the Ten, because they have anticipated the larger Community. Matters are talked about there which concern the defence of Europe and the defence of Britain. Matters are talked about—for example, the Middle East—which have the greatest implications for our country. It is essential that we should be in the councils when these questions are discussed, and that a decision should not be taken without us”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/10/71; col. 922.]

I say that for all those who think that we would be better off as a sort of Switzerland with nuclear weapons, which I think is what—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

NATO.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

The noble Lord intervenes on NATO. If you go to Washington now, you will discover that they think that NATO is a European organisation, and they argue very strongly that NATO and the European Union should work more closely together, because they see them as parts of the same outfit. There is not a sharp difference between the EU and NATO, and the overwhelming majority of members of NATO are also members of the EU. It is not a contradiction. The two go together; they complement each other.

The argument has also been made throughout this debate that the EU has changed beyond all recognition since 1975. That is partly because of British initiatives and efforts: Margaret Thatcher’s initiative on the single market; national deregulation and European reregulation, which of course meant different regulations as we negotiated some of them, but not an overall increase in regulation; and eastern enlargement, which Margaret Thatcher pushed for, with the unintended effect that of course when Poland came in, as she wanted it to, a large number of Poles decided that they wanted to move here, which was one of the interesting unintended consequences.

The world has also changed enormously since 1975. We are in a different global economy; the national companies that used to exist have become multinational; we have integrated production models in which every Airbus sold by the French has over 30% of British parts in it, and every car built in Britain and Germany has parts from other countries throughout Europe; and similarly, we have cross-border financial services, legal services and the like.

Britain has also changed. The noble Viscount, Lord Ridley, said, powerfully, “We want our independence back”. I would like to have back our regional economies. I spent much of my life in the north of England; in Yorkshire you used to have textile mills and building societies. He is from the north-east; we had ICI and Northern Rock. He will remember Northern Rock—it was quite a good building society in his time and did quite a lot for the regional economy. However, these things have all changed. Now Nissan keeps the north-eastern economy going, and I much regret that we no longer have regional banks. The bank that my father used to work for, Barclays, which used to do a lot of useful regional investment, has just chosen an American investment banker as its chief executive. That is rather different from the sort of national economy in which I grew up.

Therefore, we all have to adjust to a global world in which independence and sovereignty have gone. After all, sovereignty goes most easily with protection. Free trade requires international co-operation. Globalisation means global regulation, or regulation by the world’s leading economy, which so far, of course, has been the United States. If we wish to co-operate with others in managing a global economy, we should surely start by co-operating most closely with our neighbours, and if we cannot do that, we should not hold to the illusion that we would find the Chinese, the Russians, the Saudis and the Indians easier partners than the French or the Germans.