National Referendum on the European Union

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Monday 24th October 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Cash]

Yes, indeed, and I will go further: the EU has created a situation in which it actually damages our economy. That is the problem, and that is the reversal of the situation, with massive over-regulation—£8 billion a year, according to the British Chambers of Commerce—over the past 20 years in this country alone.

As I said earlier in my interventions on the Foreign Secretary and the shadow Foreign Secretary, we are running the single market on a deficit that has gone up in the last year alone by as much as £40 billion, so it would be inconceivable for us not to take a rain-check and say, “We cannot just continue with this and pretend that nothing is going on.”

If ever there was a time to tackle the issue in principle, it is now, and that is what the motion is about: whether there is a case for renegotiation or for leaving the European Union. On renegotiation, we must establish the fact in line with the wishes of the people of this country—not because the Whips have said, “You’ve got to do this, that and the other” or, with great respect, because the Prime Minister or the Foreign Secretary have said so, but because we have a sacred trust, as elected Members of this House, to do what is right, in the interests of the British people as we see it for our constituents, and in the national interest. This is exactly that issue tonight.

The Prime Minister has given two speeches over the past year or so—one was about rebuilding trust in politics, and the other was about a European policy that we can believe in. I strongly recommend that people tonight, tomorrow or at some point read those speeches again and ask themselves, “What is going on in this debate today?” We know that the Whips have been strongly at work, but I had all that over Maastricht, we have had it over the years and it becomes something that we have to get used to. The reality is that we are doing the right thing for the right reason. That is the point.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he not think that, because the debate has been generated by an e-petition, because it has been made possible by the Backbench Business Committee and because it is an issue that does not divide Members along party lines, it is totally wrong for both party leaders to apply the three-line Whip?

[Mr Cash]

I absolutely agree. In fact, I think that three parties are involved, and the point applies to all of them.

I should like to return to the Prime Minister’s statement today and to test it against what has been going on. He said to us: “Members of my party fought the last election committed to three things,” including, “stopping the passage of further powers to the EU.” The Foreign Secretary, in his article in The Daily Telegraph the day before yesterday, said that he objected to the Lisbon treaty, and he will remember that he, I and many Conservative Members fought, united together, against it line by line—every aspect of it—and fought for a referendum. Yet, we have been watching the implementation of further powers—I do not want to get into the semantics or legal niceties of the word “powers”, because I know them as well as anybody else in the House—and every aspect of that Lisbon treaty day in, day out, and many of the problems that we are now experiencing are a result of its implementation.

The Prime Minister went on to say that we have instituted “a referendum lock to require a referendum, by law, for…such transfer of powers”, and I have a ten-minute rule Bill on that tomorrow. It would reverse section 4 of the European Union Act 2011, which I opposed on the Floor of the House. I see the Foreign Secretary smiling, because he knows what I am going to say. The real test, as I said to the Prime Minister during his statement, is about fundamental change—constitutional, political and economic. That is the test that needs to be applied, and it was endorsed—by the way—by the Lords Constitution Committee only last year.

Fiscal union, of which I shall explain more tomorrow, is such a fundamental change, but the Government quite deliberately ensured through section 4(4)(b) of the 2011 Act that there would be no referendum when the provision in question applied, in their terms, only to the eurozone and not to us directly. At the very time when we were being told that, however, I and others objected because we felt that such a provision would affect us enormously. We were told that it would not, but now we are told day in, day out how much it does affect us, and that therefore we must not do what we are doing tonight, for the very simple reason that, somehow or other, it will undermine our economic activity with the European Union. That is absolute rubbish. The reason why we are in such difficulties with deficit reduction is that there is no growth, and there is no growth because 50% of all our economic laws come from Europe. It also accounts for 40% of our trade, a point that the Foreign Secretary made, but the fact is that we have a massive trade deficit, as I have already described.

The EU is a failed project. It is an undemocratic project. This vote—this motion—is in the national interest, because it is for democracy, for trust in politics and for the integrity of this House.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Sam Gyimah (East Surrey) (Con)]

I have listened to the debate for the past five hours, and it is clear that we on the Conservative Benches are all Eurosceptics now. I speak in this debate as a Eurosceptic, and I could not put the case against the EU better than some of my colleagues have. However, I will be voting against the motion, because I believe that anger and frustration are not enough to form our considerations; we need a clear-sighted, clear-eyed strategy to move forward.

Let me mention some of the considerations that we need to take. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) said—I paraphrase, probably poorly, in which case I am sorry—that we need to hold the Government’s feet to the fire to ensure that something is done. However, we must remember that to lead the country on this issue we need to be a united rather than a divided party. In 2010, just 13% of voters described the Conservative party as divided, but at the height of the Maastricht rebellion 50% described us as divided. We can all stand for our principles and say that this is only about our consciences—or, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said, that nothing is more important, including the coalition—but we need to remember that in the reality of the political world, if we want to achieve something we have to balance those factors. We know from the 1997 election result that we need to be mindful of that.

Why do I raise that point? Because when we were kicked out of office for being divided, we suffered the greatest setback in the European project. During those 13 years, the Labour Government opted into the social chapter, which was responsible for a lot of the regulations that have suffocated business and stifled growth, and in 2007 the Labour Government signed the Lisbon treaty. For all our high-minded principle in the mid-1990s, when we got kicked out of government because of division we set back our own project.

[Zac Goldsmith]

My hon. Friend is speaking as though this were a Conservative party issue, but we can see from the debate today that it is a cross-party issue. The question that we face today is: do we trust the people to make this decision or not? The pros and cons of Europe can be discussed later.

[Mr Gyimah]

I thank my hon. Friend for that. I am not speaking as though this were a Conservative party issue, but we can see that the media, in every interview, have pitted Conservative against Conservative. We need to be careful about divisions on our side.

Of course people need to decide, but we should be careful not to jump from responding to an e-petition that has been signed by a number of people to assuming that this issue is on every voter’s mind. A number of voters will talk about the fact that they care about their jobs. A number will say that they want their streets to be secure. Others will say that they want their children to have a better life than their own. National polls show that when the issue of Europe is considered on its own, everyone is hostile to it, but in general elections, its salience disappears. We need to adopt a very clear-eyed strategy in dealing with this.

I will not be supporting the motion. It should be clear from the debate today, especially to those who are saying that we would be better off out, that, with the eurozone on its knees, we now have the best opportunity to negotiate the best conditions for Britain. It would be catastrophic for us to walk away from the EU, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) suggested, as that would result in our giving up influence.