European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Green of Deddington Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to ex-Foreign Office luminaries. I am ex-Foreign Office, but I make no claim to be luminary; indeed, I am not entirely sure I agree with some of what it is saying.

I will cover rather different ground in my contribution, which, as usual, will be brief. Until I read the papers for this debate, I had not myself realised the extent to which the UK has been inexorably drawn into a binding legal structure so completely different from what the public, and I, originally voted for. However, the public have now come to recognise this, instinctively, if not in detail. That may explain why the outcome of the referendum was as it was: quite clear, but, as we have all recognised, narrow.

Irrespective of their own vote, many members of the public now look to the Government and to Parliament to get on with it and extract us from the European Union. In looking at this Bill, we must surely play it straight with the public. There are, no doubt, many valid and important legal objections to the Bill as drafted, but any impression that legal arguments are being used as a cover to frustrate the UK’s departure from the EU would be deeply damaging to the future of this House and, perhaps, to our political system as a whole, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, pointed out earlier.

I would like to refer specifically to one central issue, which is something of an elephant in the room. Noble Lords will have guessed that I am talking about immigration. There is no doubt that this was a major issue—some would say a decisive issue—in the referendum. Therefore, surely the outcome of this process must lead not just to control over immigration but to a substantial reduction.

Let me illustrate the consequences of failure to get such a reduction in three brief, simple but telling points. First, over the last 10 years net migration has been running at about 250,000 a year, almost half of it from the European Union. Secondly, at these levels of immigration, our population would grow by almost 10 million in the next 25 years, of which 82% would be due to migration. Thirdly, the continuation of current levels of net migration to England—I am talking only about England here—would mean having to build a new home every five minutes, day and night, just to house new migrants. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Public concern about the scale of immigration is well founded and should not be condescended to. More generally, the public are also aware of something of an alliance between some employers who prefer to employ cheap foreign labour and a metropolitan elite who sometimes suggest that any call for control of immigration is essentially xenophobic. If nothing else, the vote for Brexit has signalled a need for this to change.

This is not the place or the occasion to pursue these matters any further. Indeed, the implementation Bill in the autumn and the immigration Bill expected shortly will be more directly relevant. In conclusion, I simply invite the House to be alert to the wider consequences of our work for the future size and, indeed, nature of our society.