EU: Prime Minister’s Speech

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, I do not terribly want to get involved in a debate about what will happen when the referendum is held. Rather, I will make two points. The first is that within the next 12 months, I suspect that the Labour Party will commit itself to an “in or out” referendum, whether the noble Lord, Lord Davies, likes it or not. It is completely unsustainable for any party to stand at the next election saying that it is not going to hold a referendum when a major party like the Conservatives is doing so. I suspect that the Liberal Democrats will follow suit as well.

Not for the first time, I find that I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. He knows, as most noble Lords in this Chamber know, that the construct of the EU has been a series of treaties which need unanimous support, and that if you want to revise those treaties, it has to be done with unanimity. I therefore suggest that the chances of Britain renegotiating a position that entails treaty change is virtually non-existent, and by the same token, it will not be possible for Germany, Holland, Sweden and Finland to renegotiate to make the EU more competitive. If something needs treaty change, it will not happen; that is the reality of the position that we are in.

I have absolutely no idea who will win the election of 2015, but we will have either a Labour or a Conservative Prime Minister. Then what will happen? If Ed Miliband is Prime Minister, he will go off to Europe and come back with a minimal number of concessions. He will not be able to pull off the same trick as Harold Wilson: namely, minimal renegotiation and a vote for us to stay in the EU. He would have to win major concessions—which I do not think he will get—and, of course, at that stage he will be faced by a Conservative Opposition, led, I suspect, by a different leader, who will campaign vigorously against any move to keep us in the EU. Alternatively, if David Cameron wins, he will have to go off to Europe and come back with very serious concessions. I suspect that the best that he will be able to achieve will be some hybrid solution for the United Kingdom that will leave us more out of the EU than in. Either way, I do not see that we will do anything other than come out.

That brings us to my noble friend’s Liberal Democrats, who already have the somewhat suspect reputation of being the people whom Conservative and Labour candidates least want to face in an election. They have now added to that the reputation of being unreliable and untrustworthy when it comes to the coalition agreement that was set up at the beginning of this Parliament. So I do not think that an awful lot of people will want to go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats ever again. If the opinion polls are right, they will probably get only 10 seats at the next election, so the question may not even come up.