European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Liddle

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

At the end of the day, the EU thinks that it is free to issue information. Information can take many different forms, and I do not see that there is anything that can be done. The Minister has already said that we cannot actually stop the EU financing activities because they are all done in the name of information—and what is the difference between information and propaganda?

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

Is the noble Lord a regular reader of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail? Does he think that they provide objective, truthful information about the European Union?

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[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I have to say that that is an entirely different issue.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords—

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

The noble Lord has intervened so let me answer his question. I think that the Daily Mail and the Daily Express have their own views, as do the Guardian and the Independent. We have a free press; it is up to them what they do. We are talking here about what the EU does to finance activities during this referendum.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, does the noble Lord believe it is wrong for the EU to provide factual information about what it does when in large sections of our press, which are foreign owned, lies are printed about the EU virtually every day?

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, will know well, factual information from the EU amounts to it advertising that it is spending inordinate amounts of money on different interest groups of one sort or another around the UK, as if this were all manna from heaven: “Gosh, you’re lucky, the EU has decided to spend some money on you”. What it does not bother to tell people is that it is their own money.

The great problem that Lord Joseph had when he was in the Thatcher Government was to persuade Ministers to talk not about “public money” that they were being so generous with, but about “taxpayers’ money”. He managed to hold that line for a time with the Conservative Cabinet, but quite quickly it drifted off and we got back to Ministers constantly talking about how incredibly generous they were being with “government money”, as if all this stuff came from heaven. Of course, half the government money that we have now is borrowed anyway. It is an absurd mentality to think that people can be generous with other people’s money and get credit for it. Why should they, when it is actually the money that they have taken off the people of this country? We must live in the real world.

Amendment 18 is about purdah. The problem with purdah, as we all know, is that the Government are arguing that they have to allow the normal functions of government to continue. Obviously that is quite justifiable, but the point of my amendment is to restrict what can be done with regard to purdah. To return once more to my noble friend Lord Forsyth’s argument that this has to be seen to be a fair referendum, our worry is that we should not, as we did in the Scottish referendum on independence, suddenly have an enormous initiative from the Government to try to swing the vote because the polls are going the wrong way. We do not want some great initiative from the EU saying how incredibly generous or wonderful it has been in order to try to swing the vote here.

[Lord Liddle]

I moved an amendment on this in Committee, partly in jest. If the noble Lord wants a fair referendum, why does he not persuade his friends in the Conservative newspapers to give equal space to people who are in favour of our membership and people who are against?

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Liddle

Monday 2nd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

I take the point. The noble Lord has thrown me off my path. I was saying that the nature of our economy has changed and that sometimes when I listen to these debates I do not get an appreciation of that. The fact is that Britain has benefited more from European Union membership than virtually any other member, and has done so through attracting inward investment to the United Kingdom from all parts of the world. This has been a tremendous boost; it has been the only successful industrial policy we have had since the era of Margaret Thatcher; she was the one who first started it, and it has worked. That has meant that many British businesses are part of European and global supply chains, and we as a country benefit from hosting many foreign companies here. I often think, when I listen to the arguments, that people just do not appreciate that. Yet, that is clearly the major economic issue in the debate on membership. If that inward investment, that ability to organise your supply chains across Europe, were to be interrupted as a result of withdrawal and badly damaged, that could seriously deter future inward investment in the UK.

Most of us in this Chamber are pretty passionate in our views about the European Union, for and against. However, we also have to remember that most of the great British public are not very passionate about it; in fact, the great majority do not regard it as the most important issue in the world at all. Most opinion polling suggests that only about 10% of the voters are worked up about our membership of the European Union. That does not mean that they are pro—I am not trying to argue that. They are genuinely sceptic about the whole issue in a way in which a lot of the people who are anti-European Union in this Chamber, who claim to be sceptics, are not—they are passionate ideologues. However, most of the voters are sceptics, who want to weigh the evidence and be convinced one way or another by the argument.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I totally accept the noble Lord’s thesis that this is not a high priority for the British public at the moment. On the other hand, however, he will recollect the time when the Tory party was tearing itself apart over the issue of Europe, and it was certainly a very much higher priority at that time. Does he not feel that as we approach the referendum and the debate rages it will move up in people’s priorities, and that they will take more interest in it?

[Lord Liddle]

The noble Lord is right about that, but it is the result of dissent in an elite and a particular part of the British political elite. People will get worked up about this because of a vigorous argument on one side of the political spectrum; it is not as a result of massive popular demand from below. However, that is not my point, which is that a lot of people are genuinely sceptic and probably dislike the Brussels bureaucracy a great deal but worry about our future outside the EU. That is where I think that the need for objectivity is very important. Clearly, I am not the right person to make an objective case about the European Union but I still believe that we have a public service in Britain which is independent and can be objective and which can help to frame a rational debate about our membership. That is why I think that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is so important.

I hope that the Minister, for whom I have the greatest respect, and the Government will look favourably on the argument regarding the need for objectivity in this debate and on the argument that the public service can help to bring that to the debate. That is what the public are looking for. I would hate to think that our politics had got to the state of that of the United States, where everything is so polarised that it is impossible to have any kind of meeting of minds or objectivity and rationality in discussions. I think that the senior members of the Government are coming round to a certain view about Britain’s future which I favour, so I hope that they will be prepared to support this call for independent, objective analysis, which is so important for the quality of our politics.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Hamilton of Epsom and Lord Liddle

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

Because there might be fundamental treaty change—for instance, within the eurozone—by that date. There is no possibility of that within the date of the renegotiation. This means that the Government have to be honest about what they can achieve and what they cannot; they have to adopt the position that Harold Wilson wisely adopted in 1975 and say, “We did want to achieve quite a lot of things in this renegotiation. We haven’t achieved them all, but we have achieved some useful reforms which in our view justify staying in”. I think that that is the best that the Government can do on their own policy. That is why I have tabled the amendment.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

I am rather in sympathy with the noble Lord’s proposal. Does he not agree that, as the years progress, the whole of the eurozone in particular and the EU generally is becoming more and more accident-prone; that one drama follows another; and that by 2019 the whole thing will probably be falling apart?

[Lord Liddle]

No, I do not agree. Britain should not push unreasonable demands in the next 12 months on top of the very real issues the European Union has to deal with: resolving the long-term issues arising from the euro crisis—the short term has been resolved—and putting together the more Europe that we need effectively to tackle the migration crisis. Those are very serious problems, and Britain is getting in the way of solving them. That is an added reason for the Government to be honest with the people about the feasibility of the fundamental reforms that some noble Lords appear to think are possible—they are not.

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[Lord Liddle]

Because this is a referendum about leaving the European Union. I am not suggesting that this become the electorate in a British general election or on any other matter. However, this referendum is about the rationale for why these people are here.

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

My Lords, we have been discussing virtually all day how we are going to try to make this referendum fair. We want to keep the playing field as level as we possibly can. Enfranchising 1.9 million people of European nationality is a blatant opportunity to try to swing the vote in favour of staying in the EU. Of course, so much is going wrong for all these people who want us to stay in the EU. Let us face it: the EU is imploding as we watch and one crisis follows another. It is going to be quite tricky for anybody who wants us to stay in the EU to win this referendum. Therefore, I agree that those people who do want to stay in have got to try every trick in the book to try to swing it in their direction. However, let us see this for what it is: this is a referendum for the British people to decide whether or not they want to stay in the EU. This is not a decision for foreigners who happen to be living in this country.