EU: UK Isolation

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 22nd April 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, it would be idle to pretend that Britain’s always turbulent relationship with the other member states of the EU is not currently going through a more than usually troubled phase, and for that reason, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, for his initiative. The misguided attempt to veto a fiscal union treaty in December 2011, the balance of competence review, whose purpose often seems obscure to its authors, let alone to most of the other member states which treat it with deep suspicion, and the Prime Minister’s reckless commitment, in my view, to an in/out referendum in 2017 all contribute to a negotiating climate that could easily end up negating the objective of establishing a more settled relationship for a Britain firmly engaged as a full and fully participating member of the European Union.

How is such an outcome, which would be so damaging to Britain’s national interest, to be avoided? First, we certainly cannot afford to sit around waiting until we see the result of the 2015 general election before embarking on a process of reform. Nor can we afford to found such a process on the entirely false premise that the other member states, particularly the members of the eurozone, are poised to embark on an overall rewrite of the treaties, which would provide the opportunity for us to put forward a wish list of our own. That will simply not happen any time soon, and certainly not in the timescale envisaged by the Prime Minister. Nor can any such process of reform afford to be based on a purely British list of vetoes, red lines, no-go areas, items for repatriation or renegotiation. We need a positive reform agenda which takes proper account of the wishes and interests of other member states, and thus has some chance of enlisting their support. That positive agenda needs to enlist cross-party support in Britain; it must not be a ragbag of items designed to appease the unappeasable in UKIP and the wilder shores of Euroscepticism, neither of which forces has the slightest interest in an approach that would leave Britain inside the European Union.

Can such a reform agenda be put together? I believe that it can but it would need to move beyond the comfort zone of Britain’s traditional EU agenda—completion of the single market, with stronger provisions on services and a digital market, further enlargement and freer and fairer world trade, valuable though those components continue to be. It will need to include a more wholehearted embrace of a common foreign and security policy and it should surely include, too, some strengthening of the common security and defence policy to face up to the impact of austerity on defence budgets. It should be focused on policy reform rather than on institutional reform. There will, of course, need to be some areas of increased flexibility in the operation of an EU moving beyond the soon-to-be 28 member states. Variable geometry is alive and well—here I rather disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens —and has been operated successfully in Brussels since the end of the 1980s. We need only look at Schengen, the eurozone, justice and home affairs opt ins and opt outs. There will probably need to be more of that as the eurozone moves to a more integrated economic and monetary union within a European Union where there is still likely to be a substantial number of member states not yet within the eurozone, nor likely to be so in the near future. What needs to be avoided is making such a variable geometry the main operating principle of the European Union—that would be to sound the death knell of the single market; and to avoid, too, any fixed group of inner and outer circles of member states, which would be inherently unstable and unsustainable. It makes no practical sense anyway, as Britain is an essential leading player in any strengthening of common foreign security and common defence policy.

If I had one immediate plea, it would be for the Government to jettison their silly and untrue slogan of wanting less Europe—untrue because the Government’s policy is for more single market, more European trade agreements, and more new members of the European Union. Who are they kidding? The slogan is silly and counterproductive because it separates us from our natural allies in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, and in central and eastern Europe, who will never march into battle under the banner of “less Europe”. Shaping and beginning to negotiate with our partners and with the Commission over such a positive reform agenda is the right way ahead, and a far better option than preparing to play a game of Russian roulette in 2017.