European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Tuesday 13th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, in waiting to speak this afternoon I have felt more comfortable than for many years because the Bench with a hole in it on which I habitually sit has finally been replaced. I mention this to reassure those who are still sitting on dilapidated Benches. It may be that the change here is a sign that austerity is finally coming to an end. I should add that one great advantage is that it is not as slippery, so that one does not find oneself sliding backwards and lying back and then being unjustly accused by the press of being asleep in a debate while listening to what people are saying. At all events, some things are improving.

I have always been totally opposed to referendums, and in particular to what one might call binding or mandatory referendums, which in effect represent the dictatorship of the majority and take no account of minority interests. They are the antithesis of representative democracy and leave Members of Parliament unable to wholly fulfil their jobs as representatives and not delegates. I was glad to see in a note prepared by the Library that this Bill,

“does not contain any requirement on the UK Government to implement the results of the referendum, nor set a time limit by which a vote to leave the EU should be implemented. Instead, this is a type of referendum known as pre-legislative or consultative”.

For the reasons I have just mentioned I welcome that, but I am not at all sure that that is what is understood by the public at large who are going to suffer perhaps two years of debate on this issue and then find that the way the vote has been cast does not automatically get implemented by Parliament. If I may say so, I think my noble friend the Minister said in her opening remarks that the people will have the final say. Strictly speaking, I suspect that that is not true as far as the way that the Bill is drafted.

The other thing, which was raised by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, is that the Bill does not include any provision either for what should be decided as a decisive majority on the one hand or what should be the threshold for voting on the other. We will need to consider that in the course of debates in Committee and at later stages. There is also some danger that because this is being carried out against the background of a renegotiation, the vote will reflect whether people think that the renegotiation has been successful or not rather than the underlying question of whether we ought to be in or out. That could distort the result, perhaps to a significant extent.

It has been very difficult to discern what the Government’s objectives are at the present time—many Members have referred to this—but it is clear that the Prime Minister and the Government are opposed to the concept of ever-closer union. But there is a real paradox here. The people who frustrate any move to ever-closer union are the bureaucrats in Brussels, because they are absolutely fixated on two things: the single currency and the free movement of people. Far from leading to closer union, both those dogmas have put them in a position which is more and more divisive. We were told that the single currency would lead to harmonisation and convergence, but that is far from the case. You only have to look at the recent disputes with Greece to realise that the effect of the single currency has been to tear countries apart rather than to bring them together. The situation is similar with regard to the free movement of people, particularly against the background of the extraordinary increase in immigration from outside the European Union, and the way in which this has caused great dissent between, let us say, Germany and Hungary. There is therefore a curious paradox that what the Prime Minister is against is effectively implemented by the bureaucracy in Brussels.

However, at all events, what is crucial is that because of these two issues, which we have opted out of, the Prime Minister has effectively opted out of participation in many of the most important issues, not least the ones I have just mentioned, which are going on at the present time. He has tended to opt out, which is very dangerous indeed. We need to get to a situation where much of the renegotiation should lead to us arguing for what is right not only for this country but for the European Union as a whole. At the moment, the issues I discussed earlier are greatly to the detriment of our country in terms of, for example, exports, problems with immigration and so on. So the Prime Minister has to ensure that he takes a far more active role in Europe than appears to have been the case, because we have not been participating in those particular major areas of policy which I have referred to.

I will make one final point. All these tendencies have been recently for disunity in Europe, which could not happen at a more dangerous time. We cannot conceive of a situation where we have disunity in the European Union on issue after issue and then are totally united on participation in NATO. Personally, I am more worried about that situation than I can remember being for probably my whole adult life. These are important issues, and I hope that the Prime Minister will take a lead in the way I have suggested.