EU: Prime Minister’s Speech

Lord Howe of Aberavon Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howe of Aberavon]

My Lords, there seems to be an irony at the heart of the Prime Minister’s speech on the issue of sovereignty. He asserts that it is,

“national parliaments, which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU”.

At the same time, he does not appear to trust our own national Parliament at Westminster to judge what kind of relationship we should have with the Union. The decisions of this Parliament to approve each of the treaties that govern our membership, from the European Communities Act of 1972, which I helped steer through the House of Commons, to the Lisbon treaty in 2009, are perceived as illegitimate.

The Prime Minister says that,

“democratic consent for the EU is now wafer-thin”,

in Britain, and that the people have had “little choice” over the endorsement of successive treaties. Is it really of no consequence that, at each stage, a majority of parliamentarians supported our membership on the basis of treaties negotiated by democratically elected Governments? Is it irrelevant today that a clear majority of MPs elected to the House of Commons wish Britain to stay in the Union and do not support his proposed renegotiation of our membership?

I would like to think that I am wrong in suspecting that the Prime Minister’s sudden conversion to the merits of a referendum is less about occupying the moral high ground of democratic consent than a search for a means to overcome the problems of internal party management. At the risk of appearing discourteous, I and some of my colleagues who are old enough to remember the complicated Wilson European era between 1967 and 1975, will recognise a distinct pattern of Wilsonian behaviour which I fear may be beginning to infect our Prime Minister in this context.

There is another irony on this particular subject. If it is,

“national parliaments, which are, and will remain, the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the EU”,

one wonders why the Prime Minister did not give his Bloomberg speech in the House of Commons rather than in a high-tech conference room in the City. One wonders whether it is because, as he said in his speech, it is national parliaments,

“which instil proper respect—even fear—into national leaders”.

In justifying his promise of a referendum in the next Parliament if the Conservative Party gains an absolute majority at the next general election, the Prime Minister said:

“A vote today between the status quo and leaving would be an entirely false choice”.

I disagree. Although I am no enthusiast for referenda and do not advocate one, it seems to me that at any time the choice between the status quo and a clearly defined alternative in the here and now—in this case whether to stay in or to leave the European Union as it actually exists and operates—is a straightforward proposition. I do not, however, believe that a referendum is the best way to address that question. As the Prime Minister said in his speech, our own national Parliament, not a widely consulted referendum, is the true source of real democratic legitimacy and accountability in the European Union. It was so in 1972 and is so today, and to introduce, in this particular context, the concept of a referendum does not serve the purpose of the Prime Minister, the Government or anybody else.