European Union: Recent Developments

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I for one was very glad that my noble friend mentioned so firmly the Nobel Peace Prize at the beginning of the debate. I know that there has been controversy about this, but as one who was beginning to reach political consciousness and going through my formative years politically at the end of the Second World War and that post-war period, I remember it all very clearly.

Our sense of history becomes rather short. The European Coal and Steel Community was the beginning of it all. The great statesmen who were involved in this were not just interested in economic arrangements; they were seeing economic relations as the means by which one builds stability and peace in Europe—the two went absolutely hand in hand from the beginning. We should not be so reticent these days as to fail to mention and reassert the interrelationship between the economics and the politics, and how the economics are there to support the reality of a stable, peaceful Europe.

The noble Lords, Lords Maclennan and Lord Taverne, got it right when they reminded us that it would be much better to put our energies into explaining to the British people, in our schools and through informal public education, the benefits of the Community rather than just always putting across a picture of how we are defending ourselves against all sorts of pernicious and sinister forces that are trying to defeat us, which is nonsense, of course. Though we may think that we understand it or begin to understand the single market, we need to explain to the people of Britain why it is so important, not least in terms of inward investment to this country and of meeting the challenges of south-east Asia, China and Brazil.

But there is much more to the Community than just this, and noble Lords have referred to it. There is the reality of the new multinational businesses and of international crime. How are we helped in coping with the power and influence of multinational business or dealing with international crime if we try to do it all on an individual-state basis? It will not work; we have to co-operate. That is why the police are so adamant that we should be very careful about pulling out of any of the relationships that they have painstakingly built to help them to do their job effectively. Of course, this applies in the sphere of terrorism as well, as it does in that of global warming, because pollution and the consequences of global warming know no national frontiers and we are foolish if we think that we can build up effective arrangements for coping with it on a national basis alone.

We ought also perhaps to put a bit more time into talking about social legislation in Europe. We ought at least to examine whether there is some interrelationship between German economic success and the social provisions that prevail in its industrial relations and industrial law. Why do we have this knee-jerk, prejudiced reaction against it? Perhaps there is a relationship between enlightened approaches in these spheres and effective economic performance. I happen to believe that there is, but let us be open-minded about it and examine it rather than react to it.

I believe—here, I want refer to the very effective speech by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, with all his experience as a Commissioner—that in the eurozone, if we have it, economic integration, as the events of the past few years have made clear, is going to be indispensable. But one cannot encourage simply economic integration; social policy has to be integrated. If there is not a matching social policy for the member countries of the eurozone, I see disaster and acute political instability ahead. One has to think of the consequences of what is being done economically and how one handles it in countries such as Greece, for example, or Spain.

There is one other issue that I should like to mention, because we ought to take it into account more often. One of the difficulties that we face in Britain is the remoteness of Brussels—an apparent elitism and even arrogance in the style of Brussels. This is partly a consequence of technocracy and technocratic organisation, which can too easily start generating its own momentum and leave a gigantic gap between it and the people who are closely involved in society as a whole. We need to look at that issue, because I personally believe that there is a cultural issue there which needs to be addressed.

Whether we like it or not, Britain is part of the world. It is intimately involved in and interconnected with the world; there is no way in which we can go our own way in isolation. Indeed, isolationism in political talk in our country serves the people, our children and our grandchildren no good whatever. We are part of the global international realities and our energies need to go into ensuring that we are working with the international community to do the right things for people as a whole, including the people of Britain—our own people. It is not us against the others; it is us working together with the world in getting it right for everybody, including the British people. If we do not take that approach, we shall certainly be in trouble.

The language that has surrounded the whole, great opt-out saga that we are just about to enter is the language of doing it exactly the wrong way. To think that we can make everybody suspicious within Europe, and everybody increasingly resentful of us as an irritant within Europe, and then cherry pick the bits that we want to go back into, expecting them automatically to say, “Yes, okay, we’ll have the Brits back for that”, is very naive. We have to provide and build a context in which we can be there, benefiting our own people and bringing our influence to bear in the interests of our own people, because we are working for the European and the international community as a whole.