European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

My Lords, when speaking at number 59 in the list one can reflect, as one hears all of one’s points made by others, on how very much better one would have made them oneself. One can also keep score. I have to tell the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, whom I greatly admire for his cavalry officer skills, that it begins to look a bit like Balaclava. At the present rate it is 2:1 against, counting on the side of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, those who are all-out supporters of his Bill and those in the Cormack school, who believe that the Bill has warts but, warts and all, it must be “waved on its way”—I think I heard that. That school combined amounts to half those who have spoken in favour of the House of Lords doing its job and amending the Bill.

I had intended to try to deal with what seemed to be the two central heresies in the brilliant speech of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs—the heresy that if one gets this Bill one is guaranteed a referendum, and the heresy that if one does not get the Bill one does not get a referendum. Those are both nonsense but that was clearly explained most recently by my noble friend Lord Armstrong of Ilminster, so I see no reason to trouble the House with that.

There is a third argument lurking in the House, about which the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, needs to think as he considers how he proposes to handle Committee and Report. That is the feeling in the House, from the bias of the question, from what the Bill says about the franchise and from what it does not say about the rules, that it is all slightly slanted—that this is a Bill to produce not just a referendum but a referendum result whereby the UK is to leave the European Union. That feeling is quite prevalent in the House and it would be good if the promoters were to consider what adjustments to the Bill could be made to deal with that point.

I want to add only two points that I genuinely think have not been made so far in this debate—one on timing and procedure and one on perceptions. On timing, the big point is the one made by the noble Lords, Lord Hannay and Lord Owen. You would be plumb crazy if you seriously thought that the right year to bring to a climax a renegotiation of the terms of British membership of the European Union was the year of a French presidential election and a German federal election. You would be mad if you thought that the last thing Mr Hollande would like to do before he seeks re-election is make concessions to the British in order to, in his judgment, increase his electoral chances. You would be mad if you thought that the SPD in the German coalition which will be in office for the first half of 2017 would be likely to agree to the changes to, say, the human rights or social elements of the treaty, or to the free movement of persons, all of which government spokesmen have told us in the past four weeks are to be elements in our renegotiation strategy. The noble Lord, Lord Owen, also made the important point that it would be quite a good idea, if renegotiation were intended, to start now defining what we want rather than going with whatever the Daily Mail suggests this week is the right element to be in the renegotiation.

Our foreign friends greatly enjoyed the Bloomberg speech and admired a lot of things in it, but they are very puzzled that, in the year that has passed since the speech, no papers have been produced and no attempts have been made to secure allies. Indeed, in recent weeks it has rather looked as though we have decided that it is essential for domestic reasons that we have a major row with the Poles, the Romanians, the Bulgarians and all eastern Europeans.

I turn to the issue of procedure. I do not know why we want to amend the treaty. Mrs Thatcher secured the rebate after five years’ hard work, as my noble friend Lord Armstrong reminded us, without any treaty change. However, if we have decided that it is really important that the reforms we need are changes to the treaty, we have to go through four stages. First, we have to secure a simple majority. That means that we need to find 14 member state Governments who agree with us. We have not started that task and it looks as though we are not going to start it until after the election. Secondly, we have to get a consensus in the necessary convention. The last convention took 18 months. The third stage is that we have to get unanimity in the intergovernmental conference—Maastricht took a year—and the final stage is ratification.

This Bill tells us that the referendum will happen in 2017. Even if renegotiation finished in 2017, would we really want to have our referendum before we knew whether everybody else could sell the deal in their countries? Supposing that we have our referendum and the Latvian or Luxembourg referenda go the wrong way. What would then happen in this country? What would happen to our position in the European Union and the world? All four stages have to be gone through and it is crazy to lay down a deadline now, in advance—a point which I think is almost bound to come back in Committee.

I turn to my point about perceptions. This concerns what foreigners think. I do not know what all foreigners think but those whom I meet—I am sorry but from time to time I do meet some—find this all very puzzling. They are waiting for the British proposals. They are sorry that the British seem to be slightly out of the game and will clearly be staying out of the game for another 18 months. It is their treaty too and they all need to get ratified whatever changes we secure. We need to buy their consent and they need to get their publics to buy it. They find it very odd that this Bill appears to be slightly slanted towards producing a no vote and that it appears to lay down a deadline which they know—because they are going to be in the IGC and the convention—is impossible.

They are beginning to wonder about our motives and about why the Prime Minister, in the year since the Bloomberg speech, has not filled out the speech or produced anything to follow it up. They are beginning to find it very sad that the party of the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher is behind this kind of Bill, which they find, as a minimum, surprising. They suspect our motives. This has an immediate effect. I am talking not merely about the future but about today and our negotiating clout in Brussels. Eleven months ago, Herman Van Rompuy, the President of the European Council, came to London and made a speech at the Guildhall in which he warned us about the effect of our present position on our negotiating clout in Brussels. He asked us:

“How do you convince a room full of people, when you keep your hand on the door handle? How to encourage a friend to change, if your eyes are searching for your coat?”.

He was right. This Bill is not just nugatory; it is also noxious because it increases that perception abroad.