European Union Bill

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

This amendment gives the British people a referendum on the economic cost of our EU membership. This would discover whether they want to go on paying through the nose to be bossed around by an organisation which is of absolutely no use to them. The amendment is targeted on the net cash we send to Brussels every year. It does not address the gross cash we send, which is roughly double, although many Eurosceptics argue that we should concentrate on that gross amount because so much of what Brussels sends back to us of our own money goes on projects designed to enhance the EU’s image which we could certainly spend more fruitfully elsewhere.

This amendment requires that when our net contribution reaches £10 billion per annum, or nearly half the current spending cuts of £21 billion, there must be a referendum to see whether the British people want to go on paying such tribute. For clarity, and to show how reasonable this amendment is when set against some of the wider costs of our EU membership which are more difficult to define, it is worth spelling out some of those other costs.

This amendment does not include the huge liabilities to which we are now exposed from bailing out that cruel failure, the euro. At the moment, these include the £3.25 billion we have underwritten for Ireland and the further £7 billion to which we have been illegally signed up under the financial stability mechanism. I suppose there may be more on the way for Greece, Portugal and even Spain, but so far that is £10.25 billion, which we are unlikely to get back. Again, I would point out that that is nearly half our current spending cuts.

Nor does the amendment cover the billions we have thrown away by surrendering control of our fishing industry to Brussels and its iniquitous common fisheries policy—a cost that seems to be estimated at about £2 billion annually. Beyond its financial cost, whatever it is, it is perhaps worth reminding your Lordships of the EU’s own recent estimate that some 800,000 tonnes of fish are thrown back dead into the North Sea every year. To get this statistic into everyday proportion, I invite your Lordships to imagine a 40-tonne articulated lorry that fills most of your Lordships’ Chamber from the Throne to the Bar, although it is not quite as high. Then I ask your Lordships to stretch your imagination further and to think of 20,000 such lorries, all full of dead fish. Some environmental bodies put the annual discarded fish at 2 million tonnes, which comes to 50,000 articulated lorries. To get all these lorries into understandable perspective, it perhaps helps to think that their contents would fill the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall several times over with dead fish every year.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am sure we are all fascinated, but is the noble Lord not in favour of any sort of conservation policy in the seas around Europe or is he just saying that we have been robbed?

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

We were not robbed because we voluntarily signed our fishing away before we signed up to the 1972 Act. We gave it away. We Eurosceptics would like our fishing back. We would like our waters back. We would like to control them entirely ourselves, as do the Icelanders, the Norwegians and the Faroe Islanders, to their great national benefit. When we have re-established our fishing stocks by not discarding any fish, we will then let out any surplus not required by our industry, once we have re-established that, to foreigners. That is what we would like to do.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

I am going to the Faroe Islands in a couple of weeks’ time, and I point out that the issue with the Faroe Islands at the moment is that our mackerel, if we like to call them that, are going their way, the Faroe Islanders catch them, and we do not want them to be landed in this country. I do not know whether we will ever solve those problems without some sort of common regime.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I am sure we could collaborate with other nations that control their own waters. What we do not want to do is to go on with a common fisheries policy that ensures that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fish are thrown back dead every year and which has removed a very valuable industry. I hope that is clear to the noble Lord. While on my statistics the fish that are thrown back dead every year would fill this Palace of Westminster and Whitehall several times over, I have to tell your Lordships that there are those outside the political class who think that that might be a rather better use for them than being thrown overboard to pollute the seabed.

This amendment does not require a referendum if we are so foolish as to stay in the common agricultural policy, which is estimated to cost each family in the land around £1,000 per annum in higher food costs, or some £26 billion. On the environment, this amendment does not address the £18 billion per annum which the Government say we are going to spend on their climate change initiative inspired by the European Union, complete with all those useless and ugly windmills, not to mention the closure of our coal-fired power stations. The amendment does not include the cost to our economy when the lights go out, nor does it cover the billion or so we send to Brussels for it to misspend on foreign aid.

Finally, the amendment does not include the huge costs of overregulation which the EU imposes on our whole economy. I dealt with this in minimal detail on 3 May at cols. 398 to 400, so I will not repeat it now, but we are talking about anything between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of GDP by most estimates. Our GDP now stands at around £1.5 trillion, so we are talking about anything between £60 billion and £150 billion. If any noble Lords want to challenge these figures, they can, of course, do so, but I trust they will join me in pressing the Government for an official cost-benefit analysis of our membership if they do.

This amendment is not triggered by any of the £100 billion or so per annum of waste which I have just mentioned that is notched up by these and other EU follies. The joy under this amendment is that a referendum would be triggered only when our net cash thrown down the drain in Brussels equals £10 billion per annum according to the Government’s own figures. Mark you, the Office for National Statistics has recently put our net contribution at around £9 billion already this year, and most people seem to agree that we are looking at £10 billion for next year, so we are nearly there. I can point out that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, in his Answer to my noble friend Lord Vinson yesterday put our net contribution as low as £4.7 billion, so there is room for clarity here. I have a feeling that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, was mentioning the figures put forward by the Treasury, which are very much lower than the figures put forward by the Pink Book, but that is perhaps an argument for the cost-benefit analysis when we get there.

We are talking about £10 billion per annum. This may not sound much to our Europhile political class, but it is an awful lot of money to real British people. Ten billion pounds per annum comes to some £27.39 million every day. That would pay for 900 nurses every day at a salary of £30,000 per year each—or teachers, or policemen, or other public servants. The amendment requires a referendum when the net cash that we send to Brussels would pay the annual salaries for 900 nurses every day, or for 328,500 nurses every year.

There is another way to understand the importance of £10 billion per annum, which comes to £400 per annum for each of our 26 million families. All these costs have to be seen against the perilous state of our economy and the sacrifices and difficulties in which many of our people now find themselves through no fault of their own. Current spending cuts, as I have mentioned, appear to be around £21 billion. Which would the British people prefer?

I am sure that the Government and your Europhile Lordships will say that the benefits of our EU membership are so wondrous and obvious and that they go far beyond its mere vulgar cost to our long-suffering taxpayers. I have never understood what those benefits really are; what benefits we get from our EU membership, which we could not get from free trade and friendly collaboration with our European friends; what benefits we get, for instance, that the Swiss do not enjoy from outside the EU.

Perhaps the Minister could be more precise today about these great benefits. This Government and the previous Government—and previous Governments for some time—have said that a cost-benefit analysis would be a waste of money. The Stern report on climate change, however, cost only £1.272 million on a subject at least as complex as our EU membership. Surely that tiny sum would be well worth spending to discover whether the colossal costs of our EU membership are justified or not.

We, of course, are told that we stand taller as a sovereign nation in meetings of the international conferencariat all over the planet—because we have diluted our sovereignty into the new form of supranational government in Brussels run by bureaucrats. If the Minister is going to advance this line again today, could he give some concrete examples of the great advantages and the successes? Does he think, for instance, that the EU did a good job when the lid came off Yugoslavia, or that it is doing a good job in north Africa? What confidence does he have in the EU’s new External Action Service?

I conclude by asking the Government, yet again, to settle these matters by ordering an objective, unbiased cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. In the mean time, this amendment asks that the British people be given a referendum when our cash payments to Brussels exceed £10 billion to decide whether they want to go on paying it. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have supported the amendment and to those who have been good enough to speak to it. I said right at the start of my remarks that the amendment was designed to give the British people a referendum on the economic cost of our EU membership. That may not be strictly within the terms of the Bill, as some noble Lords who find that prospect uncomfortable might wish. However, I merely say that I was advised on the amendment by the staff at the Public Bill Office, and they were content with it. If it is not perfect, I apologise, but it has served its purpose.

Both the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, and the noble Lord, Lord Risby, for some of whose remarks I was very grateful, suggested that money is not a power. It may not be technically a power within the terms of this Bill, but money is energy and power and is something that the British people mind about very much. The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, also chided my noble friend Lord Stoddart about Churchill’s position in these matters. One can cite many sayings of Churchill, but the one that I and other Eurosceptics prefer is:

“We are with Europe, but not of it”.

I think he said that rather more often than he said some of the other more ambivalent things about the European Union.

The noble Lord, Lord Triesman, was good enough to query some of my figures. I think he said that I got one of them 400 per cent wrong. We do not need to go through that now but I will read Hansard and, if necessary, come back to that. An overall cost—however you come at it—to the United Kingdom from our EU membership of around £100 billion is probably not far out.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

We need to get to the bottom of this. Is the noble Lord implying that that is an annual figure, because it bears no relation to reality?

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

As a matter of fact, it is real. We have £10 billion that are only loans at the moment; we have £10 billion for the cash we hand over, going up; we have £26 billion for food; we have £18 billion for climate change; and we have £60 billion for overregulation. These are the figures.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I understand exactly what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, is saying and I can understand the reasons why she is saying it. However, the reason we have this Bill is because of the betrayal—if I might use that strong word—of promises which have been made and not kept.

I refer first to the promises that were made by the Government and, indeed, by the Opposition about having a referendum on the constitution, later to be known as the Lisbon treaty. There is very little difference. Even Giscard d’Estaing says that there is very little difference. However, I do not want to get into that argument. I want to try to explain why I believe we have reached this point where such detail has been put into a Bill. It is because people join political parties and have an influence on them. So many times promises have been made, such as on the five red lines that were all crossed, and not kept. Increasingly, people in this country have lost trust in the Government’s promises that we are not, ratchet by ratchet, going into a federal European state.

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

Is the noble Lord not giving the game away that this is an exercise in trying to destroy the Lisbon treaty by the back door when in fact the country has signed the treaty? He thinks that this is an opportunity to take, bit by bit. He wants a referendum on everything they have tried to do under Lisbon and it can be blocked because we do not want to have a referendum or because it can be defeated in a referendum. Is that the point he is now making?

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

The noble Lord has misunderstood what I am trying to say. The Lisbon treaty is in operation, and I am not suggesting that that can be reversed. I am trying to explain why this Bill has come about. It is because people have lost trust in the leadership. I think the reason why it is so detailed is probably because this coalition Government—it is not a Tory Government, but a coalition Government—have been trying to set out their red lines that can be crossed only if the people of this country agree to it. I hope people will reflect on that and realise that, out there, ordinary people are very unhappy about the way the European Union is proceeding. I think they have already said, “So far and no further”. This Bill is complicated because the red lines that have previously been put forward have not been kept to, and perhaps this Government are trying to put them into an order where they cannot lightly be set aside.