EU: UK Membership

Lord Lea of Crondall Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin with the interesting contribution made by my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Taking the analogy of what we have been watching north of the border, I think that there is a scenario where our leaving the EU would rather strengthen the likelihood that Scotland would be in the EU as an independent country and we would no longer be Great Britain. I do not know where UKIP would be if we no longer had Great Britain, but it would be Little England plus Wales. I do not even know how this would affect Northern Ireland. Certainly the notion that our leaving the EU would have no domestic consequences is a point that my noble friend has provoked in the debate.

There are one or two fallacies in the debate that are not helped by the prism of the Daily Mail, from which a lot of people get their information. We cannot do much about that—at least, there could be things to do about it, but they would not go down well with Thomas Paine or John Stuart Mill, given freedom of the press, although some people would describe that in different terms, as I think William Cobbett would do. The first fallacy is that our great companies are in Europe and—I say this to the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford—it is our great companies in Europe that are exporting to the rest of the world. This dichotomy or antithesis between selling to Europe and selling to the rest of the world is ridiculous.

On Monday of this week, I was part of meeting with senior representatives at Congress House on European works councils. All the great companies of Europe have European works councils. They look at world market share and try to get some minimum standards agreed between them. The idea that Europe is not interested in exporting to Latin America or Africa is a ludicrous fallacy. It is food for thought for those people who are not in day-to-day contact with how industry actually works—they used to be the Conservative Party. I know that the City of London may have its own reasons for making these fallacies the standard belief, but we ought to be clear about the facts.

The second fallacy at the present time is that we are the most successful economy in Europe and therefore we do not need Europe. We have a bigger growth rate at the moment because we dug the biggest hole. I have the latest GDP figures—the actual level of production and output—for the last complete year. Europe equals 100, Britain is 106, Sweden is 127, the Netherlands are 127, Germany is 124 and Denmark is 125. That is the measure of success of an economy, not some propaganda put from Downing Street to the Daily Mail.

The evolution of Labour Party policy was touched on by the Liberal Democrat Peer, the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, and by the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Newnham—I, too, congratulate her on her maiden speech. It is true that Jim Callaghan said what he said in the earlier period, but I remember an afternoon with Helmut Kohl, Jack Jones and Alan Bullock in Bonn in 1976 when we were on the Bullock committee. Jim Callaghan was clearly seeing the opening for the Labour Party to change its policy, which came to fruition in 1988. The reason why it came to fruition—apropos the weekend’s press, as if the concept of the working class had just been invented by somebody—was that, because Europe was increasing workers’ rights, we got the Labour Party overwhelmingly to change and to become pro-Europe. No historian is going to challenge that. I will have to stop there.