EU: Prime Minister’s Speech

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, the three-minute rule has produced many excellent speeches in this debate, including many strong ones from my side of the House. Obviously, in keeping my own remarks brief, I cannot refer to them all but will just refer to two on our side. First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, for his humour and, secondly, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, for the originality of her speech. She made a major point of constitutional significance about the Civil Service role in drafting legislation. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi, will answer that point in her reply. I also greatly enjoyed many of the speeches from the Liberal Democrat Benches and from the diplomats on the Cross Benches. There were excellent speeches from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, and the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, on the Conservative side.

There are certain principles that we all accept in this debate. Everyone in this House, except for those who want to get out, believes that Europe needs fundamental reform. We would go along with what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, said about the need for a more dynamic and flexible European Union than we have today. We would support, in general terms, the unobjectionable principles that the Prime Minister set out in his speech. We all recognise that there is a particular problem where we have to seek safeguards—because of the closer integration of the euro area, those of us outside it must have safeguards against discrimination as a result of the euro area acting as a voting bloc.

Having said that those are principles on which we all agree, there is a fundamental disagreement about the Prime Minister’s strategy of renegotiation and referendum. People ask what Labour’s position is on a referendum. One might seriously ask how it is that the Prime Minister thinks that, at this delicate stage in our economic recovery—and that is putting it mildly when GDP is falling—and in an era when business, since the financial crisis, has become extremely risk-averse, a commitment to a referendum five years hence will help our economic recovery. Is it not the case that this is bound to add one way or another to the considerable pall of investment uncertainty which hangs over our economy? If the Prime Minister now believes, in January 2013, that a referendum is in the national interest, why, in October 2011, did he impose a three-line whip on his Members to vote against a referendum? Why, in his press conference after the June 2012 summit, when asked about a referendum did he dismiss it with a sweep of the hand and say what the British people want is a Government who stand up and fight for them in Europe? It was only the uproar in the Conservative Party—let me remind the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes—the day after that forced the Prime Minister to write his famous article in the Telegraph saying:

“For me the two words ‘Europe’ and ‘referendum’ can go together”.

Our position is clear. We have always argued, as we did during the passage of the EU Act 2011, that if there is a major transfer of powers or a big treaty there should be a referendum. At the moment we do not know whether there is going to be a treaty and we do not know anything about its contents or timing. The Prime Minister’s policy represents a unilateral demand to come up with something by 2017 that he can sell to the British people or we will be off.

There are many contradictions in this renegotiation policy. One is whether those who favour it regard a treaty change as essential to its success. Listening to the Benches opposite, particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, I have found all this very confusing. On the one hand, the argument is made that we have to secure fundamental change if we are going to be able to recommend the yes vote to the British people, yet on the other, it is said that the treaty change may not be essential. In my view, it is impossible to achieve fundamental change in the way the EU works without treaty change. Of course we may be able to negotiate changes in policies or protocols that protect our position in various areas, but we will not get fundamental change without treaty change. I would like this question to be clarified in the Minister’s reply.

There is a lot of reference to the proposals of the Fresh Start Group as the kind of sensible mainstream view of what needs to change. My noble friend Lord Monks has already dealt with the social and employment aspects of that. This is not acceptable to our partners. On financial services, it cannot make sense to argue for the reintroduction of some form of unanimity on this aspect of the single market when in the other part of our mouths we are arguing that our partners should agree to major extensions of the single market in other areas. That is a completely contradictory stance, and the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, ought to recognise that.

It was interesting that we had 40 speeches in this debate, with eight from Conservatives broadly in favour of the Prime Minister’s speech, but the question of where they will end up after the renegotiation is unclear. If David Cameron remains Prime Minister after 2015, he is going to face a harsh political choice: win a referendum yes and split the Conservative Party, or bow the knee to his party’s last ditchers, and, even more dangerous, fanciful renegotiators such as the Fresh Start Group, and secure his place in history as the Prime Minister who led Britain out of the European Union. He will have overwhelming support on this side of the House if he puts the country before his party. There were passages in his well-phrased speech last week where I just about managed to convince myself that that was what he might do. However, it would historically require a breach with a whole tradition of Conservative statecraft that the national interest is best served by keeping the Conservatives in power and winning elections.

So much is at stake here for all of us. Who really fancies Britain’s chances, in decades to come, as an offshore island? There is the real risk that five years away that is what we are going to end up as—maybe as a successful tax haven for hot money, various kinds of tax dodger and fleeing oligarchs, but there is no future for Britain shouting across the Channel, “Continent cut off”, at the 400 million steadily integrating single market. That is not going to bring real investors and real jobs in real companies to Britain. We need to be there.

We will end up being politically ignored by Washington and powerless to defend our values and interests against all the multiple challenges that we face, never mind the new ones that pop up in the desert in north Africa. Do we really want what is happening in the world today, which is the rise of the East, to mean that we opt out of the West? Let us hope that the Prime Minister means what he hinted at, that he will campaign to stay in Europe, with his “heart and soul”. Let us hope that those words were not a public oration sop to pro-European opinion, particularly business opinion, which rightly fears that he has set his European policy on a trajectory that he certainly never wanted, in the hope of a positive outcome that he has not the faintest idea how he is going to achieve. There were many fine words in the Prime Minister’s speech, but it was very bad day for Britain.