Ireland: Financial Assistance

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Monday 22nd November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, any bilateral loan, as my right honourable friend the Chancellor has said, will require primary legislation. So it will go through the normal processes, including those of this House. It is in the UK’s interest to ensure that there is a strong eurozone. The present difficulties have brought to the attention of eurozone members—and of those of us who wish to see a strong zone but who are not in it—the fact that there are a number of defects in the architecture, of which the need for a permanent bail-out arrangement is one. We will work constructively with our partners in Europe to ensure that the eurozone is better able in future to withstand any buffeting of individual economies such as we are seeing at the moment.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, have Her Majesty’s Government yet understood that the euro was always designed for disaster? Do they not see that the longer the political class props it up, with its single interest and exchange rates and its lack of a federal budget, the greater and more ruinous will be the crash when it comes? Are they also beginning to get an inkling—just an inkling—that, behind the euro, the project of European integration is also designed for disaster, as I have often pointed out in your Lordships' House?

To be constructive, instead of throwing billions upon billions of good money after bad, why do they not spend a fraction of it on returning their currency to the PIIGS, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain? Would that not be just one small step away from the insanity that is the EU?

[Lord Sassoon]

It is always good to have the noble Lord with us on these occasions to share with us his big picture vision, even if it is not one that I or the Government share. We are where we are with the eurozone at the moment, and we must be constructive partners to make it work. It is clearly regrettable that articles of the European Union treaty, such as Article 122, which should have been used for such things as natural disasters, has been enabled to be used for a mechanism in which the UK was committed to be a contributor by the previous Government. There are certain things that we must get straight going forward so that the treaty is used for the purposes for which it was intended. There are a number of lessons, to which I have referred, but I repeat that it is absolutely in our interest to see a strong eurozone because, among other things, that is where 40 per cent of the UK's exports go.