European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Thomas of Swynnerton Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Swynnerton (CB)]

My Lords, I have been a supporter of Britain being in Europe ever since I was at Cambridge and I had the honour and duty of showing Mr Robert Schuman around the university. Mr Schuman wanted to talk about religion, while I wanted to talk about politics. We are not talking today about the benefits or disadvantages of membership of the European Union—we shall presumably leave that until later, to our campaign in relation to this referendum. Most of us are concerned about the need for radical revision of the rules and practices of the European Union, something which has not really divided us today either, and we look forward to having elaborate discussions on the matter later on. We are instead concerned with the very narrow issue of whether or not to have a referendum on the country remaining inside the European Union. We need to have more thought on this issue than we have had.

British politics has always seemed to me to be a garden, with many diverse streams, rockeries and rose beds, but also animals, including monsters. The referendum is the monster which we have now discovered, to our surprise, is in our garden. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, on the subject of referenda. He seemed to place the position of the monster of a referendum very clearly. I largely agree with what he said and regret that I also agree with, and realise the importance of, what the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said when he talked about the role of referenda in Northern Ireland.

A referendum is a curiously foreign concept to all political philosophers whom we know about. We talk of Burke, Peel, John Stuart Mill, Salisbury and even Churchill and Disraeli. None of them has anything to say about referendums—or referenda—and all of us are obliged, when we look up the subject in encyclopaedias, to rely on the Swiss or, perhaps, if we are lucky, Napoleon III. Noble Lords may say that the names I have mentioned are from very long ago but, nevertheless, most of us would think that the definition of the relationship between a Member of Parliament and his constituents was put better by Edmund Burke than by anyone else. Mr Callaghan—Lord Callaghan as he was known for so long in this House—said more or less the same thing in 1975 when he pointed out that Parliament makes decisions, not the people.

We have not discussed, in this debate, in what circumstances the adventure of a referendum should be embarked on. At some point, as the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, said, the British people have to be consulted. But is a referendum really better than an election? The noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, would not agree. The risks of a referendum in normal circumstances are very considerable. What would the public have said about the question of a referendum on capital punishment, membership of NATO, or support for Israel or Iran? All those are issues on which the public would be entitled to insist on a strong point of view.

I recall two statements made in relation to the referendum of 1975. First, Harold Wilson said that the decision in consequence of the campaign would have to be final and binding. We all realise that the reverse happened. Lord Callaghan said in his memoirs that, in the end, he looked on the referendum as a life raft on which both sides in the Labour Party might take refuge. In the end, they both did.