Lord Tomlinson
Main Page: Lord Tomlinson (Labour - Life peer)European Union Bill
Lord Tomlinson Excerpts
Lord Tomlinson
My Lords, some time ago I was given a copy of a speech made by a former Comptroller and Auditor-General of the United Kingdom, Sir John Bourn. I put it in a plastic folder and kept it on my desk so that I could produce it the next time someone was so foolish as to raise the question of the qualification of European Union accounts. The noble Lord, Lord Stevens, has hit the jackpot today. He is the recipient of the message from Sir John Bourn, who confirmed in June 2006 that,
“if the UK had the same system as the EU, he would have to qualify all 500 UK expenditure accounts rather than just those where he thought there was a problem (13 in 2005)”.
He went on to say:
“It is worth noting that the accounts of Britain’s Department for Work and Pensions, which is responsible for distributing pension and other social security benefits, have been qualified by the National Audit Office for each of the last 18 years”.
Nothing has changed since 2005.
“Fraud and error in the payment of UK benefits amounts to an estimated £2.5 billion a year—that is substantially more than the £224 million that is thought to be fraudulently taken from the EU”.
I thought that that was worth reading into the record, so that it is absolutely clear. Every time we debate Europe, the canard is produced about a Europe riddled with fraud, as if our example is somehow the perfect one that the rest of Europe should adopt and follow.
The European Union Bill arises from the section in the coalition programme on Europe, in which the Government said that they would,
“examine the case for a United Kingdom Sovereignty Bill to make it clear that ultimate authority remains with Parliament”.
Yet the Government in their response to the House of Commons European Scrutiny Committee said at paragraph 6:
“The Government has never claimed that Parliamentary sovereignty is currently under threat in relation to EU matters. We would agree that, to date, the UK Courts … have rebutted arguments that EU law has an autonomous entrenched status in UK law and have recognised that EU law takes effect in the UK through Acts of Parliament”.
The Government continued, having already demolished the argument about UK sovereignty, to proceed to a Bill that includes Clause 18. In a further report to the House of Commons Select Committee, when they had quoted three main sources for their concern, the Government said:
“Although none of these sources has in any way undermined the operation of Parliamentary sovereignty in relation to EU matters to date, we do think that there is a need to put the matter beyond speculation for the future”.
So this was not a real problem for today; it was an imaginary problem for tomorrow. Yet, when they were pursued further—this is my last quotation—they went on to say in a rather paranoid state of mind that Clause 18 had been included in the Bill to,
“address concerns that the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty may in the future be eroded by decisions of the courts”.
Here we have yet another example of the paranoia that is developing in the coalition about the courts. First, it was about the European Court of Justice; then it was about the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights; and now there is this fear that courts in this country may, at some time in the future, exercise an unreasonable power over what they consider to be parliamentary sovereignty. I view Clause 18 as unnecessary in its totality and I hope that the Minister can find persuasive, cogent reasoning to convince us why your Lordships’ House should not seek to delete it at a later stage.
During discussion of the Bill today, we have witnessed a rather sad scene: a rather unhappy and lonely duo on the Front Bench. They are usually such a happy couple, but we have had the noble Lord, Lord Howell, looking fairly miserable and the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, doing his best to raise a smile once in a while. It is not surprising that they are looking discomfited, however much they are wedded and welded together by coalition politics, because today they have by and large been abandoned by the Conservatives—apart from the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh. I always listen to the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, with interest, but, with respect, he gave a rather eccentric constitutional interpretation about binding your successors. Apart from that, they were abandoned by the Conservatives, rather disowned by the Liberals—with the exception of the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, who, I thought, tried to play both sides against the middle—and found no support on either the Labour or the Cross Benches. That is a unique achievement even for a dynamic duo such as the coalition’s Robin and Batman on foreign affairs. They have managed to find precious little support anywhere in this House. Even if they were reasonably confident of getting support from the usual suspects on Euroscepticism in this House, they have found that, as we already knew, they were not going far enough to placate any of them.
We have an EU Bill under which there are only two real issues. There is the so-called referendum lock, on which I shall not have the impertinence to say anything, because the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon, demolished it in his remarkable speech earlier. The other part of it is sovereignty, which has not found a friend in the House, as far as I can see. We have Parts 1 and 3. If I followed my instincts, I would possibly get into trouble, but my instincts are that the Bill needs two main amendments: “delete Part 1” and “delete Part 3”. Then we could have a vote on Part 2. That would make it a Bill that would get unanimous support not only in the coalition but in the whole of the House. That is one possibility. The case for the hierarchy of referendum locks has been destroyed and Clause 18 has been shown to be a sham.
Today’s debate has shown that everyone in this House is out of step with the government Front Bench. From the Liberal Democrats, we have had remarkable speeches from the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and the noble Lords, Lord Taverne, Lord Maclennan and Lord Dykes, among others. From the Conservative Benches, we have had remarkable speeches from the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and very interesting contributions from the noble Lords, Lord Plumb and Lord Bowness. From the Cross Benches, we have heard from the European trio of the two Davids—the noble Lords, Lord Williamson and Lord Hannay—together with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. From the Labour Benches, each of my colleagues who has spoken has made an impressive contribution.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
I would not have presumed to such an honour, my Lords. Does the noble Lord agree that he has just read out a litany of the more Europhile Lords in your Lordships’ House, who have come together on this issue with unanimity and, I must say, incredible repetition in all their speeches?
Lord Tomlinson
All of them are proud to be associated with each other. All of them spoke about the Bill and none of them took 21 minutes to do so.
The Bill is a sham, a fraud, an illusion. It is a piece of cynical deceit. Where it purports to offer referendum locks, it does it in circumstances where unanimity already applies. It is the political equivalent of the three-card trick “Find the lady”: it has always moved by the time you take the cup off the top.
The big questions after today’s debate are whether this Bill can be fundamentally amended and whether it can be meaningfully amended. There is near unanimity that it is pretty near worthless as it stands. If there are to be amendments, minimum standards for turnout and majority in any referenda, were the Bill to apply, should be considered for inclusion. There should certainly be a sunset clause, as many noble Lords have said, in order to prevent the constitutional outrage of trying to bind successors with legislation that, if you mean what you say in your programme, will not apply to the current Government. I do not want referenda on anything other than issues of major constitutional significance. If the Bill is to proceed, it should have a sunset clause; otherwise, it would be an outrageous attempt by this Government to bind their successors.
This Bill is a mess and it has distracted us from serious debate on the serious issues facing Europe. It is pandering to Eurosceptics, but will we never learn? They will never be adequately fed; you feed them a little bit and they will want more. The Bill will not deliver referenda on the issues that Eurosceptics want because we all know that those issues are the ones not covered in this debate, such as the Lisbon treaty and the European investigation order.
We who believe in Europe should be finding every opportunity to talk about the benefits that the European Union is bringing to the people of Europe. When I first started in politics, we used to argue enormously about how much the fascist dictatorships in southern Europe and the colonels in Greece would cost this country in terms of the contribution that it would make to the southern flank of NATO. Nobody knew what the price was. They did not care because it was a price worth paying. Today, we do not even have to think about it, because those countries are now all fully integrated in the European community of democratic nations. We can go on and find example after example of positive issues about Europe that this coalition Government ought to be leading on in making sure that they are popularly understood in this country. That is the way to enthuse people about a destiny in the European Union. They are the sort of things that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, used to talk about. I hope that he will get back to talking about them some time, because they are the things that are inspirational about what the European Union is, what it can be and what it can do, not just for our people but for our people in a secure Europe playing a part in securing Europe within a securer world.
My position is one of major disappointment that we have managed to spend a full parliamentary day, almost running into tomorrow, without debating the essential issues of Europe: how to make the 2020 strategy create more jobs; pushing for the single market reform that started in 1992 but that we are still not near completing; and how we get the changes to the common agricultural policy so that it can be fair in relation to the budget and play a real role in feeding the world over the next century. None of those things has been present, but those are the things that are partly the opportunity cost for having wasted so much time on a futile debate that is really about a programme that we all know is meaningless. The two parts of it, whether the referendum lock on the one hand or the sovereignty clause on the other, are totally irrelevant to the needs of our people and our country and to the role that we should be playing in building a stronger Europe.
Lord Tomlinson
Can I just invite the noble Lord, seven minutes into his speech, to get back to the EU Bill? This wander through memory lane might avoid him having to face up to his responsibilities to answer the debate, but the time has come when he ought to do that.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am talking about the underlying issue that the Bill addresses, which is that of popular consent and distrust and how we rebuild popular consent.
This Bill is the product of the coalition agreement and a compromise between initially very different positions. It is intended to draw the line underneath popular accusations that power is slipping silently and conspiratorially from London to Brussels. To demonstrate to the public that there will be a transparent process of scrutiny, the competences will not creep away but the complex and opaque processes of EU decision-making —sufficiently complex that my wife and I used to make a good living out of trying to explain them—will have to engage with public acceptability and public persuasion.
The European policy of this Government is a product of coalition. It necessarily differs from what a Conservative -only Government would have pursued, under pressures from their own Back-Benchers, and from what a Liberal Democrat-only Government would have achieved. That is democratic politics and constructive compromise. A certain amount has been said about coalition. Indeed, I felt that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was suggesting that this coalition is somehow not entirely legitimate because it has not got an appropriate mandate. Because it is relevant to this, I would remind her again a little about where we were with the previous Government. That was an informal coalition between Brownites and Blairites in which, at one stage, according to Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s party kidnapped a Treasury official from Brussels to Luxembourg in order to try to discover what the Treasury was negotiating on financial concerns.
In the Lords, we now have a Labour alternative team of moderates proposing strong pro-European approaches. I note that it is a very different team to the one we had on AV, rather as one has an attacking and a defending team in American football. We look forward to detailed discussions on this but we start from where we are with the British public. We have their deep mistrust of the European Union. As we talk about the role of Parliament, we also need to remember that we have a mistrust of Parliament and the complex issue of parliamentary sovereignty. The Government, in their programme and policy, are moving to address the causes of that mistrust. The Bill sets out to address the anxieties of the British public.
Several noble Lords have mentioned the position of the press, which is part of the problem. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, that my understanding is that those sections of the press which are the most vigorous defenders of British sovereignty are indeed those which are most preferentially owned by people domiciled outside the United Kingdom. That is one of the many paradoxes of the situation we are now in. Yet the United Kingdom is no longer an exception. If one looks at public opinion in most other EU states, that has also become more sceptical, as have the press there. Part of that—here I address the noble Lord, Lord Liddle—is that the EU itself has changed a great deal. It has become a great deal more complicated and it is therefore much more difficult to explain, particularly to the younger generation, why the EU is a public good which we should expect our public to accept.
The Brussels bubble itself is one in which policy pursues an easy and seductive competence creep. I read a recent Policy Network document which was talking about how to revive social Europe. Indeed, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was its author.