EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report)

Lord Wigley Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Brookeborough (CB)]

My Lords, I shall change the tone by thanking my noble friend Lord Boswell, so he can be relieved to a certain extent, and the EU Select Committee for this short but, I agree, very light introduction to the referendum and reforms. I agree with much of what the report says, but it is very vague and does not open up all the issues. We look forward to something further from the committee.

I would like to comment, and perhaps plead, on two issues. The first is enabling the electorate to understand the issues and the reforms by keeping the language as simple as possible. My noble friend Lord Hannay has already brought up the second, which is the engagement of the devolved institutions in our nation: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where I come from.

I could not believe this, but I have been in your Lordships’ House for 28 years this month. Most of that time I have spent on EU sub-committees, except when I have rolled off—rather too regularly—and, once, on the EU Select Committee. I was on the finance and economics sub-committee until this spring, which caused quite a stress level from my point of view, coming from rural Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, where, in order to get money out of a bank, it appears that you need a JCB and to do the job quickly. However, I have been enlightened that there are better ways of doing it.

I have been involved in many inquiries. They have stretched from the irradiation of food, which should have been taken on but was not because, in the view of most of us, the EU quashed it; carbon trading, which made millionaires out of people who did not even know what a tonne of carbon looked like and could not explain it, and I am not sure exactly how cost-effective that has been; the financial transaction tax and banking union; and other subjects, many of which would now be in the realms of whether there should not be reform of the powers that the EU has had in order to override other people.

As Members of this House, we are in a privileged position. But the language in which most of the report is termed is beyond the average person in the street—the citizens who are leading a busy life. I am not maligning them but we all have other things to do, and without them doing their work we would not have an economy. So we simply have to look at this in a reasonable light for them. The negotiations will be and are hard work and very complicated, and we accept that, but they must be explained in a way that the public can understand. I remember, as might some noble Lords, a wonderful lady, the late Baroness Elliot of Harwood. She seemed to remain on the Agriculture Committee and never left it, whether I was on it or rolled off it. She would sit there and after amazing evidence from whoever, her first question was always, “Why can’t you speak plain English?”. She was part of our privileged society, yet she was saying that. Perhaps we should have a ministry of plain English in her remembrance. Okay, obviously we would not, but in order to translate so much of what we are doing at this moment in the process of EU reforms and so on, somebody must be able to put it all into a language that people understand.

The progress must be transparent and comprehensible to the vast majority of people in their own homes. It must not require them to go to meetings and become politicised by attending rallies. We should just remember one thing: inasmuch as we discuss it, and the Government do a certain amount of negotiation and may or may not tell us about it, we are not the people who will decide that referendum. The people who will are outside this Chamber, this Palace and this city, and if we do not achieve something on this we need not be surprised when the emotional vote comes out.

As my noble friend Lord Hannay mentioned, paragraphs 47 to 49 deal with the issue of the devolved institutions. I share his disappointment not in the performance but in the attention of the Minister for Europe to this issue. It is not very impressive, because when he was asked various things at paragraph 47, a paraphrase of his answer is: “UK membership—reserved matter. Not for them”. But every single bit of what is agreed will have an impact on every single bit of the lives of people in those areas, and in my own area of Northern Ireland. He says that there is no veto, but there is only no veto if the poll is so far apart that the numbers of people in those devolved areas cannot change it. To leave them out of it and then antagonise them into perhaps a different way of voting will give them a veto—so basically, he is wrong.

It says that their interests are “to be respected”. The respect agenda has not worked very well with devolved parts of the United Kingdom, and that applies to both sides. When I have been on committees and in my case have asked the Northern Ireland Executive to give us an opinion on something, either it has not arrived at all, or, on a very good day, it has arrived just after we have done the report. However, it goes both ways. We do not give them the chance, therefore we cannot expect to be respected at all. We have to do something about it.

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

If indeed there is a reluctance or a refusal to engage from the point of view of the Minister in London with the attitudes of the devolved Assemblies, would the noble Viscount accept that those devolved Assemblies have not only a right but a responsibility to give a leadership to the people within the devolved territories as to how they should address this question?

[Viscount Brookeborough]

Absolutely. I agree entirely with what the noble Lord said. All I am saying is that it is a two-way thing and that it cannot happen without people respecting each other, getting on with each other and talking. I note, too, that the Minister says that he will visit Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by the end of the year. That is very nice—that shows a lot of urgency, does it not? We are talking maybe— according to my noble friend Lord Boswell—about a referendum perhaps not in the new year but in the early part of it. It is crackers—sorry, I mean it is a bit bemusing.

We also have the problem—which I do not want to go into because it goes into devolved things—that we have three hugely devolved systems, so nobody knows how to deal with each system, and each one demands something different from the other. I know that Northern Ireland was devolved first, therefore you would not have taken it as a model. However, would it not be lovely if we had a devolved package, and, if somebody wanted to be devolved, they could be devolved, with a package? That would end all the further demands for corporation tax, for this and that and everything else. You would get it or leave it. We are now going into powers for Manchester or further into the north and maybe the west of England. We are inventing things by the day, and how will we deal with them, because it is not an EU thing? However, on this issue, it is.

Scotland has been through a referendum; perhaps it went through an emotional vote, but I will not argue about that. However, it was quite interesting to talk to people in Scotland about their motivation. When one said, “North Sea oil isn’t doing very well”, and so on, they would say, “Okay—we accept that. It may not be”. Then you would say, “Do you want to be like Iceland”, to which they would reply, “Actually, Iceland seems to be better now”—I was there the other day, and it has not destroyed them. “We want to try something new”. They want to do that because they cannot see what the Government and everybody else are going on about when it comes to the EU, because it is not explained.

I will make one small plea and then I will stop. It is from a Northern Ireland point of view; other areas have their own. We have the only land border with the EU, which perhaps means we can smuggle, but it means a lot of other things, too. We should also take note of the report of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on EU Affairs, in the Republic of Ireland, on the effects that a UK exit could have in Northern Ireland and Ireland as a whole. It is quite interesting, because the Republic is being very sympathetic towards us, and it knows how damaging an exit could also be to it if we exit; the Republic will have to take account of that. I believe the Prime Minister said that he would respect an exit decision if that should come through the referendum. Where is the Government’s plan B? If they accept that they may respect it, they must have a plan B. I hope that the Minister will lead us not too late into the night and let us know what the Government’s plan B is. Maybe it will not take him very long, because it might be quite short, but let us see.

What about our land border? What about the restrictions and tariffs for Northern Ireland? What about border controls, which have already been mentioned? Northern Ireland is an agricultural community—82% of farm incomes come from the CAP. What are the Government going to replace that with? The Minister may not have reckoned on the fact that peace funding will have given £5 billion by 2020. Are the Government going to replace that because it means a lot?

This report raises important issues but only as an introduction. We look forward to a more detailed inquiry, sooner rather than later—clarity is the key. I appeal to the Government to try a bit of clarity for once.