European Union Referendum (Date of Referendum etc.) Regulations 2016

Lord Willoughby de Broke Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, I was going to make a long speech about my nanny, but the noble Lord, Lord Russell, has discouraged me from doing that. I do not want to go over the outcome of the Prime Minister’s negotiations in detail, but it is worth pointing out that, after three days of hard slog, all-night meetings, working lunches, working suppers, posturing photo opportunities and communiques, the result was the status quo—nothing much has changed.

I suppose that that might be considered slightly unfair. In fact, the Prime Minister has already said that the UK can now veto the Commission’s proposals, so long as 15 other member states raise the red card as well. I call that a pretty long shot, I must say. We will be allowed to pay EU immigrants more benefits the longer they stay in this country. I suppose that that is another win, is it? The EU will agree to become more competitive—that must have been a very tough one to argue. I can just imagine the other 27 representatives of member states saying, “No, we want to be less competitive”, but I suppose that after eight hours of hard bargaining the Prime Minister got his way and won that one. He also said that sterling is a separate currency to the euro—how much negotiation did that take, I wonder?—and that London is the capital of the United Kingdom. That was not in the final communique, but it was about the sort of achievement we got.

So after all the promises—such as the Bloomberg debate, which the noble Lord, Lord Fairfax, mentioned, where the Prime Minister set out his vision for a fundamentally reformed, outward-looking EU with powers flowing back to member states, or his speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2014, when he promised to cut immigration, repeal the Human Rights Act and repatriate powers from Brussels—all the travel, the grim hours of all-night negotiation and all the English breakfasts, the PM has come back with not one power returned, and not one line in the treaty altered. The PM is like a conjuror who has gone to the party with his hat but has forgotten the rabbit. He has not even produced the most myxomatosed rabbit out of his hat.

We will still have to pay £20 billion a year to the EU institution—a good name for it. It is an institution whose accounts have failed its own audit for the last 20 years. We will still be unable to control our own borders. We will not have repatriated a single power back to the UK Parliament after those negotiations. Our laws will still be proposed and enforced by the unelected Commission in Brussels and voted through by the Council of Ministers, where we have a very weak voice indeed and where we are, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, said, routinely outvoted.

The Prime Minister’s reforms have been routinely rather rubbished, I am afraid—quite rightly—so they have had to fall back on the scare tactics. I will not go into them; we have heard a lot of them tonight from our Europhile friends. Their weakness is that they said exactly the same thing about the euro—that we would be marginalised and excluded from the top table, and no one would trade with us if we did not join. Of course, the reverse is entirely the case. We have created more jobs in the last three years than the whole of the eurozone put together. Far from being marginalised, we trade all over the world very successfully. The Europhiles who told us to go into the euro were wrong then and they are wrong now when they tell us we will be lost if we do not stay in the EU.

It is very depressing to hear these forecasts of doom about if we leave. Do the Europhiles really believe that Britain would be unable to govern itself outside the EU? We are, after all—as we heard before—the fifth-largest economy in the world. London is the world’s financial centre. We have four of the world’s top 10 universities. English is the world’s default language. We have a permanent seat on the United Nations council and we have the fourth-largest Armed Forces in the world. Britain is the eurozone’s biggest single market—bigger than the USA. We are Germany’s biggest single market—bigger than the USA. Is it really so difficult to imagine us living outside the EU? I do not think that it is. I remind the House—I think someone else said this—that there are 195 nations in the United Nations; 168 of them get by very well without being members of the EU. So can we.

I suppose that this debate is to celebrate Mr Cameron’s achievement in Brussels, entitled The Best of Both Worlds. No: it is the worst of both worlds, because we have gained nothing and remain subservient to the EU. It is time to leave—time to run our own country again.