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

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, I reflect that although emotionalism can be a bit of a trap, when people vote on 23 June a great many of them will in fact be voting for emotional and not necessarily rational reasons. Let me follow the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and go back to Churchill in Strasbourg in 1949. I was fortunate enough to be there when he addressed the Council of Europe in French. The second half of his speech was the one into which he really threw himself: it was about tyranny, the knock on the door in the middle of the night, and war. It was very powerful. He was not anywhere near so certain about how the institutions that would fulfil his ideas would be created or how they would develop.

I suppose that that is what we are considering today: how has this project worked out so far? What happened to us was that we joined a club of six, hesitantly and rather late. We did not have control over who were the members of the club. Quite often, people in clubs do have such control, but geography and other considerations meant that we did not. Right from the beginning, we thought that this would be an uncomfortable club. There were good reasons for that: our attachment to common law, which is very different from the law that Napoleon put in place; our unwritten constitution; our empiricism—we are rather hesitant about any theory; and our dislike of bureaucratic control. This afternoon noble Lords have referred to the latter quite often, and I agree that Whitehall is not necessarily much of an improvement on Brussels. Of course, Brussels is informed with remnants of 19th century German socialist thinking, which is very different from how we have arrived at where we are. The documents that come out of Brussels are written in an English that generates mistrust in the normal British reader. It would be better if we had more people working in Brussels than we do today.

The arguments about staying or leaving now encompass a great deal about economics—jobs and prosperity. I am pretty sceptical about all that. It does not seem that the reason we have real incomes of four times what they were before the Second World War has much to do with politics and politicians. It seems to me much more to do with the advance of science and technology. Therefore, I again do not see much distinction between how Brussels would handle our economic future and how Whitehall would handle it. I am pretty sceptical about both. For example, who predicted fracking and the technology of horizontal drilling, which enabled that industry to be developed? Indeed, who predicted that the price of oil would fall from $115 per barrel to $33 per barrel? I do not think there were very many people who knew about that.

I suppose that it is always right to be quite sceptical, whether it is scepticism about the European Union or a more general scepticism about the way we deal with the muddle of this life. I suppose that if integration of the eurozone entangled us in some definitive way we would have to leave, but I do not see that there is an argument for leaving now. There is too much at stake, such as the troubles in the Middle East. Let us not forget that at the fall of the Ottoman Empire it was the French and the English who resolved the borders that were put in place. There is also Libya and Mr Putin. Whither the United States of America? I am being sceptical again; I am not too keen on Mrs Clinton and I am certainly very unkeen on Mr Trump. Then there are the economic uncertainties in Asia and in China. Finally, there is the huge migration into Europe. The European Union is having to react to all this.

The idea that the European Union has to change is widely in the air. It has only just started to be debated seriously. We need to be there to assist as it continues, as I believe it will. Being uncomfortable does not need to be a permanent condition.