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

Viscount Trenchard Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Trenchard (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this important debate. I spent many years living and working in Japan, and I have seen how Japanese people in business and politics view the UK and the EU. I was proud to be vice-chairman of the European Business Council in Japan but holding that office did not require me to support the subjugation of English law to EU law or the adoption by the UK of EU political and judicial structures.

I have also worked in Brussels, where I was amazed at the excessive construction of huge buildings housing thousands of civil servants duplicating or taking over functions previously carried out by member states’ own Civil Services. We are, of course, fortunate in having my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford as European Commissioner for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union. As he pointed out in his letter to the Times yesterday, he has brought forward two pieces of legislation, which have been warmly welcomed by the City, to kick-start securitisation to support lending and to simplify the requirements of the prospectus directive. However, there is no reason why our Financial Conduct Authority, freed from its subjugation to the European regulators, could not have introduced such measures. Besides, we cannot expect that the next British commissioner would be appointed to the same office. My noble friend’s predecessor, Michel Barnier, introduced the unnecessary and harmful alternative investment fund managers directive, even though there was little appetite in Brussels, until recently, to legislate to regulate a business sector that is principally based in the UK.

I wholeheartedly support doing everything that makes sense for us to do in collaboration with other European countries, many of which are members of NATO, which guarantees our national security. Our trade in both goods and services would not be much affected whether we leave or remain in the EU. I am quite confident that we could negotiate a satisfactory agreement with the EU and believe that we should resume our membership of EFTA. In addition to that, as proposed by the late Ronald Stewart-Brown of the Trade Policy Research Centre, we could negotiate to stay in Europe for trade through a new intergovernmental customs union agreement with the EU with full UK voting participation in customs union policy decisions and internal market harmonised trade regulation. We would be free to negotiate our own new agreements with other countries in areas such as trade in services and investment, which are currently EU competencies.

Just as Japanese companies and other international direct investors were unduly worried about our deciding not to join the euro, they are now unduly worried for similar reasons about the possibility of Brexit. I find they are considerably reassured if it is explained to them that the UK could expect to conclude a satisfactory basis of continuing to trade with the EU. In spite of the sterling efforts of my noble friend Lord Hill, our financial services industry is increasingly constrained by the EU supervisory and regulatory regime under which it is required to operate. On its own, the UK would never have chosen to introduce much of this EU financial services and insurance regulation. Most of our financial services and insurance exports to the rest of the EU are wholesale in nature and therefore not dependent on the UK’s EU membership. Arguably, the single market in services, especially financial services and insurance, is much more about EU integration through EU-wide legislation than it is about trade liberalisation. I believe the downside risks for the City of a well-negotiated UK withdrawal from the EU would be quite limited and comfortably outweighed by the benefits of being able to offer a more attractive and less cumbersome UK regulatory regime to foreign and UK investors, both for business with Europe and for exports to the larger, fast-growing markets in the rest of the world, free of the burden of inappropriate UK regulation.

I salute the Prime Minister for his dogged determination in trying to achieve as many as possible of the promises that he made to the electorate, but the negotiation process has revealed clearly just how difficult it is to get even relatively minor restrictions on benefits payments to migrants agreed, as just one example of how impotent we have become.

Many people argue that it would be a leap in the dark and involve too much risk for the UK to leave but, on balance, I believe that the greater risk for the UK lies in remaining a full member of an institution which, in order to recover from its current problems, needs to move in the opposite direction from where I believe we want to move. The eurozone needs to integrate and share more sovereignty, and I believe we will be less comfortable as a member of a more integrated EU as it moves inexorably towards statehood than we are now, notwithstanding the protections obtained by the Prime Minister for non-eurozone countries.

If our withdrawal from the EU were to deal a fatal blow to the European project, it might ironically force our European partners to morph the EU into a looser association based on free trade or free trade plus to which we might in turn be happy to belong. If associate member or trade member status were available for us now, I would certainly vote to remain, but the special status offered to us is not special enough and is not fundamentally different from the special status we have enjoyed before as a result of our various opt-outs. The train that we have boarded continues to travel in a direction in which we do not want to go, and now we have an opportunity to get off it. On balance, I think we should take it.