EU Referendum Leaflet

William Cash Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

Of course, my hon. Friend knows that that is happening in pursuance of a legal duty introduced into the House of Lords, which became part of our legislation through ping-pong. Is he also aware that I tabled an amendment calling for accuracy and impartiality in that information, which the Minister for Europe, who is here today, told me there certainly would be? Do we not expect a proper answer from him this afternoon?

[Paul Scully]

I am sure that the Minister has heard that, and I hope that he will respond in full to the debate.

Katie Ghose of the Electoral Reform Society expressed similar concerns, and after the referendum on Scottish independence the Electoral Commission warned the Government over taxpayer-funded propaganda, saying that it could give an

“unfair advantage to one side of the argument”.

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[Sir William Cash]

It is a question not only of whether the renegotiation is legally binding, but of whether it is legally binding and irreversible. It is not.

[Kate Hoey]

I always bow to the hon. Gentleman’s wisdom. I will not go through all the facts in the leaflet because I am sure that everybody would like to mention particular points.

When someone writes the history of this Administration and, particularly, of this Prime Minister, the way the Prime Minister has behaved on this matter will go down as very sad. It is eating into the kind of country the UK is. He should be ashamed of what he is doing. I just hope that, in some way, the response here and from the public will make him realise that he is clearly showing the country that he is deeply frightened about what will happen on 23 June. If that is the reason that all the scare stories are coming out, I am pleased. On 23 June, I want the Great British public to speak out, get out to vote and take us out of the anti-democratic EU.

[Sir William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

My fellow European Scrutiny Committee member, the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), so rightly referred to scaremongering. I simply say that there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Those words will haunt the Prime Minister in due course.

The leaflet arises from sections 6 and 7 of the European Referendum Act 2015. The words were only introduced, with a degree of connivance, I would suggest, in the House of the Lords, and came back to the House of Commons on ping-pong. We did not actually have an opportunity properly to look at the wording, which imposes a legal duty on the Government to provide information.

I tabled an amendment on the question of accuracy and impartiality. As the matter was drawing to a vote, I was besieged by various buzzing bees, who suggested that I should withdraw the amendment. I said, “No, I will not, unless I know that the Minister will answer the question I am putting to him.” The question was like this: “Yes or no—will he accept that the information must be accurate and impartial?” The Minister replied, “Certainly,” and said it would be “perverse” to do otherwise. He remembers that and knows perfectly well that I am saying exactly what happened.

When such a senior and highly respected Minister in the House of Commons replies on the Floor of the House specifically to the question of withdrawing an amendment, it is regarded by all of us on both sides of the House as being binding on the Government. I simply cannot accept that that has in any way been fulfilled. I am sorry to have to say that I regard it as disgraceful that this leaflet has been produced in those circumstances. It is not accurate and it is not impartial. In fact, a whole slew of White Papers have been produced in pursuance of those two sections of the Act.

To add insult to injury, when a White Paper is presented to Parliament—unlike the leaflet, which goes to all the households—by the Foreign Secretary and the Minister for Europe, the ministerial code kicks in. In Prime Minister’s questions, I asked the Prime Minister whether he accepted the White Papers were in breach of the accuracy and impartiality prescribed in the framework of the ministerial code, for which he has direct responsibility. It is up to him to make certain that those are reviewed as the situation could even lead to resignation by senior Ministers and Cabinet Ministers. This is a very grave and serious matter. It is not just a question of whether we like it or not.

I entirely agree with and commend the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), who laid out many of the issues and the reasons for the petition. We ought to be 100% behind the petition for all the reasons that so many hon. Members are here today. A serious issue lies beneath the petition, which is that what has happened is a serious breach of the ministerial code. Nobody can argue that those White Papers fulfil the criteria.

With regard to the issue of war, the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) were extremely apposite. The reality is that none of that is in the documents, and nor is the catastrophic effect that the Chancellor of the Exchequer yesterday alleged would happen with regard to leaving the single market in reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Jonathan Lord). The plain fact is that the omissions—to get this right regarding impartiality and to be anything other than economical with the truth—are of the gravest concern to the people of this country. They are being asked to go to the polling booths on 23 June on the basis of arguments to which they have a right, particularly as they are paying for it and for the running of the machinery of government, which is being thrown behind the referendum, despite the fact that we won the argument on purdah. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) said, it is atrocious that the machinery of government is being used to put such material on the Government website. That would be regarded as unacceptable in any democratic country.

I take the view of the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) on what happened in 1975, and I was around in 1975—in fact, I have been around since 10 May 1940, so it is my 76th birthday tomorrow. As it happens, I was born on the day that Hitler decided to invade France and Holland, and Churchill became Prime Minister that evening, so I take particularly badly to the Prime Minister’s references to what Churchill would think about all this. We were drawn into that war by unprovoked aggression and, with respect to the questions of defence and other matters contained in these documents, I do not believe for one minute that the people who fought and died in the war, as my father did, would ever have believed that we would be where we are now as a result of the sacrifice they made.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

My hon. Friend has just anticipated my intervention. I recently raised that point at Prime Minister’s questions, because I know my hon. Friend does not normally touch on it. His father paid the ultimate sacrifice at the battle of Normandy, having won the Military Cross. He lies in France, having secured the freedom of the people of not only Britain but France to rule themselves. We now have a little video, timed to coincide with the Prime Minister’s speech, showing four veterans of world war two saying that they were fighting for a united Europe, but I very much doubt that that is the view of the vast majority of people who fought and died in that campaign.

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[Sir William Cash]

I endorse my right hon. Friend’s intervention. It also made me particularly angry to hear Mr Juncker say that Eurosceptics should go and visit war cemeteries—people will understand the impact of that comment on someone like me—and I deeply resented President Obama’s reference to the same matter with respect to both United Kingdom and American troops. My father fought with American troops, and I am absolutely certain that the kind of undemocratic, dysfunctional, authoritarian, centralised system represented by the European Union, which does not work, is the antithesis of what they fought for. I want to get that firmly on the record.

[Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that it is a measure of the remain campaign’s desperation that it has to invoke the memory of those who died fighting dictatorships in order to try to present its case as patriotic when, in fact, we know from all the language that the campaign uses that it wants to do the country down?

[Sir William Cash]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I would go further, with reference to the historical analogies that permeate these documents and what the Prime Minister said today, and say that the very idea that Brexit would create war completely turns on its head the reality that, for at least four centuries, this country was drawn into all the wars in which it has been engaged by the desire of those in Europe to create European empires. That started, for example, with Philip of Spain and the armada, and later there were the Dutch wars, the Napoleonic wars and the first and second world wars. Those are realities. We were drawn into those wars. If we leave the European Union, we will be able to stand alone and, as we did in 1940, remind people that we are not going to be part and parcel of this dysfunctional system, which has so much instability and insecurity built into it that it is bound to lead to deep disturbance. Our attempt to make sense of all that has led us to argue so strongly for so many years that this European Union is dysfunctional, which is why, ultimately, we have to leave it.

The hon. Member for Vauxhall referred to the European Scrutiny Committee’s reports. She is an excellent member of the Committee, which I have the honour to chair. In the Liaison Committee’s examination of the Prime Minister last Wednesday, I was asked to go first after the Chairman, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie). I explained to the Prime Minister and to the Committee why I believe that the voters are being cheated on 23 June and, ultimately, a false prospectus is being offered to them. The reason is simple: the outcome of the question of whether there will be a full-on treaty change, which we were promised, cannot be guaranteed, if at all, until after the vote. When the voter goes to the voting booth and votes, they simply will not know whether, for example, there will be a treaty change, whether the European Court will intervene, whether there will be a change of Government or whether there will be a referendum in any other country on the basis of the changes that are made. The outcome of any one of those questions cannot be guaranteed under any circumstances, so I allege that requiring people to vote in such circumstances is cheating the voters.

I was most impressed to see the numbers on the petition, and it may be of interest to Members to know that the clip of my allegation that the Government and the Prime Minister are cheating the voters has now reached 175,000 viewings on Facebook, which is quite a lot. I strongly believe that that message is getting home to all the people who need to hear it.

The question of the single market seems to be so central to the economic case, the political case, the democratic case and the accountability case for why we should leave because it is in contradiction to what the people fought and died for in the last war. That is extremely important, but the Government also make an economic case in the leaflet, which talks about our having a massive single market:

“EU countries buy 44% of everything we sell abroad, from cars to insurance.”

What the leaflet does not say is outlined in a note I received from the House of Commons Library, and it is as simple as this. When we are trading with 27 other member states, the question of whether we have a deficit in goods and services, and in imports and exports, is the equivalent of asking whether we are making a loss in relation to those 27 member states. This is the answer from the House of Commons Library:

“UK trade deficit with EU countries: £67.8 billion”.

That is annual, and it is going up. That is a vast amount of money in our dealings with the single market, and it demonstrates that the single market does not work for us across the board. On the other hand—this is important—Germany has a £81.8 billion trade surplus with the 27 other member states. We make a loss of £67.8 billion, and they have a surplus of £81.8 billion. I do not have time to go into all the reasons, but it is a salutary lesson about the real value of the single market to us.

The UK’s trade surplus with the rest of the world, in relation to the same goods and services on which we make such a monumental loss with the other 27 member states, was £31.1 billion last year, and it is growing. We have a bright future. The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s accusation that leaving the single market would be catastrophic, the idea that we would end up at war if we do not carry out the diktat that the Government are issuing to the British people, and all the accumulated international bodies that are being brought in to support this flimsy argument that we should stay in, are all to be taken into account when people come to vote on 23 June.

I reject the manner in which the Government have gone about this. My hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam has done us a service in bringing this issue to the House, as have the petitioners. Jayne Adye deserves 100% credit for doing so. There is only one answer to this shambolic European Union, and that is to vote to leave it.

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[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully) for an outstanding opening presentation and for taking so many friendly and supportive interventions. I also echo the thanks to the petition organisers, who have done a brilliant job. As of now we are at 219,560 signatories.

I have just one regret about the debate. It ought to have been held in the main Chamber of the House of Commons, because then we would have been able to have a vote at the end of it and put to the test the sincerity or otherwise of those who say that the Government have behaved decently, fairly and honourably, rather than deeply unscrupulously, over the production of this expensive leaflet. It was produced at the expense of taxpayers, most of whom—hopefully we will find this out on independence day, 23 June—do not believe the Government’s argument.

I must make an observation on something quite striking here. I may be wrong, and I may have misinterpreted the voting intentions of some of the colleagues from various parties who are here today, but it seems that there is not a single right hon. or hon. Member here, other than the Front-Bench spokesmen for the Government, the official Opposition and the Scottish National party, who is likely to try to defend the production of the leaflet. If that is the case, it may well be that had a vote been possible, at least among Members in this Chamber, any motion deploring the Government’s production of such a leaflet at such expense for the benefit of one side in a contested referendum debate would have been overwhelmingly carried.

There is something else I find deeply worrying about the whole process. It seems that the Government arrived at their conclusions first and are now scrabbling around ever more desperately for one new argument after another to buttress them. As right hon. and hon. Members have already asked, why were these terribly important arguments about war and peace not included in the leaflet that was sent out? Why, indeed, was the Prime Minister willing to threaten—during what appear, I am sorry to say, to have been sham negotiations in Europe—that if he did not get his way on whatever minor changes he was trying to get he would be prepared to leave the European Union? If war, pestilence, flood, boils, frogs and the rest of the 10 plagues of Egypt will descend on us—

[Sir William Cash]

The apocalypse.

[Dr Lewis]

The apocalypse as well. A future apocalypse, if not an immediate one. If all that is going to happen, why on earth was the Prime Minister ever willing to contemplate leaving the European Union in the first place?

[Dr Lewis]

Indeed, and I will come to the question about war and peace a little further along, if I may.

It is a strange argument to suggest that out of something between 150 and 200 countries recognised at the United Nations, we, with the fifth strongest economy, are somehow deemed incapable of surviving outside the European Union. The vast majority of countries in the world do not, at least so far, belong to the 28-strong European Union network of nations. Who knows where the ambition will end? Perhaps one day half the countries in the world, or all of them, will belong to the European Union. One thing is clear, however. If countries are forced to integrate without the consent of the peoples concerned, the resultant political construct cannot possibly be run democratically.

[Sir William Cash]

Does my right hon. Friend accept that although we keep being told that we have to stay in the European Union because the other countries want and even need us for stability, democracy and accountability, the one thing that can be guaranteed to come out of the process of political integration is that we will be dumped into the second tier of a two-tier Europe, which I believe will largely be run by Germany? The consequence will be that we will not have influence because of the majority voting system and the lack of democracy.

[Dr Lewis]

As in so many things, my hon. Friend is absolutely correct. Let us be in no doubt about this: if, heaven forbid, we vote to remain in the European Union on 23 June, other countries will know once and for all that our ability to assert any independence or influence within that organisation is done for.