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2.2 pmMr. Michael Carttiss (Great Yarmouth) : I shall reduce my remarks in recognition of the fact that other hon. Members wish to speak. My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes) who has temporarily left his seat, in recognising the sincerity with which my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) introduced the Bill, suggested that other hon. Members may have attached themselves to the argument less because of the referendum but in order, once again, to "indulge in Euro- bashing". It is quite unacceptable that hon. Members who have a different vision for Europe from many of us constantly assert that, when we dare to criticise what is happening in the European Community or question some of the policies of our Government in that respect, we are somehow engaging in Euro-bashing and that they are better Europeans than those of us who are sceptical about much of what goes on in the European Community.
No one has to be anti-European to question the developments that have occurred in the European Community in recent years. I, for one, regularly visit Rambouillet, which is twinned with Great Yarmouth. It is one of the original twinning agreements and the mayor of Rambouillet, Senator Gerard Larcher, is vice-president of the Gaullist group, the second largest group in the French senate. The views expressed by people there are not unlike those that I hear expressed by some of my hon. Friends who are concerned about developments in Europe.
The notion that the people in 11 European countries are content to see their sovereignty reduced and live in a supranational state, and that we are the odd ones out, with a handful of people on the right and a handful on the left who do not agree, is nonsense. They may not have the same opportunity to debate as we have, but the fact remains that there are just as many French people--and I know some of them--living in Rambouillet whose views on the subject are the same as mine--that yes, we are part of Europe, and yes, we must remain part of Europe, but that that does not mean, as the hon. Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Cryer) said, that our lawnmowers all have to make the same noise. The Gaullists and many other French people have no more time than we have for Jacques Delors and all that he stands for. My right hon. Friend the Minister said that he was confident that, in a referendum, there would be an overwhelming majority in favour of what the Government have been doing. What is the problem, then? Why is it assumed that those who want the referendum are fearful of the result? I do not mind whether those who have sent me and other hon. Members to this place say, "Yes, we want a closer unified union ; yes, we want to be more closely involved in Europe ; yes, we want our lawnmowers to make the same noise in Great Yarmouth as they make in Maastricht and in Waterloo."
I remember when the town of Rambouillet was presented with a Council of Europe plaque for all that it had done in the interests of European unity, as distinct from a federal Europe. A senior diplomat--a deputy ambassador-- from the Belgian embassy attended the ceremony at Rambouillet because that town is also twinned with Waterloo. That was at a time when my right hon. Friend the Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher), who I am glad to have sitting at my side today, was making sterling efforts to protect British interests in the European
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discussions. She was speaking not just for people in this country but for people in Germany, Belgium, France, Holland and all the other countries which no more wanted to be part of a Brussels- dominated surpranational state than I did.When my right hon. Friend was leading our country in those intergovernmental conferences, that diplomat from the Belgian embassy in Paris asked me, "Why are you British so concerned about all this? Why are you so worried?" It was an occasion on which we were supposed to be diplomatic, so I brushed aside the question by asking her whether she would like another cup of coffee. However, she repeated the question, and said, "But you British just don't seem to want to go along with us. Why is that?" I continued to try to evade her question, but she kept pressing and I said, "Madam, we have had a Parliament in our country since 1295. My borough of Great Yarmouth has been sending representatives there for 700 years. Your country has not existed as a state for more than 160 years. That is why we are worried. We have a tradition of parliamentary democracy that none of the other European countries can claim."
I mean no disrespect to those other countries. As soon as I leave the Chamber, I am flying to Holland. I have many friends there and I agree with what has been said about the Dutch. No one is more concerned than I am to ensure that they are not dominated by Germany or any other country. They are a wonderful people, and their country is only 90 miles from my constituency. They built the port in my town 500 years ago. I like the Dutch, but I do not want them telling me, for example, that my lawnmower is too noisy compared with theirs. There is much more that I should like to say, but I am conscious that other hon. Members wish to speak. I do not like referendums. Of course, we are sent to this place to make decisions. Someone said that we did not have a referendum when we went to war. Of course we did not. One cannot have a referendum when one is going to war. We did not have a referendum before signing the NATO treaty. Of course not, but that is wholly different. The hon. Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) tried to draw a parallel between our membership of NATO and this business. We are talking now of changing the whole character of this Parliament. NATO did not do that. We entered a defensive alliance. We trusted our Government to negotiate. There is nothing wrong with that. Here, we are changing the very purpose of this institution. For over 700 years Parliament has existed to control, albeit ineffectively sometimes, the Executive, whether the power of the King or, as more lately, of executive government. I am choosing my words carefully, bearing in mind the power that my right hon. Friend the Member for Finchley exercised so effectively on our behalf in Europe. Now we are talking about having no control over those decisions.
There is so much that I want to say, but I shall make one final point as I am aware of the time. A constituent of mine who is in horticulture has glasshouses. He is worried about the proposed directive on carbon dioxide emissions and asked me about it. I said that there was no point discussing it with me because I would not have a vote on it. He said that he would talk to the European man about it. Paul Howell, the Member of the European Parliament for Norfolk, will have no vote on it. The matter will be decided by bureaucrats in Brussels, followed by a majority vote in the Council of Ministers.
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Those are all tiny, insignificant matters beside the great ideal of European unity and peace in our time, but, my God, they affect our constituents--those whom we have been elected to represent. Why are we afraid to say, "This is your country. Sovereignty is too great to be handed away by 650 people sitting in Parliament"? It would not denigrate the sovereignty of this place, because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills said at the beginning, this place exists only as an expression of the sovereignty of the people. Why be afraid of the people? Let us put our trust in them and have this referendum.2.12 pm
Sir Anthony Meyer (Clwyd, North-West) : My hon. Friend the Member for Great Yarmouth (Mr. Carttiss) spoke with great passion and courage. He made me think of my father who sat for that self-same seat some 70 years ago and who would probably have concurred with him. I have to say that I do not. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) who opened the debate with a speech of all the nobility of thought and utterance that we have come to expect of him. I disagree with him, but salute him. Some 27 years ago I made my first speech in the House on this very subject of Europe. This is almost certainly my last speech here and I have not changed my views in the meantime. The United Kingdom has long-term interests and it is the job of government to protect and advance them. We have a parliamentary system and a party system that enable the Government to do so, often in the teeth of great waves of public opinion urging courses that would be contrary to the country's long-term interests.
In recent years we have had several referendums, each of which may have been justifiable on its merits, but each referendum eats away at the credibility of our parliamentary institutions. That to my mind is a more insidious and profound threat to those parliamentary institutions than the loss of sovereignty to Brussels which, to a large extent, merely reflects the diminished ability of our nation or any other nation to go it alone in the world today. Government by referendum is government by Gallup poll.
Conservative Members are under constant pressure from our consitutuents to have a referendum on capital punishment. I am against capital punishment and I am against holding a referendum on it. I cannot pretend, however, that it would be all that disastrous for our national interests if we had regular referendums on capital punishment. We all know what the result would be. Hanging would be brought back. Some capitalist Home Secretary would come under irresistible pressure to execute some murderer, probably a terrorist, and the terrorist would hang. Then we would discover that we had hanged the wrong chap. There would be great revulsion and another referendum, and capital punishment would be abolished the following year. It would not matter all that much if we had capital punishment in even years and did away with it in odd years, but foreign policy cannot be conducted on that basis.
Thirty years ago a Conservative Government, under Harold Macmillan, decided reluctantly--and it was very reluctantly--that we could not prevent the emergence on our doorstep of a new economic super-power and that we
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had no choice but to join it. Of course there were positive and much nobler reasons for joining, but, for the purposes of my argument, I shall leave them on one side. We made the choice. For 20 years we have been members of the European Community. It has taken all of those 20 years to settle down into membership of the Community. I do not think that my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge- Brownhills ever really has.The Labour party has only just grown out of the habit, every time that it is in opposition, of promising to take us out of the European Community, only to turn turtle when they are back in government. Splendid. However, just when we have finished the dangerous game of see-saw, with Britain's membership of the European Community seemingly at risk every time there was the threat of a Labour Government, we find that people on this side of the House, including some who really should know better, are saying that we should submit the country's long-term interests to the unpredictable hazards of a referendum.
The proposal, as I understand it, is to hold a referendum on the Maastricht treaty terms and to close off the option, for the United Kingdom, of moving to a single currency. Just what will happen if the referendum leads to the answer no? The issue might well be voted on in a week in which French farmers set fire to a lorryload of live sheep, or a British girl gets murdered in Italy, or there is a great neo-Nazi demonstration in Potsdam. Such events, joyfully whooped up, as they would be, by our egregious tabloid press--I can visualise already the headline in the Evening Standard --could have a substantial, possibly even a decisive influence on the results of that referendum, which is bound to be more of a popularity test than a careful balancing of the issues.
The individual voter in a referendum does not have to find a policy to replace the one that he has rejected. That is our job, our responsibility. We have to live with the consequences of the policy decisions that we vote for and we have to defend them if they turn out to be disastrous. Those who vote for a policy in a referendum can wash their hands of the consequences. There is no way in which they can be held to account. They do not have to say what alternative policies they want. There is no way in which they could, even if they wanted to. If we vote for the Bill, we shall do infinitely more damage to parliamentary democracy then even the most authoritarian president of the European Commission could ever do.
2.17 pm
Sir Teddy Taylor (Southend, East) : We have been talking about democracy all morning and there is little time left. I hope that no hon. Member will try to prevent our coming to a decision today by talking out the Bill. I have been in this place for 26 years. There is no one more akin to the lowest species of pond life than someone who makes a speech for no other purpose than deliberately to prevent Members of Parliament from coming to a decision.
My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) made a splendid speech in which he referred to The Independent. He said that it has not been telling people what has been happening about the European Community. If that newspaper is guilty of that charge, may I appeal to it, if any hon. Member tries to talk out the Bill and prevent a vote being taken, to publish his picture on the front page tomorrow. Whether they be
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Labour, Liberal, Ulstermen or Conservatives, The Independent should let the people know who is stopping Members of Parliament from coming to a decision.My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills is a credit to democracy. We are about to face a general election. If all of us had been successful in the ballot for private Member's Bills, would we not have been tempted to do something nice about old people, or dogs, or helping people across the road--something popular, something positive? However, my hon. Friend has rightly said that even though it will make him unpopular with some, he wants to face up to this basic democratic issue. It is time that we did. Our complaint is not against the Conservative or Labour parties but that people have simply not been told what is happening with the EC.
An hon. Friend said, "Why not have a Committee?" I am on one of these stupid Committees that consider European legislation. What can we do? If we say, "We think that this is dreadful, is scandalous, will destroy jobs and will cost a fortune", it is not necessarily reported to the House. The Government can table their own motion, but what happens if we table a motion? Nothing.
I have had complaints from bus owners in my constituency about a recent regulation on the speed of buses. They said that it was silly, would cost a fortune and would not help anyone and asked what I could do about it. I said that it was discussed at the Council of Ministers and that it was passed under majority voting despite Britain not wanting it. The Minister was not present because his bus or train had been held up.
We have no power. The time has come to tell people what is happening. If they vote for the EC, that is fine, but let them decide. It is wrong to hide it from them. If anyone knows, you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, know how we hide what is happening from people. You have to sit in the Chair late at night--at midnight or 1 am or 2 am--when we discuss all the nasty things that are going on in the EC. Nobody hears about them because there is hardly anyone here to comment on them. You also know about the Committees where power is disappearing.
People must be told. If we simply allow more and more power to pass to the EC without telling people, at some point they will wake up, but what will they do when they wake up ? How will they vote ? It will not matter at all. If people's democratic powers continue to be removed, there will be a huge explosion from them. That should be the fear of every democrat.
We cannot say that people are not worried about it. We find that people are worried about the disappearance of their laws. Hon. Members should think about the number of people who have written to them about Sunday trading. We have had to tell them, "We cannot do anything until the European Court tells us what we are allowed to do." People complained to me last week that the European Community is spending more than £1,000 million on growing and dumping high-tar tobacco in the third world. People are suffering and dying in the third world, but we can do absolutely nothing about it.
We know that expenditure on the CAP is breaking all records, but we can do nothing about it. Despite the wonderful rebates that the previous Prime Minister achieved, Britain still has to pay £2.5 billion. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills is so right. If people want this to continue, they can vote for it and if they complain in the future we can say, "You voted for it ; it is your responsibility." But if we take away all the
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people's powers, step by step, and if we hide it from them deliberately, as we do by having late-night votes and pretending that things do not happen, at some stage there will be an explosion in our country. People will get very angry if they feel that their powers have been thrown away.My hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr. Nelson) said that we do not want a referendum because people will vote against the CAP and not for more money for farmers. He suggested that, irrespective of the views of people, there are some things that we cannot allow them to do. That is one point of view. I think that my hon. Friend is a Conservative--I am not sure--but that is what he was saying. Hon. Members have powers entrusted to them by the people. The Labour or Conservative parties can do what they like with those powers. They can pass the laws that they want. They can govern stupidly, which might happen under the Liberal Democrats, but at some time every five years the people have a chance to say, "We think that you have done well" or "You have made a mess of it." The only thing that we do not have the right to do is to pass that power over. We do not have the right to do that unless the people give us their support. That is the issue that we are discussing today and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills, because he has done a service for democracy by making us face the issue. We must say yes or no and if any hon. Member from any party tries to stop us coming to a decision, that will be a shame on democracy and I hope that his photograph will be splashed on the front page of The Independent and every other newspaper in Britain.
2.24 pm
Mr. Christopher Gill (Ludlow) : The Bill so ably presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) relates to what I consider to be the biggest issue to have faced the nation in my lifetime, barring only one other.
In the 1950s and 1960s there was another political issue of fundamental importance to the nation on which there was no public debate. The public were not consulted and, more importantly, the issues, arguments and consequences were, I think deliberately, not presented. Those who spoke out in the House were pilloried for their trouble. The consequences, as the House knows, is that we now live in a multiracial society. Never again must the whole culture of our nation be so fundamentally altered without the people being consulted, because the people have an inalienable rights in these matters. It is the people whose lives will be affected, not in the way that those of Ministers and mandarins are affected but in every detail. It is important that we--the politicians of the nation--put fairly and squarely to the people the issues and arguments and, more to the point, the consequences. I stress in particular the consequences of the treaty of Maastricht, because, as many hon. Members have said, they are irreversible and, unlike domestic policy, they cannot be reversed.
I said a moment ago that I was most concerned that people should have the consequences of these steps pointed out to them. One has to look no further than the common agricultural policy to see the effect of political and economic union. The CAP is, to all intents and purposes, a microcosm of a political and economic union with its own form of legislation, its own currency in the
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green currencies and even its own monetary system through the monetary compensatory amounts. What are the consequences? They are the enormous, unsustainable high cost of the CAP, record low incomes for farmers and the production of food that people will never eat. I represent a large and important rural constituency. My farmers tell me what they think about the CAP and about their future. I relay their concerns to the Minister and on many occasions he might agree, but the reality is that he can do nothing because unless and until he can get the agreement of the other nations in the European Community, we are lumbered with what we have.I do not want the Chancellor of the Exchequer of this country ever to be put in the same hapless position as the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, but that would be the effect of introducing a single currency. With one currency, we would have but one Chancellor and he would not be at No. 11 Downing street.
The danger to the House is that ultimately there would be such disillusionment with hon. Members and the parties represented in the House that we would see the emergence of that very phenomenon to which the hon. and learned Member for Montgomery (Mr. Carlile) who spoke for the Liberal Democrats, drew our attention--nationalism. An awesome example of where that leads us can be found in the events in the USSR and eastern Europe.
2.29 pm
Mr. Robert G. Hughes (Harrow, West) : I profoundly disagree with this silly Bill, and I think that we would be doing a disservice to the House and to the country if it were allowed to get into Committee. It is for that reason that I am talking now. What we have to discuss is whether we approve of the mechanism of the referendum. I do not
Sir Teddy Taylor rose in his place and claimed to move, That the Question be now put.
Question put, That the Question be now put :--
The House proceeded to a Division --
Mr. Dafydd Wigley (Caernarfon) (seated and covered) : On point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Paul Dean) : I think that I can anticipate the hon. Gentleman's point of order. I understand that the Division Bells have been ringing within the Palace of Westminster, but that there is some doubt whether they have been ringing throughout. In view of that, I propose to add two minutes to the time allowed before the doors are locked.
Mr. Cash (seated and covered) : Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. If hon. Members could not hear the Division Bells because they were not ringing, they can do nothing about that, whether or not they have an extra two minutes.
Mr. Deputy Speaker : It is reasonably clear to me that the Division Bells have been ringing in most of the Palace
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of Westminster, but I have added two minutes to ensure that every hon. Member who desires to vote will have an opportunity to do that.Mr. John Marshall (seated and covered) : Further to that point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Hon. Members expect a Division to take place at 2.30 pm. If they do not hear the Division Bells ring at 2.30 they will not sit around for another 12 minutes on the offchance that they might ring.
Mr. Deputy Speaker : Order. We will not have a debate on the matter. I have given my ruling.
The House having divided : Ayes 46, Noes 3.
Division No. 90] [2.29 pm
AYES
Aitken, Jonathan
Alison, Rt Hon Michael
Barnes, Harry (Derbyshire NE)
Barnes, Mrs Rosie (Greenwich)
Beggs, Roy
Body, Sir Richard
Bowden, Gerald (Dulwich)
Browne, John (Winchester)
Carlile, Alex (Mont'g)
Carttiss, Michael
Cash, William
Cohen, Harry
Cox, Tom
Cran, James
Crowther, Stan
Cryer, Bob
Dykes, Hugh
Favell, Tony
Gill, Christopher
Greenway, Harry (Ealing N)
Hunter, Andrew
Lawrence, Ivan
Leighton, Ron
Lord, Michael
McCrea, Rev William
Marshall, John (Hendon S)
Michael, Alun
Molyneaux, Rt Hon James
Morris, Rt Hon A. (W'shawe)
Paisley, Rev Ian
Powell, Ray (Ogmore)
Robertson, George
Ross, William (Londonderry E)
Shepherd, Richard (Aldridge)
Shore, Rt Hon Peter
Skinner, Dennis
Smyth, Rev Martin (Belfast S)
Spearing, Nigel
Spicer, Michael (S Worcs)
Taylor, Rt Hon J. D. (S'ford)
Taylor, Sir Teddy
Thatcher, Rt Hon Margaret
Trimble, David
Walker, Bill (T'side North)
Wigley, Dafydd
Williams, Rt Hon Alan
Tellers for the Ayes :
Mr. Humfrey Malins and
Mr. Toby Jessel.
NOES
Bottomley, Peter
Irvine, Michael
Sedgemore, Brian
Tellers for the Noes :
Sir Anthony Meyer and
Mr. Robert G. Hughes.
Whereupon Mr. Deputy Speaker-- declared that the Question was not decided in the affirmative, because it was not supported by the majority prescribed by Standing Order No. 36 (Majority for Closure or for proposal of question).
Debate to be resumed on Friday 28 February.
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