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Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, since we have touched this afternoon upon the niceties of our behaviour in your Lordships' House, I should perhaps start by apologising for wearing a scarf rather than a tie. The reason is medical, in that I have a swollen disk at the top of my spine, which thoughtfully touches a nerve from time to time and prefers not to be constrained. It is also, apparently, the cause of an irritating rash. So I trust your Lordships will forgive me. In all the circumstances of this debate I will try not to speak, at least metaphorically, with a swollen head, a stiff neck, too rashly or touching too many Europhile nerves.
I start by taking up where the noble Baroness the Leader of the House left off yesterday (at col. 1455 of the Official Report) when she concluded her Statement on the recent European Council. I may be presumptuous but I thought that she threw me a rather withering and accusatory glance when she said that the Government would now pursue an agenda for reform in Europe, but that they would do so from a "pro-European standpoint". That is where I thought the flash crossed the room.
The implication seemed to be, yet again, that we Euro-sceptics are not pro-European; indeed, that we are anti-European. I have wearied your Lordships often on the ambiguity now contained in the word "Europe" and I will not repeat it all again now. I merely repeat that we Euro-sceptics love what we regard as the true Europe of independent democracies. In this we regard ourselves as the true Europeans. What we object to is the project of European Union, which is now in a state of some confusion. It is not just that we think the UK should never have joined the project of European Union and that we should now leave it. We think that the whole project, however honourable and well intentioned its conception, can now clearly be seen as a mistake, and that it should be abandoned. I know this may be an almost impossible concept for many of your Lordships to take seriously, especially for those noble Lords who have spent so much of their lives in building the project physically and in backing it politically, of whom there are many.
At this crossroad in the project's journey it is perhaps worth recalling why it set off in the first place, what was the basic idea which inspired it, what was the honourable idea that Euro-sceptics believe has now come so badly unstuck. That idea behind the project of European integration was that nation states were responsible for
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the carnage of two world wars. They must therefore be emasculated and diluted into a new form of supra-national government run by a Commission of wise and honest technocrats; hence the European Commission's sole right to initiate legislation. The nation states, with their ill-informed and unreliable democracies, were always seen as the enemy of the project's fulfilment. They therefore had to be slowly and stealthily drawn into the project, and it was important that their people—their voters—did not come to know what was really going on. I know that I have mentioned the genesis of the project before, but I urge noble Lords to think about it again now and to ask themselves whether it makes sense any more in the modern world.
I submit that if there was a common thread running through the French and Dutch "No" votes, it was a growing distrust of remote government and officialdom, for which the European project must bear most of the responsibility. After all, 80 per cent of all our new laws are now made in Brussels, behind closed doors, for which national parliamentarians—whom the people actually elect and dismiss—have become rubber stamps. The fact that the French voted against the constitution for different reasons from the Dutch, and indeed for precisely the opposite reasons to those that would have inspired this country to vote against it had we been given the chance, does not prove, as Mr Barroso and others have claimed, that what the people are asking for is more of the project of what he calls "Europe", but quite the opposite.
For one reason or another, the project is in trouble. I fear the Eurocrats are going to say that it must be kept going because it promotes peace, which claim is rooted in the original big idea, but which, as I have pointed out before, simply does not wash. NATO kept the peace in Europe since 1945, and the angry exchanges that we have just seen at the recent summit show that the project, being a top-down amalgamation of different peoples put together without their informed consent, is a recipe for long-term conflict rather than harmony. The leaders could no longer ignore the contrasting needs of their very different peoples, and so they had to squabble, and the dream wobbled.
So we Euro-sceptics believe that the whole project should be abandoned in the interests of the real Europe and its diverse peoples. But of course, there are far too many vested interests in Brussels, Luxembourg, Strasbourg and in Europhile political careers across the Continent to allow even for an open and honest debate about that course, let alone its planned and peaceful conclusion. I fear that the road ahead therefore looks rough. Not only do we have the internal political strains that we have just observed, but we have the slow-burning fuse of the ill-fated single currency. With no common language, with limited mobility of labour, with the straitjacket of its single interest rate, and above all with its lack of a federal budget that could be operated only by the federal megastate, which was always the currency's aim but which is now off the agenda, all those inherent design faults are now coming home to roost. German officials are talking secretly about the euro's eventual failure, and the Italians are doing so publicly. The vultures in
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the currency markets are on their way down. So it looks as though the euro may fail sooner than some of us thought, and let us pray that its end is not too uncomfortable when it comes.
It seems that the project of European Union will stagger on, given the vested interests that support it, until it too runs off the road. Surely this is a moment when our political leaders in this country should pause, and consider whether the United Kingdom should continue to be part of it. I know that this question will fall as a forlorn cry in the ears of the Government and of the Liberal Democrats, both of whom are too lost in their dream about the project to see it for what it is. But surely if the votes in France and Holland show the Conservative Party anything, even that party should now see that it can afford to stiffen its policy toward the EU sufficiently to render the UK Independence Party redundant. Alas, I see no sign of that. Following the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Saatchi, yesterday, I have looked into their eyes, but I have found them blank. Nevertheless, I feel bound to make the point yet again, and I shall go on doing so until the Conservative Party finally gets the point and leads the country out of the grip of the corrupt and ruinous octopus in Brussels.
I end by asking the Government three questions; two of which I have asked before, alas without getting any sort of satisfactory answer, and one that is new. We must find something new to say about this depressing subject. First; an old question. To see whether there is any value in the suggestion that the UK should now disengage amicably from the project of European integration, will the Government commission an independent cost-benefit analysis of our membership of the European Union? I asked that question in debates in your Lordships' House on 27 June 2003 and 11 February 2004 without getting any sort of answer on why such an analysis should not be carried out. All we are told is that the benefits of our membership are so wonderful and obvious that there is no point in finding out the truth. My noble friend Lord Moran mentioned another attempt to get a cost benefit analysis done by a Select Committee of this House, in which he unfortunately failed.
In that respect, I ask whether the Government are aware of a new independent study entitled Should Britain Leave the EU? An Economic Analysis of a Troubled Relationship. It is by Professor Patrick Minford and colleagues.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, Europhile noble Lords continue to use the policy of ridicule; I am attempting to use the policy of reason. I merely ask whether the Government are aware of the publication, which came to much the same conclusion as the analysis in A Cost too Far? by Ian Milne of Global Britain, published by Civitas last June. Both those analyses find that the current cost to the UK of EU membership is around 4 per cent of UK GDP, or £40 billion per annum. They also agree that future additional net costs of our
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EU membership, due to measures already in the EU pipeline, will bring us to double-figure percentages of GDP—10 per cent and above.
However ridiculous the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, and others find the studies, have the Government read them? What do they think about them? Do they dismiss them? Why? Have the Government studied a report written in April 2004 by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which may not give rise to the same ridicule from the noble Lord and his friends? It is entitled Benefits and Spillovers of Greater Competition in Europe: A Macroeconomic Assessment. It concluded that,
"increasing competition in the euro area to US levels could boost output by 12.4 per cent in the euro area, as both investment and hours worked rise".
Will the Government go on ignoring such findings? Have they read them, in which case what do they think of them?
Will the Government also undertake to read the new study mentioned today by my noble friend Lord Stoddart of Swindon? Will they tell us whether they agree with it? If not, why not? Surely the Government can see that leaving the political constraints of the European Union and continuing our free trade with the single market would create millions of jobs. Do they deny that? If so, what reasons do they give for doing so?
I asked my second question yesterday at the end of the Statement and could not understand the reply of the noble Baroness the Leader of the House—and nor could my noble friend Lord Waddington, judging from what he said today. I also tabled it as a Written Question on 13 June and await a reply. The question is simple. Will the Government tell us what is happening to all the EU initiatives which rely on the proposed but now defunct constitution as their legal basis? Are they still alive? Are we still paying for them?
I listed some of the initiatives yesterday. They appear to include the EU's space programme, which costs £7 billion annually; the fundamental rights agency being set up in Vienna to enforce the charter of fundamental rights; the EU's string of embassies and ambassadors in growing numbers overseas; the ECJ's ruling last Friday that the Community now has power to dictate on the judicial procedures to be followed by all 25 member states; and—I forgot one yesterday, so I shall mention it now as it seems important—apparently there are already EU troops in the Congo, serving under the EU flag, which would of course have become a proper flag only if the constitution had been ratified. In the mean time, as the Government have confirmed in Written Answers, the EU flag is flown as mere advertising, requiring local authority licence in this country to be flown, for instance.
Is any of that the case? If so, do the Government intend during their forthcoming presidency that those and other initiatives should be abandoned, or will they blithely continue under our presidency as though the constitution had sanctioned them? I ask the noble Baroness the Leader of the House for a clear answer to that today. Are these things alive or are they dead?
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Finally, my new question. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, and others seem to think that Turkey may enter the European Union and that that would be a good thing. Have the Government noticed that M. Chirac changed the French constitution on 28 February this year to guarantee the French people a referendum on eventual Turkish membership? Apparently, this new provision does not bite on Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia, whose entry negotiations were already in the pipeline, but it does bite on Turkish membership.
The relevant article in the revised French constitution is No. 88/5 and this is what it says:
"Any Bill authorising the ratification of a Treaty concerning the accession of a state to the EU or to the European Communities shall be submitted to a referendum of the French people by the President of the French Republic".
In his final televised appeal to the French just before their referendum, beseeching them to vote "Yes", M. Chirac reminded viewers that they now had the right to veto Turkey's membership in future. So I would not have thought that Turkey's membership is much of a starter, unless the unanimity rule for treaty change is going to be dropped. I should be most grateful if the Government would comment on that and, indeed, attempt some sort of reply to my other two questions.
8.46 pm
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