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I have for a long time believed that we should have a much looser relationship with the EU. I remember the debates on Maastricht, when I worked on amendments with the late Lord Tonypandy on matters that concerned us, such as the provision that the Queen should become a citizen of Europe. Those debates included the late Lord Blake’s call for a referendum on Maastricht, which was defeated by the then Conservative Government, who organised a massive vote against it. Now, we again face widespread calls for a referendum but this time it is a Labour Government who oppose consultation with the people. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, quoted in this House on 25 March a speech in which the Prime Minister said:
“The right of all the British people to have their voice heard is fundamental to our democracy”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/7/07; col. 818.]
Those are fine words, but Gordon Brown now denies the British people that right.
Before we go, it would surely be right for this House to vote to give the people of this country the opportunity to say whether Britain should agree to the Lisbon treaty, with all the consequences that flow from it. In doing so, we should go some way to restore genuine democracy to this country—something that our people surely deserve.
11.19 pm
Lord Dykes: My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has been so praised tonight that I am sure that, if he were a lesser man, it would go to his head. However, I add my words of thanks for what he and our committee—I am a member of it so I suppose that I should not praise it too much—achieved in the report. In fact, it is so stupendous and such a blockbuster of a report that it reminds me of the Cecil B DeMille definition of the ideal film, which is that you start with an earthquake and then you build up to a real climax. The report’s conclusions go from page 247 to page 276, and good luck to anyone who has time to read not merely the conclusions but the rest of the report as well.
This has been a momentous debate of high quality. I am sure that we all appreciate the usual channels and the noble Baronesses the Lord President and the Chief Whip on the government Benches providing an intelligent amount of extra time on an exceptionally long day and night. Everyone has been accommodated on a fair basis, with ample time to speak. The only exception we were beginning to worry about was the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert, at the beginning of the gap. Because of the various confusions that arose in the other place as the Bill proceeded through the Committee of the whole House and the atavistic and bizarre nature of most of the Tory contributions to both the debate and the amendments, I feel that a much better lead has now been given in your Lordships’ House on what the public need to decide, with their parliamentarians advising them on their own conclusion, about this crucial Bill.
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As others have done, I deliberately pay tribute tonight to the speeches made by eight or nine of the more enthusiastic Members of the Tory Benches about membership of the European Union. They were remarkable contributions, not least from the two ex-Commissioners. Although they may be described malevolently by others as “pensioners of the European Commission”, the work they did as Commissioners for Europe as a whole—as well as for their own country directly, although that is not the main purpose of their oath—was outstanding in both their cases. That applies too to the two Labour ex-Commissioners we have heard from tonight, the noble Lords, Lord Kinnock and Lord Clinton-Davis, and to the work that they did. The difference in their case, however, was that it was nice to see how those who originally had been quite Eurosceptic, in the old days of Labour Party history that we remember so vividly, had gone native very soon after getting to Brussels—
Lord Dykes: Thank you, my Lords, I accept the correction. That is understandable, bearing in mind the rational nature of this modest project we are all trying to construct in Europe. Why people on the Eurosceptic side of the argument get so incensed about it is beyond all rational thinking.
Logically, treaty Bills have to be accepted in toto. That is inevitable because a national Government—the sovereign Government—of each member state have already negotiated the clauses and are therefore entitled to seek ratification with the majority they manage to secure in the one or two chambers of each parliament. It is two chambers in most countries, but only one chamber in Denmark and some other countries.
The opponents forget that 19 member states had already ratified the original text of the old constitution and were, to put it mildly, frustrated by what was going on. If we are in a community, we have to occasionally pay attention to what the other member states want and need. The sovereign member Governments had to return to the exercise and re-present a modernised, non-constitutional type of text to the Union’s public. I am delighted that this whole exercise has restored the powers of the sovereign parliaments of each member country, which were increasingly being pushed aside by this ridiculous referendumitis, which is actually of the street—more and more, in fact, of the street of the extreme thinker—and of the gutter press in this county, as we know so well. Sadly, that is true more in the UK than elsewhere. That is one of the great dangers facing us all.
Sovereign Governments and parliaments are very important concepts that we treasure in this country and elsewhere. We are all proud, patriotic British people—but also, I hope, increasingly and enthusiastically Europeans as well. We have re-established the rights of the sovereign Governments and parliaments over demagogic, crude, primitive and sinister populism. The Irish are the only ones who have to do it the other way because of their constitution, but every other parliament, including the European Parliament, has
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I see from history that we had the Second World War and the atom bomb without a referendum. We joined NATO without a referendum, a much bigger so-called loss of intrinsic national so-called sovereignty. We outlawed capital punishment without a referendum, for obvious reasons. This Government launched an illegal war in Iraq without a referendum, and 10 years earlier the then Tory Government, quite rightly, flatly refused a referendum on the Maastricht treaty Bill. That must have been the biggest piece of this so-called loss of pretend sovereignty that I and others have ever witnessed, not least with the subsequent creation of European citizenship for the first time, a profound step that will develop later on alongside national citizenship, although it will not replace it.
On 21 January, the Foreign Secretary reminded us that left-wing parties in all 27 member states supported the treaty of Lisbon, as did liberal and social democratic-type parties, but strangely only 26 conservative parties in the Union supported it. There is no prize for guessing which was the exception. I say for the benefit of noble Lords who do not remember that it was the British Tory party, denounced in the process by the right honourable Kenneth Clarke.
I found that, for part of the time, I was sitting masochistically in the Committee stage in the House of Commons—a process that went on for several weeks—until I could stand the boring tones of Mr William Cash no more. He was there every day and I think made 275 interventions and about 80 or 85 speeches. I have never before witnessed such root and branch hostility by the Tory Front Bench and by the people on the Back Benches—some of them rather peculiar people—not just to the treaty and the Bill but to almost every aspect of the European Union. I never expected to witness that.
I agreed with the right honourable Member for Rushcliffe, Mr Kenneth Clarke, when he reminded us that Mr Tony Blair’s volte-face on the need for a referendum on the previous treaty text was at the root of this absurd chaos and Sturm und Drang in Britain. What a contrast between the ludicrous antics in the so-called sovereign parliamentary scene at the other end of the building and the dignified and mature behaviour of the German, French, Italian, Spanish and indeed Danish parliaments, to name just a few.
I am sure that noble Lords have appreciated the wiser aspects of this debate on a sensible Bill that we have witnessed today, with some interesting contributions from the Eurosceptics. I pay tribute to some of the interesting suggestions made by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. A number of speakers brought out the essential points of this legislation. The constitutional approach of the previous text has definitely been abandoned and the amending treaty has taken its place. That is gaining more and more support in this country—in the business community, in the trade unions and in all sorts of NGOs. The NSPCC and even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are supportive.
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Lord Dykes: My Lords, I know that that causes a frisson, because the RSPB has more members than any political party. That is understandable.
The European Union (Amendment) Bill covers a treaty text that quite spectacularly enhances the role of national parliaments in any wished-for scrutiny of EU legislation and policy formation. Indeed, scrutiny includes actual participation in these processes from now on. The treaty brings in improvements to the functioning of majority voting, which the Conservative Government in the mid-1980s quite rightly demanded and secured in relation to the single market, as mentioned by many speakers in the debate. Energy markets will be opened up by qualified majority voting to the benefit of consumers, and the UK share of the national votes also improves. Clause 6 of the Bill gives Parliament a major say in these processes in future.
Despite the fact that the main opposition spokesman on Europe in the other place, Mr Mark Francois, sports an enticingly French surname, his sad speeches in the Commons revealed Essex man in a pathetic coalition of hatred towards Europe that is unique among all respectable parties in any of the member states. However, I note that he is at least strongly supported by the Dutch animal party, by Sinn Fein for some bizarre, difficult-to-explain reason, by many communist parties and by the French Front National. Not even the nine conservative-type parties in Italy were able to support Mr Francois’s suggestions.
On the day of the flypast to commemorate 90 years of the RAF, some among the brave pilots who survived remembered how, after the war, gradually, painfully and slowly, friendships developed with members of the Luftwaffe when conditions returned to normality. That was part of developing Europe as well. We made a note in this debate of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, suggested. This needs closer examination and we shall see how the debates proceed at later stages.
My noble friend Lord McNally made a passionate plea for us and the UK to move on. That is what we now need to do with Europe and the rest of the argument as the Bill proceeds. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, for giving the example of what he achieved and what Europe means in a modern context—the new Europe, post-Lisbon ratification, if the treaty is ratified.
A succession of speeches this evening has underscored the growing antipathy among parliamentarians of all parties to Mr William Hague’s foolish obsession in the other place with referendums—supported by Mr Murdoch’s press—as a device for maximising atavistic hatred towards all things foreign, which of course means European. That is a sad state of affairs, which must be corrected in the other place by the politicians there, as well as by people here giving them sound advice.
I quote from Mr Kenneth Clarke’s speech in the debate in the other place about a referendum. Reminding us that Ted Heath and John Major, as well as Margaret Thatcher, fully overruled demands for referenda, he added:
“I am astonished to find the atmosphere so completely changed now. In fact, it worries me that members of the political ruling class of this country have now lost their self-confidence
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I finish by paraphrasing—“because they want to overturn a natural parliamentary majority against the gutter press”.
Anyway, far from this Lisbon treaty being a massive loss of national power, or a massive transfer of power, it is merely and self-evidently a sensible, totally unsinister modernisation of the functioning of the system of, now, 27 member states. These are sovereign countries, all working together with agreed integrated institutions to achieve sensible decisions on how the Union moves forward in a way that increasingly impresses the rest of the world. Witness, for example, how the Chinese fulsomely praised the creation of the euro as a unique and successful currency.
I am not too keen on the red lines to which the Government refer from time to time in a slightly embarrassed way but, again, we shall see what happens in the future. They irritate our partners in the Union so much because they show that, once again, we are too often a half-hearted member state. That is not because the UK public want to be like that; I do not believe that they do. They appreciate European matters more and more, particularly the younger generation, who are natural back-packers, travel all over Europe and are getting used to being European as well as British.
There is a strange, unique disease in this country whereby the opposition party becomes anti-European. Parliamentarians of both Houses and all parties must exorcise that from our political society. I noticed in the Spanish election campaign that, despite there being fierce competition between the two major parties, not a single politician from either sought to invoke Europe as a domestic political matter to embarrass the other side.
I pay tribute to the Foreign Secretary and the excellent and highly competent Europe Minister, Mr Jim Murphy, for sending the Bill unamended to us for our own Second Reading. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness the Lord President for her wise and positive words of explanation at the beginning of the debate. Let us hope that in Britain the dark days of our nauseating chauvinism are over. As I said before, the younger generation feel both British and European. They want, as do other older citizens, to enjoy their European citizenship, by travelling, studying, working and living in one of the greatest continents on the planet, where peace has taken over from war and strife. The European Union reform treaty and this Bill help us to ensure that that can happen.
We Liberal Democrats believe that Europe will be of huge benefit to this country and to the world. We on these Benches are ready to take on all comers to defend Britain’s true and deep national interest, which is to be at the heart of the unique and increasingly rational and important European Union.
11.34 pm
Lord Hunt of Wirral: My Lords, my first important and pleasant task is to congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chichester on an exceedingly
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I do not think that there can be anywhere else in Europe where we could have had a debate of this quality. I pay tribute to all those who participated. I have struggled to find the necessary collective nouns to describe those who have contributed and to picture the full expertise and eminence on which this House has been drawing. We have heard from a red box of former Ministers and from a gang not of four but of five of the original Labour rebels who defied the Whips in October 1971 to endorse the EEC application. It has been like a journey to the past. Looking to the future, we have also had a bureau of former European commissioners, and I pay tribute to the excellent contributions of my noble friends Lord Tugendhat and Lord Brittan and to those of the noble Lords, Lord Kinnock and Lord Clinton-Davis. We have also had former civil servants and MEPs. This strength in depth is what makes this House so special. It also enables us to perform our crucial constitutional role.
I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and all his colleagues on the European Union Committee, to my noble friend Lord Goodlad and his colleagues on the Constitution Committee and to the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and his colleagues on the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee. They supplied us with some detailed reports that will be enormously useful to us as we proceed to the Committee stage.
In his outstanding speech, my noble friend Lord Howell set the agenda for the debate. He staked out the intellectual and political ground not only for this debate but for the debates that will follow in Committee and on Report on this legislation. As my noble friend rightly observed in what seems, at this late hour, to have been several lifetimes ago, it is the function of this Chamber to scrutinise and improve legislation and, in the context of this Bill, to ensure that an intergovernmental treaty is imported into our domestic law sensitively, appropriately and with as many parliamentary safeguards built into it as possible.
It is a well worn canard and a travesty of the truth to describe the Conservative Party as being in any sense anti-European. It is not true now, and it is certainly not true historically, despite what the noble Lord, Lord McNally, said at the outset of the debate about how the Conservatives were whipping up anti-European sentiment. I did not like the way he looked at me when he said “Every twitch of his body is hostile”. It is not; of course it is not, and he should know that. I have a solid record of being a Euro-enthusiast. I never deviate from that, and I will not.
The noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, said that the Conservative Party blew hot and cold. The noble Baroness, Lady Quin, said that the Conservatives were not a credible alternative Government, as if in some
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We stand on our record. It was Sir Winston Churchill who first called for European unity; it was Harold Macmillan who first applied to join the EEC; and it was Ted Heath who signed the treaty of accession. All the party’s senior figures in opposition—Ted Heath himself, my noble friend Lady Thatcher, Willie Whitelaw and Reggie Maudling—put their shoulders to the wheel on behalf of the “Yes” campaign in 1975, and both the previous amending treaties—the Single European Act and Maastricht—were carried through by Conservative Governments. As my noble friend Lord Astor pointed out, the only major party ever to call for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union was the Labour Party, back in its dark days of the 1980s. I happily and readily describe myself as a pro-European, and I know that that goes for many of my colleagues both here and in another place.
The question now is not: in or out? The question is: what sort of Europe do we want, and how do we best engage with it in pursuit of our national best interest? For better or for worse, this treaty has been negotiated and signed. As my noble friend Lord Howell pointed out, this House does not have the power to change the terms of the treaty. What we can and must do is ensure that the treaty of Lisbon is embodied in UK law in the best possible way. That means that we must avoid any gold-plating. We must also ensure that every possible device for accountability is put in place. That is of particular concern to this House.
We had some important contributions on aid programmes, including that from the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich; and my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, made a stirring speech about how Europe could help the third world through those programmes.
How right my noble friend Lady Hanham was to seek to disentangle the Home Office from the Ministry of Justice. My noble friend Lord Astor of Hever raised crucial issues on defence. We must also reflect on some ideas put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford.
Important contributions have also been made on some vital provisions that we must now spend time considering in Committee. The noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, gave a fascinating analysis of the charter, and the noble Lord, Lord Jay, made a thoughtful speech including a lot of points about which we need to think carefully, as did the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hannay. With all their experience, what they said merits closer scrutiny.
As the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, we can in this House substantially improve the legislation. Like him, I sincerely hope that Ministers will approach the amendments to be tabled in the House with an open mind, particularly on the passerelle provisions, especially in the light of the persuasive comments of my noble friend Lord Goodlad.
I have worked with the Minister on several occasions, and I hope that I do not again blight her career by saying that I have always found her to be constructive,
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