EU: UK Membership

My Lords, when I was preparing my remarks for the debate of the noble Lord, Lord McNally—on which I congratulate him—it rather surprisingly occurred to me that if I am not the youngest speaker in the debate, I am certainly one of the youngest. At the same time, I am the Member taking part who has longest been a Member of this House. Of course, that is because I am a hereditary Peer. Over that period, two constitutional topics have generally dominated the debate on this kind of occasion: the composition of this House and Europe. As I thought about it, it struck me that there was perhaps one interesting similarity which the two topics share. If I go back to the first 15 years or so of my membership of your Lordships’ House, the debate about composition was dominated by whether hereditary Peers should remain. From the perspective of the hereditary peerage, the position was pretty clear: the British constitution was such that if the peerage was conferred on one, it was conferred on one’s male heirs until they finally expired, enabling them by inheritance to legislate in your Lordships’ House. It was the constitutional position but, as we all know, the world has moved on. Of course, one of the problems with the European debate is that the world has moved on, but many parts of it are still hijacked by the argument over whether we in Britain should be in or out of Europe. This was the issue at the start. I recall some of my first political activity, campaigning in the referendum. But we have now seen the evolution of that Europe into a new kind of sui generis system of decision-making by the European nations in an interdependent world. The issue is not now about sovereignty or loss of sovereignty, but how it is exercised. That involves a new mixture of European intergovernmental and community method systems. It is quite clear that what we have in place today will change. But what will not happen is some kind of big bang, and a return to the old intergovernmentalism of the immediate post-war period. To believe that is fantasy, and seems to be curiously addictive and delusory. Instead, we will have a kind of continuous state of evolution. The danger is that we will have permanent revolution rather than no change at all. The first place to start increasing our influence in the wider world through the European Union is for this country to wean itself off the kind of addiction to the question of whether or not we should remain in Europe. If we concentrate on that, we are neo-Jacobites. As I said to your Lordships on a previous occasion, however much they drank to the king across the water, he never came back. If we move on, we can then collectively, as a nation, start to address the myriad real issues and abuses that we find in the European political process, in a manner likely to maximise our chances of actually putting things right in a way which we would like. Over the next few weeks and months, we are obviously going to see a lot of debate about the ill fated constitutional treaty and the proposed new treaty. I do not really care what any new treaty might be called; what I care about is what it does. I do not want to have—and am not prepared to vote for—a treaty which in some way substitutes Europe for my own country. Maybe the name matters to other people. So be it. So it is quite right that the idea of calling the treaty ““the constitutional treaty”” has been set on one side. Equally, it seems to me that the concept of the rotating presidency is no longer appropriate for the contemporary world, and the EU therefore needs some sort of boss. I am not all that concerned about what that person may be called. What matters is what he does and how he does it. Equally, the role of the European Union in foreign policy can, on occasion, be constructive and helpful, but I do not want to see it become a replacement for our own foreign policy. If it needs somebody in charge of it—I dare say it does—I do not really mind what he is called. Again, we must find a name that is acceptable to other people and, therefore, acceptable to all. In this debate, we must get behind the words. One of the problems across Europe is that words that sound very similar in different European languages sometimes have very different connotations and nuances of meaning in reality. We must try to find acceptable words to describe agreed and accepted functions, powers and policies. In doing this, in the context of proposals that may come from an intergovernmental conference, we must recognise that the policies will come forward in a package. We are moving from the a la carte menu to the table d’hote. It is a package, and it is self-indulgent at ratification stage to reverse engineer what is on the table and then attempt to cherry-pick the best bits. If we do not like it, we should vote against it and lose the lot. This phenomenon poses particular difficulties for opposition parties in our country. Domestically, they perform precisely that kind of cherry-picking on a daily basis in this Parliament. In Britain, we have not yet got to grips with the problem of what domestic opposition parties should do when on a Europe-wide basis they may be the majority. I do not think my party in the late 1990s and the early part of this century or the Labour Party in the early 1990s managed to get to grips with this problem. By definition, some time—and like my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, I hope soon—the Conservative Party will be back in government. The problems that this can throw up are graphically illustrated by the debate in the Conservative Party about where its MEPs should sit in the European Parliament. It is not a question of whether a party should sit with party A or party B; it is a matter of the party positioning itself where the nation’s and its own best interests are served in the circumstances of the case, and that may change over time. The one thing that is absolutely certain is that if you want to get the wrong answer, you start by asking the wrong question. The other trouble in this country is that debates about European issues tend to get exaggerated and polarised because of our two-party system. The advocates of what is on the table tend to overstate their case, and the Opposition, in opposition to the Government of the day, tend to overstate the criticisms and objections. We end up by distorting the implications of what is in front of us. Whatever the new treaty may be—I have no idea—the truth of the matter is that it will not be the precursor of the new Jerusalem, nor will it be the end of civilisation as we know it and the winding up of 1,000 years of British freedom. Equally, I share the concerns for parliamentary democracy that the increasing prevalence of and reliance on referendums poses. After all, they are invariably a plebiscite on the popularity of the Government of the day on the day of the poll. We have to have a hard-nosed assessment of the crucial meaning of the changes that may be included in any treaty and what they mean for us in Britain in the real world. In the context of our foreign policy, itis important that what we do seems sensible and understandable to those outside these shores, be they on mainland Europe, across the Atlantic in Washington, in Moscow or in Beijing. I believe that the best way to further our nation’s best interests through the European Union is to be seen and recognised as sensible people furthering our national interests by doing sensible things for sensible reasons. That has the added advantage of being good domestic politics.