European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, noble Lords are not witnessing attempted identity theft. The noble Lord, Lord Denham, is down on the original list of speakers but has regretfully withdrawn. He is far more fastidious than I. I am not, however, speaking in the gap because my name should have been on the list and is on a revised list. I apologise and will not detain your Lordships very long. I make it absolutely clear from the beginning where I stand on this. I voted no in the last referendum and I am against ever-closer union. It is not an objective that I hold dear for reasons to which I shall come in a moment. I am delighted to see the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, is present. I never thought that I would take one of his phrases as my text but he is one of the most sensible and—if I may say so without sounding patronising—balanced and well informed Members of this House. He told us that we should not look too closely at what is in the treaty or the constitution but rather that we should be infused by the spirit behind it, which is very beautiful and moving. I am sure that he was genuine about that. However, my problem with that approach is that I find the general manifesto of the Communist Party very moving. As I understand it, its objectives are from each according to his ability and unto each according to his needs, which has an almost biblical simplicity about it and I should have thought would have appealed to the author of the sermon on the mount. But when you look at what the Communist Party has done and the gap between its aspirations and achievements, you are reminded of the gap between the aspirations of the European Community and what it has done. I heard the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, say that you can reform the common agricultural policy. How much reform has there been of the common agricultural policy in the past 40 years? It is evil, it is selfish, it is expensive and the effect that it has impoverishing poor people around the world is wicked. There is no other word for it. I can remember very well one of my former colleagues in the other House—he is not in his place here at the moment—saying that we had to join the Common Market because that was the only way that we could change the common agricultural policy. Good luck to him. The common fisheries policy, which has been mentioned, is not so much wicked as absolutely disgusting. What it does is disgusting, and we all know it. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, appreciates that. I am only sorry that I am not in a position to compliment the noble Lord, Lord Renwick of Clifton, who gave one of the best speeches that I have ever heard on the Common Market, as I prefer to call it. It was factual, it was without hyperbole and there was hardly an adjective in it from one end to another. Unlike other Members from the Foreign Office who grace our Benches, he took a very cold-headed and realistic view of the Common Market. The problem with those who join us from the Foreign Office is that they remind me so much of a telephone call that I had in New York when Charles de Gaulle vetoed us. That afternoon I was working in a bank. I was living in New York at the time. I got a telephone call saying, ““Isn’t it marvellous news? Have you heard? De Gaulle has just vetoed us””. I said, ““I think it is marvellous news; I am damned if I see why you do, Richard””. He was a Foreign Office official up in the consulate-general office. He said, ““Don’t you see? Within six months, they will be bringing us the crown of Europe on a platter””. He believed it, that is what the Foreign Office believes, and that is where it is so wrong. It will always go on believing it, because it is very deeply imbued in it. There is that delightful man, the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond, with whom I have jousted a couple of times about European aircraft. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Lee, is not in his place. His grasp on reality seems to have deserted him since he joined the Liberal Democrats. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, talked not about our giving up sovereignty but sharing sovereignty. I tried to explain that concept once to my constituents in Dudley many years ago. I said: ““Shared sovereignty is quite simple. We get together in a room with a lot of other people, and we have a piece in telling them what to do and they have a piece in telling us what to do””. That is what shared sovereignty means. If anyone wishes to dispute that interpretation, I will gladly give way. My constituents said, ““Oh. We do not actually want to share in telling other people what to do and we are damned if we want them telling us what to do””. So I am afraid to say to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that demonstrates that the concept of shared sovereignty did not have much appeal to my constituents. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, I think, spoke on this point, although I was not in the Chamber; I was listening to the debate in my room. The European Union has some very good things in its record for which we should be very grateful, particularly the civilising influence that the EU has had on the countries of eastern Europe and the fact that it has eliminated the death penalty from the statute book of many countries. We should be very grateful to our friends in Europe that it has accomplished that. However, it is very easy to over-egg the cake with respect to the European Union. I regard the idea that it is only because we have a European Union that there has not been a third world war in Europe as absolute poppycock. In my view, there are three reasons why there has never been a war since 1945. One is that the vast majority of Germans today are ashamed of what their fathers and grandfathers did. Of those who are not ashamed of what their grandfathers did, many do not want to have visited upon them again what was visited upon them between 1939 and 1945. If anyone does not fall into those two groups, they are influenced by the fact that we have the bomb. The French have the bomb and the Russians have the bomb. The Germans do not have the bomb and we are not going to allow them to have it. That is why there will not be third world war in Europe. Anyone who thinks that if the bomb did not exist, another Hitler in 25 or 50 years’ time would be deterred from advancing into France just because his country was a member of the European Coal and Steel Community is completely out of touch with reality. There is one last matter that I wish to touch on. I said that I voted no, like the noble Lord, Lord Monson, but I actually walked through the streets of Birmingham at the front row of a parade in which Mr Benn was also a participant. From that time on, my father in law was absolutely convinced that I was a communist. I never succeeded in dissuading him from that conviction. The noble Lord, Lord McNally, prayed in aid some remarks of Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. I, too, thought that some of Lord Jenkins’ remarks were overwhelmingly persuasive. I remember in 1975 that the Parliamentary Labour Party held a debate on how we should vote in a referendum. The debate went on for five days. I was a fairly new boy in the PLP—even more diffident than I am today—and I did not participate in that debate, to my eternal regret. Roy Jenkins said two things in that debate. First, he said that he had never had much time for kith and kin in politics. We all knew what he was referring to. He was trying to get people to recall Ian Smith, UDI and Rhodesia and to persuade members of the Labour Party that we should vote for membership of the Common Market. When he said that, my mind went back to when I was learning to be a chartered accountant in Canada, when I once took part in an audit commission at an engine company. There was a fellow with us called Doug Neil, who was a Canadian. The other fellows on the audit commission said to me, ““Do you know about Doug?””. I said, ““No, what is there to know about Doug?””. They said that Doug had lost three brothers on the same day at Dieppe. Therefore, I have a lot of time for kith and kin in politics. The second thing, which I shall never forget, that Roy Jenkins said in that debate was his description of his visits to Washington for meetings with the governors of the International Monetary Fund. He bemoaned his fate. He said, ““Do you know what used to happen to me? All the European finance Ministers””—there were only six of them then—““used to get together in a room to agree a position, and I was excluded from those meetings. All that I could do was to sit in another room alone with the US Treasury Secretary””. I thought, ““How lucky could you be?””. When I heard Roy Jenkins make those two remarks, I realised that I did not share his values or those of people who thought like him; nor did I share his political judgment. It is for those reasons that I am not in favour of ever-closer union.