European Union (Amendment) Bill

I should have congratulated the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on the new addition to his party in the House of Commons. I hope that it is not the last from the Conservative Benches. I realise that the overlap in the Conservative Party and the UK Independence Party is a matter of great delicacy which we will see many on the Conservative Benches struggling with as we deal with the Bill. I do not agree with him about the absolute defence of British sovereignty. When I was a history student, I read through some of the debates on the Irish question in the late 19th century. For the unionists, the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament was absolutely inalienable. One could not allow Dublin, let alone Edinburgh, to have its own Parliament, because that would somehow destroy the essence of what was the United Kingdom, which of course was about English supremacy. The noble Lord should also have noted that David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, in a rather good speech on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation at Chatham House two weeks ago, proposed common funding for NATO defence—a common budget for defence operations which would be a huge loss of British sovereignty. In that respect David Cameron recognises that we are in a different world from 50 years ago, let alone 100 years ago. The leader of the Conservative Party recognises such a pooling of sovereignty as worth while at least in the Atlantic context, even if in the European context he still stubs his toe on those who do not speak English, who are therefore not trustworthy. We have US bases on British soil, and they are an immense invasion of British sovereignty. I passed RAF Menwith Hill at sundown two weeks ago and stopped to watch US soldiers taking down the RAF flag that marks the British presence there. There were no British soldiers present although there were one or two MoD police outside. It is a huge incursion of British sovereignty which most of us recognise to be worth while for our security. The right-wing conservatives in the United States, with whom some on the Conservative Benches are highly familiar, believe that American defence of sovereignty is indeed absolute. Justice Scalia of the US Supreme Court and others argue that the United States cannot accept that international law overrides American domestic law. I do not think that we in this country wish to accept that; we accept that, in a changing world, international law has to limit domestic law. So we are talking about a number of international obligations—of which the European Union is the most extensive—of a political character. I should like to remind the Committee of what Sir Alec Douglas Home said in June 1971 when opening the debate on Britain’s application to join the European Community. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart—since one of the great myths is that no one told us what we were going into—that Sir Alec, in his first sentence, said that the first thing he wished to say was that, "““our application is a step of the utmost political significance … I don’t think that it is true to suggest that the political case has been allowed to go by default or that the political implications have been suppressed””." He went on to talk about the desirability of co-operation in foreign policy. He said that, "““it is inevitable, and I use that word advisedly, that Western Europe will begin to carry more of the burden of its own defence””." In 1971, he was clearly talking about foreign policy and defence co-operation as part of the implications of joining the European Community. He ended by saying: "““Perhaps my real fear for this country at this moment is that we are in danger of getting out of date in our thinking””." That could be a motto for the UK Independence Party, but not, I hope, for most of the remaining speeches in this Committee stage.