European Union (Amendment) Bill

With his usual distinction, the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, has done the service to the Committee of trying to disentangle the issues of what is a constitution and what is a treaty. He also has done us the service of trying to flesh out the difference between allegations made from one side of the Committee and those from the other. Like others who have declared their positions during these debates, the first political meeting I went to was called by Mr Grimond, held in the town where I then lived, in favour of the Common Market. I was in favour of that and, as a teenager, went to that meeting with great enthusiasm, not least because my father was one of five brothers who had served in the Armed Forces. One brother died in the RAF. My father was in the Desert Rats and survived. They all believed, as I did, that the community of the European nations should come together and do what they could to create reconciliation in Europe. I believed in the ideas of Maritain, Mounier, Monnet, De Gasperi and others who had created the European Community. Throughout the 1970s, alongside others who fought for that idea, in the difficult environment of Liverpool where I was a Member of Parliament, I fought in favour of the retention of our membership of the European Community when the then Labour Government called a referendum, which was the right thing to have done. It was right also when I stood alongside the late Peter Shore and the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, and argued for a referendum in favour of Maastricht, although I was in favour and they were against. It is right that there should be a referendum now on the Lisbon treaty. The reason why I think that, and I agree with my noble friend Lord Owen on this, is that this is an issue of trust. The question placed before the electorate at the last general election was clear. Like other noble Lords, I have been out on the streets in the most recent local elections campaigning for candidates of different political persuasions—I am an independent Peer, so I can do that—and I heard again and again people raising their concerns about this matter. The issue for them is one of trust. They ask why it is that they were promised the opportunity to vote in a referendum on the Lisbon treaty when it is now being withdrawn. We are in grave danger of misunderstanding the feeling among many people who believe that elites are driving them into something of which they are not in favour. That is what the House has to consider. The goal for the European Community that the original founding fathers had in mind was a good and noble one, but in some ways it has left people behind. In that sense the noble Lords, Lord Pearson and Lord Willoughby de Broke, and others have expressed a sentiment that we should at least be alive to in this House. To drive this on without any consideration for those concerns would be a huge error. And what is it that we are so frightened of? I have no fear of campaigning in a referendum, and indeed if it were on the referendum question that was begged by some of my former friends in another place recently—whether we should remain a member of the European Union—I would argue that we should. Surely that is not a question we should be frightened to put to the people of this country. I am concerned that we, in these confined spaces and rather refined environment, are losing sight of that.