European Union (Amendment) Bill

I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, praised the cohesion funds. I confess at once that the aim of the amendment was not to get at cohesion funds but to get at regional funds, the Labour Party’s attitude to them and to social and labour policy and the Conservative Party’s attitude to that. However, I say to the noble Lords, Lord Jay, Lord Tomlinson and Lord Sewel, that the well known Europhile theory that giving lots of money to the poorer countries in the European Union is eventually good for the British economy is at least debatable, and debatable at much greater length than we have time for now. It does not ring true with many of us who have run international businesses in the real world and who tend to feel that much of this money should go to regions in the world that are poorer than the ones to which it actually goes, and that the United Kingdom would do far better to escape from the overregulation of the European Union and all that goes with it and to take its place in the world beyond the recipients of the cohesion funds—the world of China, India and so on. As I say, the amendment is really aimed at the Labour Government’s response to Mr Brown’s suggestion that regional policy should be repatriated. I should say in response to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House that Mr Brown used the word ““subsidiarity”” in the quotation that I gave at the start of the debate on the amendment. All I can say is that we in the UK Independence Party thoroughly approve of Mr Brown’s proposal that regional policy should be repatriated. As to the Conservative Party, I think that we have taken on board its answer to the question that I put to it. I thought I knew what it was going to be, and I accept that it is, ““We would rather not talk about it””. That is fair enough, but one day it will have to. Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, once again used the expression ““sovereign member states””. He said that this project—I trust that I have made it clear to the noble Lord, Lord Lea, and others that we object to it—is merely sovereign nation states getting together and deciding things. I do not want to prolong the debate—we will come back to it—but I ask how a nation can be sovereign if most of its national law is made beyond its reach and beyond the reach of its elected representatives. The continued use of ““sovereign nation”” to describe the United Kingdom perhaps does not reflect the reality of the position to which we have been unfortunately reduced by our membership of the European Union. Having said that—