European Union (Amendment) Bill

No doubt that it is a phenomenon with which the noble Lord is familiar. That leaves us with the Conservatives, who I fear will oppose this amendment. One of their problems is their belief that William Hague lost a general election because he indulged in ““too much Europe””; in other words he played the European card. I have to put it to my erstwhile Conservative friends that he did not. He played the currency card. He said that the election was a last minute referendum on our membership of the currency. That was not so because everyone knew by then that we were going to get a referendum on the currency. So I dispute the fact that William Hague played the Europe card. To be very charitable to my old friends, I think their continued affection for our membership of the European Union may stem from base ignorance, an ignorance inspired no doubt by their guilt at having led us into this quagmire in the first place back in 1972. So I have another quote for your Lordships, this time from the leader of the Conservative Party, Mr David Cameron. He was attending a public meeting on 17 April in Leeds, organised by the Yorkshire Post. The meeting went on for one and a quarter hours but only one question, to Mr Cameron, was applauded by the audience. The question went as follows: "““Why would you rather be in Europe rather than govern? Why don’t you want a landslide victory that that policy would give you?””—" that is, governing and not being enslaved to the European Union. Mr Cameron’s answer is enlightening: "““The vast majority of the British people want to stay in the EU. From the very next day””—" after we left— "““our businesses will flounder and be unable to export to the European Union””." I assume that Mr Cameron believes that. If so, it shows a degree of ignorance about our relationship with the European Union which can only be described as oceanic. As my noble friends and I have pointed out to your Lordships many times over recent years, the United Kingdom is the EU’s largest client. We buy far more from them than they do from us. I will not go into it all again now, but even the most pessimistic analysis carried out over the past 10 years concludes that leaving the political construct of the European Union and continuing in free trade and firm collaboration with our good friends in Europe would be at the very worst trade-neutral—and, therefore, jobs-neutral. In fact, our business would be set free from Brussels over-regulation, which is put at some 6 per cent of the—