European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, particularly to those who have supported the amendment. It is strange, is it not, that the Conservative Party does not have a view on it? It would have been interesting to hear that. Does it think that a cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership would be helpful, a good thing? Does it agree with the Leader of the House, or does it simply not know? I imagine that our rules of procedure do not allow the Conservative Front Bench to intervene now, so I suppose we will just have to continue in ignorance of its position. As to the contributions that have been made, I take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, who was somewhat overcritical of eurofacts magazine, which is one of the shining lights of truth and reason in the whole debate about our membership of the European Union. The noble Lord suggested that I had written most of it. I stand to be corrected. I may have written one article some time in the past 10 years, but I am ashamed to say that I have not written more, because I would like to be more associated with this truly significant publication. The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and others who objected to the amendment trotted out—I am afraid I have to use that expression—the usual Europhile line, as I said they would in my introductory remarks, that membership is hugely beneficial. He even dropped a clanger when he suggested that 3 million jobs depend on our membership of the European Union as opposed to our trade with it, which is a very different thing. He wisely said that a number of figures are being bandied about, although he put the net cost of our membership in 2006 at £3.9 billion, which was not all that far from the figure of the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, of £4.5 billion. If these figures are being bandied about, why do we not earth them? I assure the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and the Leader of the House, who suggested otherwise that my friends and I would of course accept an unbiased cost-benefit analysis of our membership of the European Union. I am afraid that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, also produced the old canard that the European Union has brought us jobs, peace and security. He is presumably not prepared to consider the suggestion that that is an emperor with no clothes. I have dealt with the jobs. We owe peace and security to NATO and our friends, the United States of America, since the end of the last war. He thinks that youth is swinging towards the European Union, but opinion polls show that youth is actually swinging away from it. The most Eurosceptic sector of British society is the 18 to 25 year-old group, according to many present polls. Whether noble and Europhile Lords like it or not, there is no European Demos. There cannot, therefore, be any European democracy—not for a very long time, or long after this project has failed, as it surely will. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, produced the line that the value of Spain, Portugal, Greece and others joining the European Union and getting rid of their dictatorships is unquantifiable because of the money we have thus saved by not having to support NATO, and so on. That is a difficult debate, but there is of course no reason why any cost-benefit analysis should not look at and pay due credit to it. It is likewise for the new countries of eastern Europe, who owe their membership of the European Union more to the interest of their political classes—many of whom went to work in Brussels, and all on the Brussels pay scale at 10 times their former salaries—than to the real, informed opinion of their peoples. I come to the noble Baroness the Leader of the House, who I am afraid produced again the only line that she can—that the benefits are overwhelming. We had jobs, again: peace and security, we got all of that. We had an estimate of the net £3.9 billion but, as my noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke said, that is not the point. The gross is the point: we pay £12.4 billion gross a year, according to her, to this absurd arrangement that is then filtered through Brussels. Some of that is given back to us, not on projects that we would necessarily choose, but always on projects designed to enhance the reputation of the project. I am afraid that I do not have time to take detailed issue with the noble Baroness on some of the statistics she produced. She says that half our trade is with the European Union; that is what the Europhilic establishment tends to say, but it is of course not true. She means that it is, I am afraid, somewhat less than half of our exports of manufactured goods. If we take the whole of the economy—the export of manufactured goods, our services and transfers, and the return on our investments worldwide—it is acknowledged that around 10 per cent of the British economy trades with its clients in the European Union, some other 10 per cent trades with the rest of the world, and 80 per cent stays right here in the domestic economy. It really is not fair, then, to produce these bland, unchecked and unquantified statements. This amendment tries to quantify them; it would be really reasonable to do that. When I mention Switzerland, the noble Baroness replies that it is not reasonable to suggest that the benefits that Switzerland gets from staying out of the European Union—it is not in the European economic area, unlike Norway, or part of the fax economy—would be very similar to those that we could expect. We could do even better because, as she says, we are bigger. As a bigger client of the European Union, we could clearly do better. Finally, I must ask the Minister: what benefits have we had in any matter she has mentioned, from our membership of the European Union, which we could not have had from simple free trade and friendly collaboration with our neighbours across the Channel? That is a question that needs to be answered, and one which this amendment sought to answer. However, time is moving on and I cannot imagine that your Lordships wish me to divide the House, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 15 had been retabled as Amendment No. 26.] Clause 6 [Parliamentary control of decisions]: