European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I proceed with some hesitation and anxiety. It is not the first time in my career that I find myself speaking from the Back Benches out of line with the Front Bench, and it is something that I hesitate to do even on this occasion. I do so because I am above all concerned with what is likely to be the least damaging outcome of this long series of transactions for British interests in the long run and our position within the European Union. I start from a premise which regards referenda as alien devices in our constitution. I would not have had a referendum in 1975—I shall come back to that later. Important decisions of this kind are to be taken by a democratically elected Parliament. We get into a bad habit if we go on down the referendum road. It is with only that question that I intend to deal. I do so by looking at the dreadful warning of the 1975 referendum. I know that it came out with the right result for almost everyone at that time. That was a piece of luck and depended on a number of other much more fundamental factors. My fear is that a referendum on this issue under this Government at this time will produce an outcome which is disadvantageous to our country. I draw two lessons in that respect from our experience in 1975. Nobody can doubt that the decision then being taken was of fundamental importance. Macmillan was the Prime Minister who made our first application to join the Community in 1961. He opened the debate in August 1961 by saying that it was, "““perhaps the most fateful and forward-looking policy decision in our peacetime history””." He was right about that. His successor, Edward Heath, when he came to open the debate on the White Paper in October 1971, said: "““I do not think that any Prime Minister has stood at this Box in time of peace and asked the House to take a positive decision of such importance as I am asking it to take tonight””.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/10/71; col. 2202.]." Those were the views of two distinguished statesmen about the fundamental question of our accession to the European Community, as it then was. Neither of them considered at that time that it was necessary to depart from our traditional democratic parliamentary method of deciding it. It was left to Parliament to decide. The first lesson that I draw is that it was not necessary, sought or argued that we should in relation to a decision of such importance of course proceed to the people. It was taken for granted by everyone that it should be taken by Parliament. We came to have the referendum in 1975 not because of any fundamental change in that issue but because of conflicts, tension and strife within the then Labour Government. That is the sharp difference. It was recognised until that happened that a referendum was not to be desired. There are three reasons to be drawn from that for believing that it would be wrong to have one now. At least that referendum addressed beyond any doubt a single, intelligible, major, fundamental issue, and that was the issue that was presented to the electorate at that time. The electorate were not presented with a 1,000-page bundle of miscellaneous documents—despite my diligence over many years, I confess that I have not read them all; I am not a master of many of the details. However, I could have coped with the 1975 referendum question, which was: "““Do you think the UK should stay in the European Community (the Common Market)?””." That question is relatively simple to understand and hugely fundamental. If you are to have a referendum at all, that is the kind of question to put—not this extraordinary shambles that provokes such dissent and the debates that we are having. Moreover, if the Government had failed to secure the affirmative resolution that they wanted from that referendum, that would have had serious implications, but only for the United Kingdom. We were asking ourselves what we should do; it did not matter one jot to the well established, existing Community members. On this occasion it is quite different, having seen the impact throughout the Community of votes that have gone the wrong way, whether in Denmark, France, the Netherlands or—where it may go the wrong way tomorrow—Ireland. It was a different, fundamental question—very simple, and with a referendum quite different from ours. Even so, although it went the right way, having the referendum in 1975 damaged the interests of the United Kingdom. First, it eroded our credibility, standing and influence within the Community. Happily, I am able to say that restoring our credibility and effectiveness in the Community thereafter was undertaken overwhelmingly under the leadership of my noble friend Lady Thatcher, but that was repairing damage done even by a referendum that had been won. Even then, it had a damaging effect on us, because it also distracted from other business that the UK should have been addressing and had a divisive impact on the Government of that time.