European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, like my noble and learned friend Lord Howe, I have always been against referendums. To take up the point addressed to my noble friend Lord Brittan, I was against referendums when I was a European Commissioner, when chairman of the Conservative Party, a Cabinet Minister, a Member of Parliament and director of the Conservative research department. Despite my boundless regard for the Shadow Leader of the House, I am not going to change my opinion today, next week, next month or next year. I have just two points to make this late in the debate and I will do so briefly. One argument we have heard is that we should vote in favour of a referendum in order to keep the Government clean—a big enterprise but that is the proposition. We owe it to public integrity to vote for a referendum because of what the Government said in their manifesto. I do not doubt the sincerity of what the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said on this. There are perhaps one or two question marks about one or two other people’s arguments in favour of this proposition which sound occasionally a tad meretricious. I do not want to throw myself on the assegais in defence of the Government’s honour, and occasionally when I listen to their arguments about why they have been against a referendum—something they should never have promised in the first place—I am able to contain my enthusiasm within the bounds of public decorum. I do not want to get too deep into that argument but to make one simple point. Confessional time: I have written three-and-a-half manifestos. I have been a member of Governments who I suspect have not always kept every manifesto promise they have made and on which they were elected. If in this House we get into a constitutional tizzy every time a Government do not keep an election promise we are going to require a productivity rate of stellar, Asian proportions. So it is not a hugely good argument, although it is a reasonable political point for my noble friends to make. I breezed into one or two of the debates in Committee. I have not taken part in the Bill: it reminds me a little of Francis Pym’s observation that it is dog and bone for any debate in this country on Europe—the same old bone dug up time after time. During the debates that I heard the most interesting and agile argument was made, not surprisingly, by my noble friend Lord Forsyth, was a terrific debater in the other Chamber too, from which we have both been ejected, and who is a terrific debater in this Chamber. My noble friend said that this treaty was very different from Maastricht, for example, because we put the Maastricht treaty into our manifesto, we were elected on it in 1992 with 43 per cent of the vote, and, therefore, there was no requirement on us to accept the case for a referendum. It is true that we were elected—some of us, not me—on that 1992 manifesto. I do not seem to remember every Conservative who was voted in on that manifesto taking the view that they should support the Maastricht treaty. I was some way off. I had to read about it in the South China Morning Post, but I seem to recall that a lot of people did not take the manifesto argument in that period, and there were even Members presently in this House who voted against the Maastricht treaty and voted in favour of a referendum on it. I shall come to that in a moment. Secondly, my noble friend’s argument does not take account of other European treaties and legislation on which we have not had referendums. Our old friend the Single European Act, the biggest practical extension of qualified majority voting we have ever seen, was driven through on a guillotine on a three-line whip, as quite a few of us in this Chamber know very well. I am only sorry that my noble friend Lord Tebbit is not in place, because he was party chairman at the time. There is a third issue. As some noble Lords will know, I had something to do with the 1992 election campaign which we fought with the Maastricht treaty in our manifesto. I recall the advice that we gave to candidates, for example, in something called Questions of Policy. I shall not quote it, because it might be a shade embarrassing. The advice was that if candidates were asked why we should not have a referendum, they should say that this was not part of our constitutional practice; and we quoted again and again the reasons against a referendum, adduced with great eloquence and force by my noble friend Lady Thatcher in her speech on 11 March 1975. That speech was much quoted when, in this House, we voted on 14 July 1993 on whether or not there should be a referendum on the Maastricht treaty. Several of my noble friends here today went back and quoted that speech in extenso. I want to quote another speech made in that debate. It was wise at the time and is singularly wise today. It was made by my old boss, the late Lord Whitelaw. At the end of his remarks arguing against a referendum, he said: "““The other place has rejected a referendum … that is a fact which must surely be of crucial importance in the argument … Your Lordships’ House is now being asked to overturn this very clear decision. This proposal cannot be represented as the action of a revising Chamber, neither does it provide any opportunity for compromise. It is in fact the clear rejection of the elected Chamber’s decision on a constitutional and voting question. For good measure, that is being proposed by the unelected House of Lords””." He continued: "““No Prime Minister—certainly no Prime Minister that I have ever known—and no government or House of Commons could be expected to accept such a clear challenge and reverse their decision. Therefore, even if the vote were carried in your Lordships’ House, the result would not be a referendum. Instead, there would be a damaging controversy between the two Houses and further delay, which would do much harm to our nation””.—[Official Report, 14/7/93; col. 263.]" I say amen to that.