My Lords, I am pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lang, although not his line. Instead, I return to the 1960s and 1970s, when some of us were campaigning for the United Kingdom to join what was then called the Common Market, when it was supported by very few in the Labour Party. Those on the far left described it as a “capitalist conspiracy” and some of us were held back in politics because of our support for Europe.
Thankfully, by the time of the referendum in 1975, more had recognised that the EU was not just a force for peace, but a way of maintaining high environmental, safety and social standards, even when we had a right-wing Government in the United Kingdom. That referendum was won not by the slim majority of the 2016 referendum, but by a margin of two to one. I was pleased to play a part by helping to organise the campaign in Scotland.
But even that convincing majority never silenced the critics—the little Englanders who kept on and on with their anti-EU campaign and many false stories about Europe, which are too numerous to elaborate. Indeed, the current Prime Minister promulgated some of them. All of this resulted in David Cameron, like a rabbit caught in the headlights, conceding a totally unnecessary referendum to try—unsuccessfully, as it turned out—to appease his critics in the Tory party. With a campaign of dubious funding and even more dodgy publicity, they obtained just a slim majority, which took even them by surprise. As a result, they have struggled to negotiate this complicated and inadequate deal, which seeks to unstitch 40 years of really fruitful co-operation.
Today we have the unenviable choice of supporting a poor deal or rejecting it in favour of the even worse option of no deal. So, I will support the Government in this Bill not because I welcome the deal but because
it is the less bad option. In doing so, while accepting the deal we are not endorsing it—that is a crucial difference. We also reserve the right to seek to renegotiate, as well as review, and ultimately—in my view—to seek to rejoin the European Union, which I believe will be increasingly successful.
Those who campaigned for decades to have us leave cannot deny us the same right to persuade the British people to think again. For those of us who fought the campaign in the 1970s, and the youngsters I believe will now join us, it is the time now to gird up our loins and prepare to renew the fight to restore our rightful position within the European Union.
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