EU: Recent Developments

Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Willoughby de Broke

Thursday 16th February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs. In his excellent speech, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford talked about the earlier vision for Europe, and the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, mentioned his own vision for the future of Europe. Well, visions are all very well, but as what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Davidson, would call a “blinkered Europhobe”, I prefer to look at the facts. The plain fact now is that the southern states, what is referred to as the “Club Med”, have been badly failed by the political adventure of the EU and the euro. Nobody, not even the most ardent supporters of the euro—with due respect to the noble Lord, Lord Taverne—can really pretend that, so far, the euro has been a success. The Eurocentrists have had to fall back on the Merkel gambit to justify the pain it is causing to the poorer states. In one of her speeches, she said:

“Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe … If the euro fails, Europe fails”.

The argument appears to be that if you are against the euro or the EU, you are in favour of war. But as the noble Lord, Lord Flight, said in his speech, by any objective measure the euro itself is stoking the fires of national antagonism.

I can well remember the triumphant fanfares when the euro was introduced in 1999. Those of us who predicted that it could never work were dismissed as swivel-eyed, foam-flecked Europhobes hopelessly out of touch with the reality of the new Europe. I just want to remind the House what my noble friend Lord Pearson said as long as 15 years ago in a debate on the European Communities (Amendment) Act, talking about European monetary union:

“Personally, I do not believe that that is a bird which will ever fly, but if it is pushed off the top of the cliff by ignorant politicians I fear that it will do much damage when it crashes to the ground … I believe that civil unrest will become a real probability”.—[Official Report, 31/1/97; col. 1332.]

That was 15 years ago, and who has been proved right? It is the foam-flecked ones who have been right and it is the “blinkered Europhiles” who have been comprehensively and spectacularly proved wrong.

The political imperative behind the euro is so strong that the Eurocrats will go to any lengths, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said in his speech, to keep the political construct of the euro travelling along the road. But let us look at where this Europhile dogma has led us. Instead of the promised stability and prosperity, what do we have? We have riots in Greece, where the taramasalata has hit the fan badly; and we have demonstrations and riots in Italy, in Portugal and in Spain. Indeed, Spain has 50 per cent youth unemployment and 30 per cent total unemployment. That is the reality. Europe has turned into a weapon of mass economic destruction.

What is the remedy prescribed by the EU leeches? It is to take more blood in the form of more wage cuts, more unemployment, lower pensions. “Austerity macht frei” seems to be the remedy prescribed by the Germans, certainly to Greece and to the rest of the “Club Med” members of the eurozone when they are unable to meet the German requisites. They cannot, as one other speaker in the debate has said, turn themselves into Germans.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, can I just say that I find that remark offensive because it likens German economic policy, however wrong we may agree it is, to a camp that practised genocide? I think that that is utterly inappropriate.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

I am sorry that the noble Lord takes it like that. The fact is that the German Finance Minister, Herr Schaeuble, is recommending more and more pain to be inflicted on Greece regardless of the fact that it is going to do the Greek population and Greece’s economy no good at all. That is what austerity is leading to. That is why I used that expression. He is saying that more austerity will bring you free—austerity macht frei. I repeat that.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, asked, will it really be worse for the Greeks or any of the other countries afflicted by the euro to leave it? I agree that it is not going to be easy, but will it be any worse than the pain inflicted by 10, 15 or 20 years of austerity, low employment, no jobs and lower pensions? That cannot be a viable alternative in a democratic country.

Worse, almost, than the financial pain which the euro ideology is inflicting on Europe is the failure and erosion of democracy. Ireland, Portugal, Greece and even Italy are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the European Commission. When the European Commission says jump, all they can ask is, “How high?”. I remind your Lordships of what happened to the Greek Prime Minister when he threatened to ask his countrymen whether they wanted to submit to the harsh criteria of the bailout fund. He was immediately given a sharp lesson in Euro democracy and told that, if he had the referendum, he would be out. In fact, he was out anyway, and there was, of course, no referendum. It is ironic that what scared the pants off the bureaucracy was the prospect of a democratic vote in Greece, the country that gave the world democracy.

I do not really understand why our Government are spending quite so much political capital and time supporting what is going on in Europe now. Our membership of the EU costs us £18 billion a year; EU regulations and red tape are costing our businesses fortunes every single year. We have lost control of our immigration policy; we have lost control of our energy policy; and the emissions directives have forced us into enormously expensive wind and energy policies which are putting many people in this country into fuel poverty. On the evidence so far, if the EU is the answer, we have been asking the wrong question.

However, I want to end on a more positive note. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, said in his opening speech that he supported the Commonwealth. We should stop being quite so Eurocentric and look, as he said, at our interests in the Commonwealth and beyond. After all, we have many ties with it, both legal and financial. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is not here, but I cannot resist reminding him of the words of Winston Churchill when he was challenged by De Gaulle. He said:

“If Britain must choose between Europe and the open sea, she must always choose the open sea”.

The political construct of the EU is yesterday’s idea. The future lies with the growth economies of the Commonwealth, the USA, South America, China and the Pacific rim, not with the moribund, zero-growth EU.

I remind the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, whom I am pleased to see in his place, that the UN has 193 members. 166 of those are nation states that do not belong to the EU, yet they manage to trade perfectly well with each other and with members of the European Union without being stifled by the panoply of directives and regulations that emanate from the Commission.

To prosper in this world we do not need to belong to the EU club and its stifling rules. There is only one club in the world that we need to belong to—that is the world, and we are already a member.

Wind Turbines (Minimum Distance from Residential Premises) Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Teverson and Lord Willoughby de Broke

Friday 10th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

My Lords, I strongly support the Bill produced and so eloquently proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Reay, and supported generally by Members of this House. The Bill would not be needed were it not for our foolish commitment to sign up to the EU requirements. Our renewables obligation requires us to produce 20 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2020. I hope that the whole House, including the Minister in her reply, will bear that in mind. That requirement means that one particular energy generator, wind, is guaranteed a market share and a price—which is underwritten by the taxpayer, regardless of how competitive that energy source is.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said that he believes that wind power is competitive on cost and efficiency. I do not know how he can say that with a straight face. A moment's study of the facts will show that to be completely nonsensical. Let us take costs first. Here I take the facts from the report of a House of Lords committee on The Economics of Renewable Energy, 2008-09, which said that onshore wind is twice as expensive as coal, gas or nuclear; that is before taking into account the cost of transmitting the power produced by this uneconomic source to the National Grid, which is a substantial added-on cost. The result is that—thanks to the requirement to produce our 20 per cent by 2020, as we are told by the EU—our consumers will be forced to pay twice as much for a proportion of their electricity requirement.

Turning to efficiency, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and other noble Lords, there is the well known problem of intermittency and fluctuation. Who has not driven down any road recently, particularly during the past two winters, and seen wind turbines totally stationary and not generating a single watt of electricity for weeks on end? The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, said that he had driven down this morning and seen two attractive turbines in Dagenham. Perhaps he could tell us whether they were revolving and producing electricity. This morning I drove to the station from my house and passed a wind turbine which was running a road-warning sign; that was stationary. Coming in on the train from Moreton-in-Marsh to Slough, I saw a large factory outside Slough with four large wind turbines and not one of them was moving a single inch; they were not generating a single watt of electricity. They are grossly inefficient.

The problem is that in order to maintain a stable electricity supply, wind turbines have to have a permanent back-up, whether they need it or not; it has to run all the time. That may not be a problem at the moment because such a tiny proportion of our power is produced from wind, but it will become a problem if we ever hope to achieve this absurd 20 per cent target of our energy from renewables and particularly wind.

Perhaps in answering the debate the noble Baroness could tell us how many extra fossil-fuel or nuclear power stations would have to be built simply to support the extra percentage of power which is due to be produced by wind, according to the aspirations. She may not have the answer at her fingertips, but perhaps she could write to me about that and put the answer in the Library. It may be a little technical.

[Lord Teverson]

I would like to put something that the noble Lord said into context; it is an important point. Clearly wind is an intermittent technology. Generally, the utilisation of the UK generating capacity is about 50 to 60 per cent anyway; it is quite staggering how inefficient it is as a whole, and wind is probably a lot worse than that. To put the issue in context, the other half of the equation on renewables and intermittent renewables is that, in terms of the distribution grid, you have to move towards smart grids. How you use those is part of the total package. You have to do both and one helps to solve the other. That is how the overall energy strategy works. The argument itself is not conclusive.

[Lord Willoughby de Broke]

I think it is conclusive. The noble Lord has made my point for me. There are huge added costs in creating a wind grid which will feed into the national grid. That problem is not even close to being addressed, let alone solved yet.

I turn briefly to the environmental impact of wind farms. As the noble Lord, Lord Williams of Elvel, said, they are scarring some of our most beautiful landscapes. He mentioned Wales. I have been to Wales on many occasions and seen the increase in these dreadful wind farms over beautiful parts of mid-Wales. One noble Lord mentioned a figure of 160, but there are proposals for 800 new wind turbines in mid-Wales that will scar the Cambrian mountains beyond redemption. Each turbine will be 425 feet high—higher than St Paul's Cathedral. Not surprisingly, local communities have come together to oppose this despoliation and vandalism of the countryside in pursuit of a chimera—a dream—that is unachievable. The Department of Energy and Climate Change must know that there is no chance of achieving these dream targets.

I go back to the report of the Select Committee. With masterly understatement, in paragraph 227, it summed up the opinion of its witnesses on the Government’s target on renewables. It stated:

“Witnesses’ views of the target ranged from challenging to unachievable”.

We know from Sir Humphrey Appleby that “challenging” is the equivalent of “unachievable”. We should say that the targets are fully and wholly unachievable.

I will present my own evidence. My electricity is supplied by Haven Power, which thoughtfully provides its customers with a statement detailing the fuel mix for the electricity that it supplies. In 2010, 33.7 per cent of its electricity was generated by coal, 54.1 per cent by natural gas, 7.2 per cent by nuclear and 1.3 per cent by renewables. I would guess that that pattern is representative for England as a whole. We must now crank up the frankly derisory percentage of 1.5 to 2 per cent of electricity generated from renewables, mainly wind, to 20 per cent, according to our masters in Brussels.

What are we doing about that? First, we are wrecking some of our most cherished landscapes. Secondly, we are forcing electricity users to pay far more than they need simply to subsidise these grotesque, inefficient and costly wind farms. As a result of government intervention, the wind industry is turning into a money-grabbing scam masquerading as an environmental benefit. There is no environmental benefit from wind farms—but it is a money-grabbing scam.

Yesterday, BP produced figures showing that global emissions in 2010 from energy consumption increased by 5.8 per cent. China accounted for the biggest rise, overtaking America as the prime emitter. Whether the UK increases or decreases its CO₂ emissions will have absolutely zero effect on global emissions as a whole, yet in the vain pursuit of this chimera—this dream—the financially and morally bankrupt policy continues. It enriches landowners—as the noble Lord, Lord Reay, said—and wind farm operators at the expense of pensioners on fixed incomes who are least able to afford the luxury of subsidising renewables and wind power. This is Robin Hood in reverse: robbing the poor to pay the rich. It is completely crazy.

Opponents of wind farms—we have heard from some of them this morning—are branded routinely as Luddites by the proponents of wind energy. In truth, the wind energy fans are the Luddites. They are blocking the one energy that will give us a secure supply without damaging our landscape for ever, which is of course nuclear. The dream of relying on the wind to keep the lights on will go down as one of the most costly and damaging fantasies of our time.