European Union (Referendum) Bill

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Friday 17th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I absolutely agree. I am only just old enough to have voted in the last referendum on the European Union—my first ever vote. There is a whole generation of people who have never been consulted on this question and who are entitled to have their say.

We should all be able to agree on this question, not least because that is the agreed position of this House in this Parliament, because the Bill we are debating today is, of course, the same as the one introduced in the previous Session by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) and passed unopposed on Third Reading. We are left wondering why it enjoyed such apparent acquiescence from Labour and the Liberal Democrats in this House, only for them to block it in the other place by denying it time for debate. The question is why Labour and the Lib Dems do not trust the British people to have their say on Europe. If Labour and the Lib Dems do not trust the voters, the voters should not trust them.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I understand what the right hon. Gentleman is saying about listening to the British people, but does he understand that if the British people are to speak with clarity of voice, they need the clarity of choice of the Prime Minister’s red lines, and those have not been revealed? Until they are, how can that possibly be the case?

[Mr Hammond]

The clarity of choice they will have in 2017 is a clear body of reform on the table. They will know what the future European Union will look like and will decide whether or not they wish to be in it.

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[Mr Alexander]

It is always revealing when those on the Government Front Benches give up an argument and simply go for abuse. If that is the best the Foreign Secretary can do—[Interruption.] I am happy to give way again to hear a single specific example of powers that he will repatriate. Is he prepared to take to the Dispatch Box and tell the House which social, economic or employment rights he is seeking to repatriate? It is unconvincing for Labour Members, but—this is much more worrying for the Foreign Secretary—it is deeply unconvincing for Conservative Members when he pretends that he is having conversations in Europe that he is not willing to tell any of us about. That will not convince the British public, and I do not believe it will convince the House.

[Barry Gardiner]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that the obscurity that we have just seen displayed is deeply concerning given the time scale set out in the Bill? If within 19 months after May next year the British public are to have an in/out vote on this issue, there are not 19 months to negotiate but a much shorter time, if the matter is to be debated realistically among the British people.

[Mr Alexander]

What honestly worries me about the Government’s approach to Europe is not that it is clever, wily and strategic, but that they are making it up as they go along. Many months after the Bloomberg speech we have absolutely no detail. I see the Europe Minister is in his place, so perhaps he would like to advise the incoming Foreign Secretary about those detailed proposals for reform. Would he like to set out repatriation proposals for us today? I would happily give way.

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[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to speak in the debate and to support the Bill that has been introduced by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill). I am pleased that he has done this. I also had the pleasure of supporting the previous Bill, introduced by the hon. Member for Stockton South (James Wharton), and of serving on that Bill’s Committee. The right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green) talked about prosperity in the European Union. I hope that he will go and tell that to all the unemployed Greeks and Spaniards, and ask them if they think the EU is prosperous. The economy of the European Union, and particularly of the eurozone, is diving into a black hole at the moment.

I rise to support the Bill because I believe that people want a choice. I was an active member of a multi-party organisation called People’s Choice. Interestingly, its chair and president were both members of my party, although members of other parties were also active in it. A big majority of the British people want a referendum. In my constituency, we held a mini-referendum just before the last election on whether to have a referendum, and there was a 2:1 majority in favour of doing so. I therefore feel that I can legitimately express my view here today, as it is also the view of the majority of my constituents.

I have some experience of referendums. In the 1975 referendum, I was the chair of the Vote No campaign in Luton. Subsequently, I was the agent for the no vote in Bedfordshire. Interestingly, the agent for the yes vote was Sir Trevor Skeet, the then Conservative Member of Parliament for Bedford. Some years ago, when I met him again and reminded him of our previous encounter, he was horribly embarrassed because he had changed his view. That was an interesting conversation.

The Labour party held a special conference at that time. It was my first ever Labour party conference, and a massive majority—myself included—voted in favour of supporting a no vote in the referendum. At that conference, I saw one of the greatest pieces of oratory of my political career. It was a speech by Michael Foot, calling for a no vote. In it, he referred to Joseph Conrad’s novel “Typhoon”, saying that if someone was in a storm, they should always face into the storm to save themselves and not run away from it. Sometimes we have to do that in politics as well. I have always remembered that speech. I am often in the minority, but I remember what Michael Foot said: if you believe you are making the right point, stick with it. I have certainly taken that on board.

At that time, a great majority of Labour MPs wanted to come out of the then Common Market, but the majority of Conservative MPs wanted to stay in. There has been much reference to Labour’s support for the European Union, but even fairly recently it was the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), who kept us out of the eurozone. Had we gone into it, it would have been a complete disaster.

It has also been suggested that there have been great changes since 1975. We have certainly moved much further towards an integrated Europe, but there were early signs of where we were going. In 1979, there was a proposal to form an embryonic single currency called the European monetary system—the “snake”—but Denis Healey wisely kept us out of it. At the time, I wrote a brief for the general secretary of the union I then worked for, who then banged the drum at the TUC saying that we should not go into the snake. I like to think that I had some small influence on the Labour leadership at that time.

Now, my devout wish is to convince my Labour colleagues to support a referendum. They might not necessarily listen to my voice, but there are significant voices in and around our leadership that privately support a referendum. However, they have not won the argument inside the leadership yet. Their views are private, but I hope that my party will have acquiesced and decided to support a referendum by the time of the general election, even if it does not agree with my view on the European Union.

[Barry Gardiner]

I understand that my hon. Friend is a passionate and insistent voice on these matters. Does he believe that the timing that has been set out in the Bill is sensible? Will it allow the people of this country to have the necessary debate with full information about what any renegotiation might involve?

[Kelvin Hopkins]

Personally, I would like a referendum sooner rather than later. Most people in Britain have a pretty good idea of what the European Union is about.

We will renegotiate terms, and no doubt there will be some loose improvements in minor areas that will make no difference to our membership. A sticking point for me is that we should withdraw from the common fisheries policy. We need to restore Britain’s historic fishing waters so that we can start to restock our seas to ensure that we have fish for the long-term future. I put that case in private to a former UK representative in the European Union who immediately said that, in that case, we would have to get out of the EU because we could not possibly withdraw from the common fisheries policy. So there we are: we have a problem. If we are going to renegotiate, it should be about real things that matter.

[Barry Gardiner]

Is my hon. Friend aware of the work that Commissioner Damanaki has done for the renegotiation of the EU fisheries policy, and of the benefit that that is bringing to small fishermen in the UK? The UK quota can now be divided up, bringing greater advantage to the under-10 metre fleets.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I appreciate that improvements have been made to the common fisheries policy, and for that I give some credit to the previous Conservative Minister, but the pressure on him to renegotiate came partly from other hon. Members, including me—

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[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I have in the past been a great supporter of Friday morning debates on private Members’ business. We often get some very straight talking on a Friday morning, and I gained that impression this morning. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), who has had a tradition of opposition to the European Union going back many years, as have many Conservative Members. I do think, however, that it would have been better if this motion had been made more clearly one about getting out of Europe, rather than hiding behind the pretence that it was a motion about giving choice to the British people.

We should beware of politicians calling for common sense without telling us what that common sense actually is. What we have not had from the Conservative party or the Prime Minister is clarity about what a renegotiated Europe would look like or about the red lines as we go into the negotiations. Neither have we had clarity about a time scale within which to enable the British people to make the informed and common-sense judgments—I certainly trust the British people are able to do so, as many Conservative Members have claimed they do—that are needed. A common-sense judgment demands having some real questions on the table to look at, examine and then to decide on.

Because the Prime Minister has been unwilling to provide clarity over the red lines and because the Conservative party has been unwilling to set out what a revised European Union would look like after a renegotiation, within 19 months of next May, there would have to be clarity on those issues. I do not think that that is a reasonable time scale. The hon. Gentleman who often speaks for his wife and whose constituency I have forgotten—

[Mr Bone]

Wellingborough.

[Barry Gardiner]

Wellingborough: of course it is. The hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) said that the end of 2017 was a backstop, but, as he knows full well, in the last six months of 2017 Britain will be chairing the European Union, and it is inconceivable that we could hold the referendum within those six months. The hon. Gentleman drew the date forward, saying that there could be a referendum during the first six months of the year, but that would shorten the time that the British people would have in which to look at what was on offer.

I do not think that the Bill is lacking in disingenuity. It is disingenuous because it claims to rely on the good wisdom of the British people to make a judgment without giving them the basis on which to make that judgment, and without giving them a time scale that will allow them to exercise it.