European Union (Referendum) Bill

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Friday 10th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, made an excellent speech in introducing this Bill, as he invariably does. He is a very respected and popular Member of this House and I quite understand why the Prime Minister asked him to be his standard bearer in bringing this difficult piece of legislation before us. I hope, therefore, that he will not think it in any way a personal attack on him if I say that the Bill he has brought before us is a very bad Bill. It is not a good Bill at all. It is a very dubious Bill that, in at least three respects, purports to be something that it is not. There is an English word for that but it is not a parliamentary word so I will not use it. It is, at the very least, a cynical Bill, which we should treat with considerable scepticism.

The first example of the Bill purporting to be something that it is not has not escaped the attention of many colleagues in the House on both sides. We have already discussed it at length today. It is the fact that it is a Private Member’s Bill that is really a Prime Minister’s Bill. Prime Minister’s Bills that are whipped through the House of Commons and will be whipped through the House of Lords—and are said by the Prime Minister of the day, to his supporters, to be essential for the credibility of the Government, as has been said in this case—are not Private Members’ Bills. If the Government have chosen to bring the Bill forward in this camouflage, two things follow.

First, they must accept the rules of the game—the rules that apply to Private Members’ Bills. They have chosen that route; it is their fault. Under no circumstances should we allow ourselves to be blackmailed by being told that there are difficulties with Private Members’ Bills but the Government need to get this one through by 28 February, otherwise there will be difficulties. It was the Government’s decision to bring forward this Bill as a Private Member’s Bill and they must take the consequences. Under no circumstances should we be blackmailed along those lines. Indeed, if I am still speaking at 3 pm, which I probably will be, I hope someone will interrupt me. If they do not interrupt me at 3 pm, I hope that will be established as a precedent for future Private Members’ Bills going through this House, which should equally be allowed additional time if there is particular interest in speaking on them on the part of the House as a whole.

The second thing that follows from the Government’s voluntary decision to bring this forward as a Private Member’s Bill is that, clearly, we should not treat it with the respect and regard with which, normally and naturally, the second, unelected House treats government initiatives. Normally, we operate on the basis that we can hold up legislation—we can put forward proposals for amendment to the House of Commons—but, at the end of the day, the Government of the day tend to get their business through. This is not, by the Government’s own choice, a government Bill. We therefore do not need to regard it with quite the same respect and consideration that we would give a government Bill. We should, of course, be sceptical and we should do our duty. If we come to the conclusion that the Bill needs to be amended, we should be even more confident of our duty to amend it than we would be if it were a government Bill.

The second aspect of the lack of straightforwardness to which I referred—of the Bill being presented as something that it is not—is again a matter that has, unsurprisingly, received quite a lot of attention in this debate. This is a Bill that purports to be a democratic, altruistic initiative designed to give the public their say. That is a phrase that we have heard several times. In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Only 18 months ago, both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, were bringing forward arguments for not having a referendum in this Parliament. They were powerful arguments, which have already been referred to—some of them have been quoted today. I had it in mind to bring in a whole sheaf of quotations, but I thought I would not burden the House with them because it is very familiar with the words concerned. Only 18 months ago the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and other members of the Tory party in the Cabinet said that we should not have a referendum in this Parliament, giving all those reasons—uncertainty of the economy, and so on and so forth—why we should not do that. They were absolutely right about that.

Why did they suddenly switch? We all know why—there has been a purely party politically orientated initiative to try to buy off the Eurosceptics in the Tory party and keep them quiet until after the election and to prevent Conservative voters slipping over to UKIP because UKIP is offering a referendum, so the Government thought that they had to offer one too. Of course, no sane or sensible person would ever go to the public and ask them to decide on something and say, “It’s important that the public have their say—but you can’t do it for the next four years”. Nobody knows what will happen in the intervening four years; in fact, there is quite a large probability that there will be a new treaty under negotiation—not concluded—by 2017. It cannot possibly be concluded in practice before the French and German elections in that year, which have already been referred to. How absurd it would be if we had a legal obligation to hold a referendum before the end of 2017, but there was another treaty in gestation and we were part of that negotiation, so we would have to have another referendum on that in 2018 or 2019. That would be absolutely absurd.

From a practical point of view the whole idea is ridiculous and any sensible person would have been able to see that it was ridiculous. Indeed, I have no doubt that the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary know that it is ridiculous, and that that is what they would have said a year and a half ago in public. However, they have decided on this slightly squalid party political ploy, which is why we have the Bill before us today.

There is a third aspect to this lack of frankness about the Government’s legislative proposal this afternoon, which has not been referred to at all. That is, although the Government purport to wish to give the public a free choice, to consult the British public about our future in the European Union, there is one obvious choice—not just a coherent or a theoretically possible choice, and not even a practically possible one. It is an obvious choice that has been the default choice, the consensus choice and the automatic choice of 17 out of the 28 members of the European Union. That choice is to be a full member of all aspects of the Union: to be a member of the core, if you like, of the Union—which, of course, means being a party to Schengen and to the euro and so forth.

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

Noble Lords opposite may well think that that is an appalling prospect, and they are entitled to feel that. However, they cannot deny that that is a possible choice. They also cannot deny that that is a choice that many of our partners in the Union—the majority of them—have taken. They cannot fairly deny that there are good theoretical arguments for all those proposals. It might very well be argued that now would be a very good time to join the euro, before interest rates and the parity go up, but we are not having that discussion today. However, that choice is being denied to the British people. Other people have had the choice of doing that, but we have not—our electorate have not.

Clearly, both parties in this rather squalid transaction between the extremist Eurosceptics in the Tory party and the Prime Minister have been at one, I am sure, in wishing to exclude any possibility of going down that road, which they would call the federalist road. So democracy has not reached that far, and democracy will not include giving the opportunity for that particular choice to be expressed in the referendum. There may be practical reasons: people would say, “Well, you can’t have more than two questions in a referendum”—but that is nonsense. If there was an aggregate majority of those who were in favour of our joining the core of the European Union on the one side and those who were in favour of joining the Union with the various derogations negotiated by the Prime Minister on the other, and if those two votes together came to a majority of the vote, clearly you could not argue that there was a majority in favour of our leaving the European Union. So in practical terms this is a very real possibility.

I notice that I have gone beyond 3 pm. Quite disgracefully, no one from the Front Bench and none of the Whips sitting there has interrupted me, which of course they should have done. Therefore, I have no bad conscience at all in delaying the House a little longer. That is their fault, not mine. They are in breach of the rules. What is more, this precedent is something that we should not forget, and one that should be applied in all fairness and in all honesty to all future Private Members’ Bills. Otherwise, this will just be seen as a very underhand procedural trick by the Government. Of course, it also blows the cover completely about this being a Private Member’s Bill. It is nothing of the kind.

[Lord Trefgarne]

My Lords—

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

No, I am not going to give way. I know perfectly well what the noble Lord is going to say, and I am not going to give way. I am going to finish my remarks, and I am not going to give way. I make that absolutely plain. There has been scandalous conduct in this House this afternoon, not by me or anyone on my side but on the part of the Members of the government Front Bench sitting opposite, and I am certainly not going to allow them or any of their minions to interrupt me.

What do we do in the squalid circumstances that I have described? We do our duty, and look at this Bill thoroughly, sceptically and responsibly. If we can improve it, we improve it. There are one or two particularly scandalous aspects of the Bill, notably where the Government try to override the decisions of the Electoral Commission on the formulation of the question. That amounts to appointing an umpire and then rejecting the umpire’s decisions. It is a scandalous thing to propose and, obviously, something that this House needs to look at very sceptically, along with many other things. We will not do our duty if we do not do that.