European Union Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, if you do not mind me saying very briefly, I find the debate that we have been having since dinner of singular unreality. It reached its apotheosis in the last speech, which told us, “Keep calm dear, nothing is going to happen for 16 years. Everything is going so slowly, as they will be translating urgency from ‘urgence’ and back again and making something of it”. I am sorry, but you have to look back only one year to see a circumstance where there was a major crisis, when the Greek economy was on the point of collapse and the European Union, including Britain, decided that something needed to be done about it because otherwise there was a very real risk for the solidarity of the whole European financial structure. It is no good saying it will not happen. It has happened. Please do not tell me that it could not happen again.

So what happens then if you lock all the doors and throw all the keys out of the window, as the Government are absolutely determined to do? Their supporters have explained with enormous eloquence this evening how jolly happy we will all be when we throw all the keys away and we cannot unlock the door—we cannot do anything in less than two or three years or something like that—and we shall all be happy. What happens? They find some other way of doing it. That is what will happen now. And the British Government will help to find another way too, because it will be in our interests to do so.

This debate is a matter of total unreality. It has no meaning whatsoever. If the Government had a bit of common sense, they would see that the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, does have quite a lot of sense in it.

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, I suggest that what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has just said illustrates the very reason why this amendment is undesirable. It is not in the interests of this country to get sucked into bailing out economies that have gone off the rails as a result of the problems of sharing a currency. Had there been a requirement for a referendum, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the previous Government would not have been in a position to have committed this country to things to which he should not have committed us.

Charming and likeable though the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, may have been, this amendment is just another excuse for watering down the basic principle of this Bill. It is of less magnitude than the last amendment. Urgency is a subjective matter—it could arise; it could not arise—but the basic principle of the Bill is that the elite of British Governments will no longer be able to commit this country to loss of sovereignty and other such matters without the consent of the people.