European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Lamont of Lerwick Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 31st January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lamont of Lerwick (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, as it always is. It is also a pleasure to follow 185 other speakers; but I do not envy the Minister who has the job of summing up the debate.

Reference has been made several times to the Third Reading of the European Communities Bill in 1972. I have to confess that I, too, was another person who participated in that debate. My noble friend Lord Baker referred to the speeches by Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. He did not refer to my maiden speech, illustrating what the writer Mackworth Praed meant when he referred to,

“a maiden speech,

Which all men praise, but none remember”.

If I have a dagger to my heart, it is the opposite to that of the noble Lord, Lord Butler. The dagger to my heart is that I strongly supported our joining the European Community at that time. Quite why I and others over subsequent years developed increasing doubts about the European Union is illustrated by the Bill before the House, because it incorporates both visibly and when you dig into the Bill such a huge amount of EU law covering all sorts of things, from zoos to human rights, beaches, canals, immigration, extradition, foreign policy mechanisms, policy in north Africa and overseas aid. At the time of the 1972 debates, we were assured by the Law Officers that the supremacy of EU law was confined “essentially to economic matters”. Those were assurances that were repeated both by the Prime Minister in 1972—Ted Heath—and by Harold Wilson in 1975 at the time of the other referendum. Some 12,000 pieces of legislation later, and after Nice, Maastricht, Amsterdam and Lisbon, we can clearly see why many people like myself think they were mistaken to believe the assurances that we were given.

We had at the opening of this debate excellent speeches from the Leader of the Opposition the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, from the noble Lord, Lord Newby, and from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope. It was particularly excellent that they made it quite clear that they did not intend to obstruct this Bill and that they approached it in a constructive spirit. I totally agree with all three of them that there is great need and scope to amend this Bill in certain crucial areas.

A lot of concern has been focused on the so-called Henry VIII clauses and the number of statutory instruments that will flow from this Bill. This is, of course, the mirror image of the problem that we had when we joined the European Economic Community in 1972. Section 2(2) of the 1972 Act allowed EU law to have legal effect in the UK by delegated legislation. Some of that delegated legislation was by Order in Council and directives that totally bypassed Parliament. However inadequate the procedures that we are examining tonight are, they were even more inadequate in 1972. None the less I do not dispute for one minute that it is quite right that this House should seek to strengthen the safeguards, although some wild things were said in the House of Commons such as that this Bill could be used to alter the composition of the House of Lords or to postpone the date of the next election. The noble Lord, Lord Grocott, made a powerful speech. He referred to the powers of the House of Commons. Statutory instruments are not government by fiat; they are a parliamentary procedure. If you object to something, turn up and vote against it. As has been said in this debate, it is not easy to see an alternative to the use of statutory instruments. Given the huge volume of legislation, it would be quite impractical to incorporate it all by primary legislation.

These are serious issues, but some of the speeches that we have had, although serious, were not really about the merits of the Bill but criticised the Government’s tactics in the negotiations as a means of getting a second referendum on to the agenda and into the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, who I see in his place, was rather flirtatious—rather triangulating—about this question. He said he had been of the opinion that the referendum ought to be binding but it was no longer axiomatic. As Clemenceau once said to Lloyd George after an ambiguous speech: “Pour ou contre? Oui ou non?”. We all know which way, in the end, the noble Lord is going to go on that question.

The Opposition present the phrase “the single market”, which they parrot all the time, as though by finding a phrase they had found a policy. They never go beyond the phrase to explain why a free trade agreement would be worse than membership of the single market. We know that if you export into another market without being a member of the single market you have to observe the rules, just as many countries do—many countries that have increased their exports to the single market more than we have, faster and to a larger extent. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, referred to the customs union. I wondered whether it was the same distinguished noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, the Commissioner who used to preach the virtues of free trade—that it was a spur to productivity and helpful to consumers—as he was defending without further argument, just by the phrase, a customs union that imposes very high tariffs on food and goods, including textiles and clothing, from poorer countries. I found that very difficult to comprehend.

I regret that this country has been so divided after this referendum and that some people have been so upset by the result, but that is no excuse for caricaturing Brexit as some dangerous extreme nationalism. Brexit is not a rejection of the values that we share with Europe, those values being human rights, democracy and the rule of law. Some Liberal Democrats were cynical and dismissive of the Prime Minister’s call for a special deep partnership with the European Union and called it just rhetoric, but why should we not have outside the framework of the EU co-operation between universities and in science and technology just as Switzerland does. Is Switzerland any less European by being outside the European Union? No, it is not.

Yes, Brexit is about self-government, sovereignty and making our own laws through our own Parliament rather than through a Parliament in which we have only 15% of the share of the votes. Millions of people voted for this because they believe in the nation state and that the nation state and democracy are two sides of the same coin. That is what people voted for and this Bill is necessary to facilitate that. It requires amendment and improvement but it should be given, expeditiously, a Second Reading.