European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Willoughby de Broke Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willoughby de Broke (UKIP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. I do not, of course, agree with his conclusions.

I welcome this Bill as an important step towards leaving the EU in 14 months’ time—no more than that. It cannot be an attempt to thwart the result of the referendum. I remind some noble Lords that the British people voted to leave in a referendum with a turnout of more than 70%. They knew what they were voting for. In spite of the warnings in the propaganda leaflet sent to them by the Government a couple of months before the referendum, they still voted to leave.

The British people voted to leave in spite of the dire warnings—the warnings of disaster—wheeled out by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron; the then Chancellor; the then President of the United States, “back of the queue” Obama; the fragrant Christine Lagarde, president of the International Monetary Fund; and the Governor of the Bank of England. We were warned of the disasters that would befall us if we were rash enough to vote to leave: a stock market crash, plummeting inward investment and soaring unemployment. It turned out that those forecasts were about as accurate as a cross-eyed javelin thrower. Unemployment is at a record low. The stock market is at a record high. Industry has the fullest order books for 30 years. Inward investment remains very high, as it was before the vote.

With the gloomsters so comprehensively defeated, why do our negotiators in Brussels persist in the pre-emptive cringe approach? I do not understand it. We have a strong hand to play, but we are playing it very badly. Why are we agreeing, for example, to pay the EU any money at all to access the single market? No other country does this—not Switzerland, India or America. Why are we doing it? We are in a very strong position. We have a trade deficit with all the other major economies in the EU. Perhaps we should be charging them for access to our markets. I do not see why we should not do that, on the same basis as they are trying to charge us for access to their markets.

For example, we had a trade deficit of £26 billion with Germany in 2016 alone. Surely, this sort of deficit, which they have with us, gives us some leverage in the current negotiations. I can, however, see no sign at all of that being used, and I wonder whether we should listen to our closest ally, America, in the form of Donald “front of the line” Trump. He said, in an interview in Davos, that he would not have negotiated the way we are negotiating: he would have been much tougher. I really wish that our negotiators would listen to that and drop the pre-emptive cringe.

The referendum has happened. The decision was to leave. We decided that we did not wish to be part of a supranational regime run by a European Commission priesthood that we did not elect and cannot get rid of. We did not wish our laws to be overseen by a European Court of Justice with an entirely different legal system from ours, and we wished to remain in control of our own borders and our own immigration. Those were the three principal points in the referendum. Parliament’s duty is to implement that choice—the choice made in the referendum—and so is the Government’s. I remind the Conservative Government what happened to the Conservatives after the repeal of the Corn Laws: oblivion.