European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill [HL]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, on his persistence in bringing this Bill forward. I hope that it will have more success on this occasion than in the past. The EU is an organisation to which a country either belongs or not. There is no halfway house. It is essential that there should be periodic examinations of the costs, not only in money terms but across the policy board, and any real benefits that might be obtained. It is absurd that the Government have not acceded to requests for an independent audit of United Kingdom membership of the European Union, so some of us have to try to do something, and the Bill is about the only means available to us. First, the costs in money terms have been mentioned, and I want to comment on them further. On 4 June, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham gave me an Answer to a Written Question about the gross costs that this country pays every year. In 2007, the gross cost is £14.2 billion, and, by 2011, it will have reached £14.5 billion. That is in 2004 money terms, so the actual figures will be much larger than that. Taking into account all the receipts from the European Union—money coming back to us—at 2004 prices, the amount in net terms will increase from £4.7 billion in 2007 to £6.8 billion in 2011. One could reel off a long list of services that would benefit from that sort of money, but it is unfortunately going to subsidise services in other countries, services that are sometimes better than our own. The second cost is in trade. I again asked a Question for Written Answer, which was answered by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, about the average deficit between 2001 and 2006. His answer was that each year there was a deficit in trade of£27.1 billion. Going in was represented as being essential for our trade, but running a consistent deficit is not helpful. We are not doing very well on trade. We have also heard about the cost to industry of regulation. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, quoted a figure of £60 billion a year. That differs from the figure given to me by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, in an Answer to a Written Question. That stated:““the total administrative burden on business, charities and the voluntary sector in England derived from EU legislation is approximately £6.3 billion per annum””.—[Official Report, 15/5/07; col. WA23.]. I would very much like to know the exact cost, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, will be able to give it when he winds up. The Government say that the costs are worth while because they allow us to trade freely with the European Union. However, countries outside the EU have trading relations, often better than our own, without incurring the costs that I have just mentioned. They are unnecessary costs and injure our competitive position. We are doubly disadvantaged in world markets. Furthermore, the annual total of some 2,000 laws and regulations from the EU affect all economic activity in this country, yet only 9 per cent of our GDP is involved in European trade. We have to incur huge regulatory costs for only 9 per cent of our GDP. It is not simply trade and financial contributions. A Northern Ireland strategy paper indicates that more than two-thirds of administrative and legislative actions originate from or are influenced by decisions taken in Brussels. Huge areas of our national life are being decided not in this country by our own Government and Parliament but by a group of27 countries, of which the UK is only one and in which it has only 8.5 per cent of the voting strength. There is a huge democratic deficit, which the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, mentioned and which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, wishes to close by giving the European Parliament a lot more powers. He has to understand that the more powers that are transferred to the European Parliament, the fewer powers there will be here, and that they will be exercised in an assembly where we have only 78 Members out of a total of some 730. If that is democracy as far as this country is concerned, I do not think much of it. I am glad to say that the House of Commons is beginning to notice things. During the past 10 days, the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has criticised the Government for failing to give timely evidence on the future of Europe, and the Home Affairs Committee has warned the Government not to give up the veto on justice and home affairs without first having a proper parliamentary debate. So the democratic deficit is being noticed not only here but, I am glad to say, in the House of Commons. The Home Affairs Committee is demanding that there should be a proper parliamentary debate before the veto is removed on justice and home affairs. The EU’s policy is more and more integration. It is demanding more power over taxation and defence; it wants to police our seas and make the resources of the seas community property; it wants to take over much of foreign policy and diplomatic representation; and, of course, it wants a legal personality. That ongoing programme is bound to undermine the democratic Government in this country. Those of us who oppose those developments and say that they will completely remove our national sovereignty are often told that we can always repeal the European Communities Act 1972. However, almost in the next breath, we are told that it is inconceivable that Britain should leave the European Union, so they do not think that it is a realistic option at the moment to repeal the 1972 Act. That is why the Government should accept this Bill. The Government should understand that it is not only a few malcontents who wish to halt the drive to further EU integration. In a recent poll, 70 per cent of the UK population were against further integration, and 50 per cent wished for a simple free trade organisation. A poll taken by Eurobarometer, which is a European Union thing, found that 40 per cent of those aged between 15 and 30—throughout the European Union, not just in this country—think that the EU means an excess of bureaucracy and a waste of money, and over a third of them see it as a threat to cultural identity and diversity. So there is scepticism not only in this country; it is widespread throughout Europe. People simply are not convinced by the claims made for the success of the EU by the political and bureaucratic elites in the member states. They are deeply suspicious of the constant drive for ever more powers to be ceded to the centralised Brussels institutions. We will be told that Britain would be marginalised and ineffective if it was outside the EU, but was that not what was said about ditching the pound and adopting the euro? In 2002, we were told that, if we did not adopt the euro, our country would be marginalised, our economy would stagnate, the City would go into decline, and the pound would be an unstable currency, but that simply has not happened. We are not marginalised. Our economy has performed better than those in the euro-zone and still thrives. The City has grown in strength and influence, and the pound has been a haven of stability. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, instanced Germany as a success story within the euro. It is true that, in the past few months, Germany has picked up a bit, but, while we in this country enjoyed a 2.6 per cent increase in GDP from 2002, Germany either stagnated or had a fall in its growth. Unemployment in Germany rose from 4 million to 5.5 million in that period. So we who helped to prevent our going in to the euro did our country a very good turn. I sincerely hope that the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported by the future Prime Minister, will see that we never join the euro, because it certainly is not in the interests of this country to do so. The proof is there. There is life outside the European Union. That is where the future lies, not in the backwater of Europe. It lies in the wide, wide world—for example, in the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth, which we ought to develop, still represents 25 per cent of world population. The markets of the future will not be in Europe, even though Turkey and one or two other countries might join. The real markets are China, India, the United States and South America. Far from putting all our eggs in the European basket, we should make sure that our eggs are widely distributed throughout the world. Our Britain was built on trading with the whole world. That is our past, and it will be our successful future. Anything else will not succeed. I hope that the Bill makes progress.