European Union Bill

My Lords, what a wealth of experience of Brussels we have had from the previous three distinguished speakers. I cannot claim to have the same intimate experience of Brussels, but I share the lack of enthusiasm of my former pair in the other place, the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, and agree substantially with what he said. Everyone respects the Minister. He is highly respected, and he is an excellent salesman, but alas on this occasion he has a very bad product to sell. It is a bad Bill—bad in its gestation, bad in its principles and bad in its effects. It does not arise from a cool appraisal of our national interests but of the increasing Euroscepticism of the Conservative Party and of the dynamics of the coalition. In the 1980s, we had this odd reversal of position on the European Union between my party and the Conservative Party. We then had the awful debates in the years of Mr Major that did so much damage to our position in Brussels. The noble Lord will know the position in which we were the asterisk country in terms of progress, and this Bill will, as he said, put not a lock but a ball and chain on developments and on British influence in Brussels. From the debate in the 1990s, we had Mr Cameron’s decision to withdraw from the European People’s Party, which clearly was not in our national interest. It was the result of a failure to understand that the European Parliament works through political families and that if you withdraw from that family, which is your natural centre-right family, you lose influence in committee placements, and that can hardly be in our interest. The pledge on the European People’s Party gave the signal to the Eurosceptics that the Prime Minister understood them. They were perhaps taken in, as I suspect he travels very lightly on Europe, but it is a false view to imagine that the Government are rather like a penguin-house keeper in the zoo feeding the Eurosceptic penguins and throwing fish to the penguins in the hope that they will swallow them. Yes, they will, but they will ask for more. Therefore, the Government will not satisfy the Eurosceptics by this stratagem. As for the coalition, we had the true and traditional voice of the Liberal Democrats in the remarkable speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams. In terms of coalition bargaining, I have come to the conclusion that I would not ask my many Liberal Democrat friends to negotiate on my behalf because they have sold their principles for a mess of potage. Here is the most European of parties prepared to make very serious compromises just for its obsession with constitutions and the alternative vote. The only respectable argument that has been forward is that there is clearly a disconnect between politics as a whole and public opinion, and on this I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. However, that disconnect comes from a whole series of reasons. As someone who has been a Member of this Parliament—a great honour—for almost 40 years, I did not have many constituents coming along to complain to me about the European Union. Who can doubt that much of the Euroscepticism has been manufactured by the press lords who live outside this country and who tell us what to do and what is in our national interest? We saw the same thing when we had the debate on votes for prisoners. The Government weakly and tamely listened to those views in total ignorance and failed to understand that the European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the European Union and the fact that by being willing to defy the European court on this one issue of votes for prisoners, we lose the moral high ground against the serial defaulters: Russia, Turkey and others. They will simply say, ““You have done it, so why can’t we?””. I defer to the moral high ground.