European Union Bill

I am sure we could collaborate with other nations that control their own waters. What we do not want to do is to go on with a common fisheries policy that ensures that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of fish are thrown back dead every year and which has removed a very valuable industry. I hope that is clear to the noble Lord. While on my statistics the fish that are thrown back dead every year would fill this Palace of Westminster and Whitehall several times over, I have to tell your Lordships that there are those outside the political class who think that that might be a rather better use for them than being thrown overboard to pollute the seabed. This amendment does not require a referendum if we are so foolish as to stay in the common agricultural policy, which is estimated to cost each family in the land around £1,000 per annum in higher food costs, or some £26 billion. On the environment, this amendment does not address the £18 billion per annum which the Government say we are going to spend on their climate change initiative inspired by the European Union, complete with all those useless and ugly windmills, not to mention the closure of our coal-fired power stations. The amendment does not include the cost to our economy when the lights go out, nor does it cover the billion or so we send to Brussels for it to misspend on foreign aid. Finally, the amendment does not include the huge costs of overregulation which the EU imposes on our whole economy. I dealt with this in minimal detail on 3 May at cols. 398 to 400, so I will not repeat it now, but we are talking about anything between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of GDP by most estimates. Our GDP now stands at around £1.5 trillion, so we are talking about anything between £60 billion and £150 billion. If any noble Lords want to challenge these figures, they can, of course, do so, but I trust they will join me in pressing the Government for an official cost-benefit analysis of our membership if they do. This amendment is not triggered by any of the £100 billion or so per annum of waste which I have just mentioned that is notched up by these and other EU follies. The joy under this amendment is that a referendum would be triggered only when our net cash thrown down the drain in Brussels equals £10 billion per annum according to the Government’s own figures. Mark you, the Office for National Statistics has recently put our net contribution at around £9 billion already this year, and most people seem to agree that we are looking at £10 billion for next year, so we are nearly there. I can point out that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, in his Answer to my noble friend Lord Vinson yesterday put our net contribution as low as £4.7 billion, so there is room for clarity here. I have a feeling that the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, was mentioning the figures put forward by the Treasury, which are very much lower than the figures put forward by the Pink Book, but that is perhaps an argument for the cost-benefit analysis when we get there. We are talking about £10 billion per annum. This may not sound much to our Europhile political class, but it is an awful lot of money to real British people. Ten billion pounds per annum comes to some £27.39 million every day. That would pay for 900 nurses every day at a salary of £30,000 per year each—or teachers, or policemen, or other public servants. The amendment requires a referendum when the net cash that we send to Brussels would pay the annual salaries for 900 nurses every day, or for 328,500 nurses every year. There is another way to understand the importance of £10 billion per annum, which comes to £400 per annum for each of our 26 million families. All these costs have to be seen against the perilous state of our economy and the sacrifices and difficulties in which many of our people now find themselves through no fault of their own. Current spending cuts, as I have mentioned, appear to be around £21 billion. Which would the British people prefer? I am sure that the Government and your Europhile Lordships will say that the benefits of our EU membership are so wondrous and obvious and that they go far beyond its mere vulgar cost to our long-suffering taxpayers. I have never understood what those benefits really are; what benefits we get from our EU membership, which we could not get from free trade and friendly collaboration with our European friends; what benefits we get, for instance, that the Swiss do not enjoy from outside the EU. Perhaps the Minister could be more precise today about these great benefits. This Government and the previous Government—and previous Governments for some time—have said that a cost-benefit analysis would be a waste of money. The Stern report on climate change, however, cost only £1.272 million on a subject at least as complex as our EU membership. Surely that tiny sum would be well worth spending to discover whether the colossal costs of our EU membership are justified or not. We, of course, are told that we stand taller as a sovereign nation in meetings of the international conferencariat all over the planet—because we have diluted our sovereignty into the new form of supranational government in Brussels run by bureaucrats. If the Minister is going to advance this line again today, could he give some concrete examples of the great advantages and the successes? Does he think, for instance, that the EU did a good job when the lid came off Yugoslavia, or that it is doing a good job in north Africa? What confidence does he have in the EU’s new External Action Service? I conclude by asking the Government, yet again, to settle these matters by ordering an objective, unbiased cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. In the mean time, this amendment asks that the British people be given a referendum when our cash payments to Brussels exceed £10 billion to decide whether they want to go on paying it. I beg to move.