European Union Bill

My Lords, obviously I do not support this amendment. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Radice, was present in the Chamber on 3 May when, as reported at columns 398 to 400, I thought I made a pretty good fist of destroying the usefulness of the single market. I will not repeat those arguments now, but any student of these matters can look up the case against the single market and why his famous 3 million jobs are not worth much against the 4.5 million jobs which they have through making things and exporting them to clients in this country. I also discussed why we can trade with a market of 350 million people through free trade in the same way as 63 other countries around the world do at the moment, now moving towards 75 countries. There is really no advantage to our membership of the European Union which we could not enjoy through free trade and friendly collaboration. I will not go down that obvious and inviting route. What I will do is produce some statistics and facts to show that the wicked Murdochite and Desmondite et cetera press is more than balanced by the BBC in this country. It is not as the noble Lord, Lord Lea, suggests. In 2005, thanks to continuous monitoring by the organisation Mediawatch-UK, the BBC was forced to hold its first ever independent inquiry into some of its political coverage, in this case its coverage of the European Union and our relationship with it. The whole of that story can be found on the Global Britain website. That independent inquiry, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Wilson of Dinton, found unequivocally that the BBC’s coverage of our relationship with the European Union was inadequate and biased. The BBC responded in November 2005 and made one clear promise: to explain to the British people how the institutions of the European Union work, how they interact, and their effect on our British way of life. I trust that the noble Lord, Lord Radice, agrees with me that it is a great pity that the BBC has never fulfilled that promise. It would be helpful to the debate between us, because obviously we are never going to agree, if the BBC did conduct such an unbiased debate and at least told the British people what they are voting for when they vote for the European Parliament. They do not have a clue what the European Parliament is, or where it fits into the European law-making process, that of laws being proposed in secret by the unelected Commission, negotiated in secret in COREPER and passed in secret in the Council. The people do not know that. I think that if the BBC were to explain all that, Euroscepticism in this country would rise. The noble Lord, Lord Radice, and other noble and Europhile Lords presumably think that public opinion would swing in favour of the European Union. I have one devastating statistic from the BBC’s coverage. Over the past six years, the ““Today”” programme has devoted only 0.004 per cent of its coverage to any discussion about withdrawal from the European Union. That figure, which has not been bettered anywhere else in the BBC, has to be set against that of the roughly 25 per cent of the British people who voted for a withdrawalist perspective in the last European elections, and roughly 5 per cent at the last general election. We have a British public who are massively more interested and massively more Eurosceptical than the BBC gives them space for. Whatever else the noble Lord, Lord Radice, and I do not agree on, surely he would agree that all these matters could be laid to rest not only if the BBC did its stuff, as it should do according to its charter and guidelines, but also if we had a genuinely independent cost-benefit analysis of them. I cannot understand why the Government go on refusing to do that. I hope that we can agree, and I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Radice, will accept that the answer to his amendment is not that it should be seen through, but that there should at least be a genuine economic cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. We can leave aside the constitutional disaster of EU membership; let us just look at the money.