EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report) — House of Lords, 2015-11-03
Topic: International Affairs
Richard Balfe (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, for chairing the committee that produced this report. Whatever reports are produced on this subject, I am afraid that they will not please many people for a long time because it is a long-running saga. I have been part of this saga for almost as long as it has run. The opposition Benches are not fully staffed, but I can tell them that they have an organisation that used to be known as the Labour Common Market Safeguards Committee. It is run by a remarkable person called John Mills. I understand that he is the only person who has given a seven-figure sum to a political party and got nothing for it for it apart from running the Labour Common Market Safeguards Committee. It has been in operation since around 1971 and it has constantly niggled about the EU. At first it wanted the referendum to result in a no vote, which it did not. It then spent 20 years, from roughly the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, arguing for expansion and enlargement. It wanted the EU to do more and it wanted it to have more members. When you challenged the committee as to why, its members would say, "Because that is the way it will break down. It will break down under its own pressures". That was the only reason they wanted it Of course, a number of noble Lords and Members of the other House have a long history in this. My good friend Kate Hoey has never hidden her reluctance, shall we say, to have anything to do with the EU and the people it represents. I am sure that the noble Viscount, Lord Brookeborough, will correct me if I am wrong, but she alleges that she represents a strong strand of opinion in Northern Ireland, because although she represents Vauxhall, she represents a good part of Northern Ireland as well, so this has been a long-running saga One of the saddest things about it is that it is a very short queue because only one country is actually talking about leaving the EU. Everyone else who is dissatisfied with the EU is talking about reforming it because they all realise that Europe is quite a small part of the world. It is made up of a number of small countries and even the biggest of them is not that big. Put Germany against Bangladesh, and I am afraid Bangladesh wins. So let us have a look at what we want to do. We will not get anywhere by constantly saying that we want to leave: "Our solution to your problems is that we will go away" What will happen if there is a no vote? Nothing will happen. Britain will have voted no and we will then start a long process of negotiation about withdrawal. I do not know whether it is an interest that should be declared, but I am the chairman of the European Parliament Members Pension Fund. I also served for a period as a director of the CERN pension fund in Switzerland. I mention that because many member states are represented in CERN and there are many member states in the European Union. At one point in CERN, we had to look at what the consequences of a member state leaving would be. We decided that the pension fund would have to buy out its liabilities. Buying out liabilities from a pension fund on an insurance basis not only takes a long time but is extremely expensive. That is just one little corner I tell you what would happen if there was a no vote: there would be another referendum about three years later and it would be called a general election. Without predicting too much, I think noble Lords on the opposite Benches and their party would be saying, "We have had three years of negotiating to leave the European Union; the thing is a whole mess. We never wanted to leave anyway and if you vote in a Labour Government next Thursday, we will scrap the whole thing". So a no vote would actually be a "let’s have another vote after you have got yourself into a thorough mess", which is what would happen if we started negotiation for withdrawal. Do not doubt it: no one in Brussels would have any vested interest in making our process of withdrawal easy. Everybody would want something out of the pot as Britain goes. There would also be enormous complications. What would happen to the TTIP arrangements with the United States? Are we to withdraw from them before they are signed or will we go along with them? Then what will we do—have separate negotiations with the United States? Are we going to endorse TTIP and ask Congress to approve it, in two or three years’ time, because it is not covered by the decision that gives Obama the right to conclude the treaty? This would be a compounding of lots of different interests. I am not saying that we do not need reform in the EU: of course we do I shall finish with a different story. There is a lot of concern about migration in Europe, but let me retell a conversation I had in Frankfurt three weeks ago, with someone who is well placed to know the feelings of the German Government. The migrants are coming into Europe; Germany needs more population. Some people in Germany believe that the cost of absorbing the migrants, even 800,000 of them, would represent about 0.5% of its GDP, which is a really serious amount. However, within five to eight years, all that money would have come back into the economy because of the productivity of the migrants. Do you know what they said about the British Government’s brave idea that we would take migrants from the camps? The gentleman I was talking to said, "Fine. They’re the losers, Richard. The winners are the ones who have crossed Europe to get to Germany; they are the ones with the initiative and the get up and go. You go to the camps and take the people who want to stay there. The people who will build a modern Germany are the refugees". That may be a controversial point of view but it is probably an economically sound one, if you look at the quality of the people who are now in Germany. I am not saying that we should change our policy, but when we look at mainland Europe we should not be full of pity, saying, "Oh dear, poor them", thinking that none of them has thought it out or has any idea what to do, or that these people are just washing in and the response is, "Oh dear, poor little us". There is quite a well-developed school of thought at the upper levels of European polity which says that we have to control the refugee crisis but it will not necessarily be the worst thing for our economy and our future. We should not forget that Last week I was in Turkey, monitoring the election. Turkey still wishes to join the European Union. It has been the wish of all three parties that have served in government that Turkey should join. Frankly, we have treated it disgracefully. We have treated it to promises and we have gone on about human rights, which are important, but we have used things to hide behind. We should start looking around Europe at the large number of countries that want to join. We should say that a stable Europe is one that has one of its biggest countries—namely, us—firmly anchored in the middle, pressing for the sort of reforms that many countries want and leading from within Europe, not this nonsense of sitting on the sidelines and constantly carping, which means that we lose influence because people say, "Oh God, you’re at it again are you?". We can do much better than that.