EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report) — House of Lords, 2015-11-03
Topic: International Affairs
Alan Brooke (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I shall change the tone by thanking my noble friend Lord Boswell, so he can be relieved to a certain extent, and the EU Select Committee for this short but, I agree, very light introduction to the referendum and reforms. I agree with much of what the report says, but it is very vague and does not open up all the issues. We look forward to something further from the committee I would like to comment, and perhaps plead, on two issues. The first is enabling the electorate to understand the issues and the reforms by keeping the language as simple as possible. My noble friend Lord Hannay has already brought up the second, which is the engagement of the devolved institutions in our nation: Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, where I come from I could not believe this, but I have been in your Lordships’ House for 28 years this month. Most of that time I have spent on EU sub-committees, except when I have rolled off—rather too regularly—and, once, on the EU Select Committee. I was on the finance and economics sub-committee until this spring, which caused quite a stress level from my point of view, coming from rural Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, where, in order to get money out of a bank, it appears that you need a JCB and to do the job quickly. However, I have been enlightened that there are better ways of doing it I have been involved in many inquiries. They have stretched from the irradiation of food, which should have been taken on but was not because, in the view of most of us, the EU quashed it; carbon trading, which made millionaires out of people who did not even know what a tonne of carbon looked like and could not explain it, and I am not sure exactly how cost-effective that has been; the financial transaction tax and banking union; and other subjects, many of which would now be in the realms of whether there should not be reform of the powers that the EU has had in order to override other people As Members of this House, we are in a privileged position. But the language in which most of the report is termed is beyond the average person in the street—the citizens who are leading a busy life. I am not maligning them but we all have other things to do, and without them doing their work we would not have an economy. So we simply have to look at this in a reasonable light for them. The negotiations will be and are hard work and very complicated, and we accept that, but they must be explained in a way that the public can understand. I remember, as might some noble Lords, a wonderful lady, the late Baroness Elliot of Harwood. She seemed to remain on the Agriculture Committee and never left it, whether I was on it or rolled off it. She would sit there and after amazing evidence from whoever, her first question was always, "Why can’t you speak plain English?". She was part of our privileged society, yet she was saying that. Perhaps we should have a ministry of plain English in her remembrance. Okay, obviously we would not, but in order to translate so much of what we are doing at this moment in the process of EU reforms and so on, somebody must be able to put it all into a language that people understand The progress must be transparent and comprehensible to the vast majority of people in their own homes. It must not require them to go to meetings and become politicised by attending rallies. We should just remember one thing: inasmuch as we discuss it, and the Government do a certain amount of negotiation and may or may not tell us about it, we are not the people who will decide that referendum. The people who will are outside this Chamber, this Palace and this city, and if we do not achieve something on this we need not be surprised when the emotional vote comes out As my noble friend Lord Hannay mentioned, paragraphs 47 to 49 deal with the issue of the devolved institutions. I share his disappointment not in the performance but in the attention of the Minister for Europe to this issue. It is not very impressive, because when he was asked various things at paragraph 47, a paraphrase of his answer is: "UK membership—reserved matter. Not for them". But every single bit of what is agreed will have an impact on every single bit of the lives of people in those areas, and in my own area of Northern Ireland. He says that there is no veto, but there is only no veto if the poll is so far apart that the numbers of people in those devolved areas cannot change it. To leave them out of it and then antagonise them into perhaps a different way of voting will give them a veto—so basically, he is wrong It says that their interests are "to be respected". The respect agenda has not worked very well with devolved parts of the United Kingdom, and that applies to both sides. When I have been on committees and in my case have asked the Northern Ireland Executive to give us an opinion on something, either it has not arrived at all, or, on a very good day, it has arrived just after we have done the report. However, it goes both ways. We do not give them the chance, therefore we cannot expect to be respected at all. We have to do something about it.