European Union (Information, etc.) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-07-20
Topic: International Affairs
Sarah Ludford (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I welcome the Bill and am pleased to speak in this debate. I salute the justified persistence and perseverance of the noble Lord, Lord Dykes. He has amply refuted the notion that this measure might be closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, because it is still essential that British citizens are informed about how the EU works. It will continue to be important to us. As even a Government who are pursuing Brexit acknowledge, we want at least a "deep and special partnership" with the EU. If it is deep and special, it is therefore not possible for our citizens to understand the world unless they understand the European Union The question in the 2016 referendum, although ostensibly about the EU, was rather along the lines of, "Are you happy with the status quo?". After a decade of tightened belts, no wage rises and concerns about insecure jobs, inadequate housing and widening inequality, you did not need an EU peg for many people to answer with a big raspberry, but the widespread ignorance, misinformation and sheer malevolence in much of the press towards the EU did not help. As the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, said, the EU has become a scapegoat for everything that people do not like, whether or not it has any relationship or any causative role in those matters that are causing discontent On knowledge of the EU before the referendum, I shall quote someone whom I shall not name because I have not asked his permission. He is a remainer now, but he voted leave in 2016. This is what he has written: "Prior to 2016 I had never really thought much about the EU. Indeed, the only time I was vaguely aware of it was when, on the rare occasion it did make the news, it was generally in either a negative (‘red tape central bureaucracy holding back business’) or comical (‘bendy bananas’) context"— he perhaps means straight bananas— "1 or 2 rare minutes of a news bulletin was about the maximum coverage it received. Never prior to 2016 (that I am aware of) did the British public have any objective and informed insight into what the EU is, how it came to be, what is represents, how it works, how we play our part in it and what benefits membership brings to our daily lives and that of business. In the months leading up to the referendum I therefore sought to better understand the EU as best I could" He continues along the lines that he did not find much guidance on that. That sums up better than I can the predicament in which many voters found themselves in 2016. They simply had not been prepared, through education or through the media, to be knowledgeable voters asked to pronounce on the EU We all know who started the Euro myth business of bendy cucumbers and straight bananas: the unlamented ex-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, whose association with the truth has more than a touch of Trumpism about it. Other journalists felt under pressure after Boris Johnson, as the Brussels correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, started finding it fun to report just on jokey, and usually untrue, stuff. They were pressured by their editors to produce the same sexed-up stories, but nothing boring about what was going on in the Commission, the Council or the Parliament. No, let us have some fun stuff. That has done an awful lot of harm On the history of the Bill, as the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, has said, he first tried about 12 years ago to get this Bill through. He did not have a lot of help from previous Governments including, it has to be said, the Labour Government, who felt that it was unnecessary to try to increase the volume of information that British citizens had In 2013, Andrew Rosindell MP asked: "the Secretary of State for Education what his policy is on the teaching of the history of the European Union in schools" The answer from Elizabeth Truss was: "Should schools choose to teach their pupils the history of the European Union then they can do so at their discretion. However, as we have made clear in our proposals for the new national curriculum published earlier this year, we do not think it should be compulsory for them to do so. Where schools choose to teach this, legislation requires that they do so in such a way that pupils are not exposed to politically biased views, but are provided with a balanced presentation of opposing issues".—[Official Report, Commons, 3/6/13; col. 1004W.] We can hear an echo there of what many of us are criticising the BBC for these days: false equivalence. As soon as you start to say, "Please can people learn about the EU?", there is an accusation that you are politically biased, when actually people just want factual information. Somehow you have to balance knowledge of what the EU does with negative criticism of it. That is what has dogged this issue I had long been meaning to do this, but the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, prompted me to actually go and look at what is in the national curriculum about the EU. The answer is nothing. Of course the curriculum does not even apply to academies and free schools anyway, and certainly when you come to the citizenship part of the curriculum you are relying on good will and on a teacher being found to cover the citizenship theme, which I am afraid often gets shoved aside in favour of subjects that are going to be subject to examination; it is often a sort of afterthought On the question of citizenship, the curriculum says that at key stage 3: "Pupils should be taught about … the development of the political system of democratic government in the United Kingdom" You cannot understand government in the UK without understanding the origins of EU law, and we have just been through all that in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act. We are asking people to completely not understand how EU law is made and how it is democratically arrived at between democratically directly elected MEPs and democratic Governments, so it is no wonder that you hear the accusation that the EU is not democratic. There may be a legitimacy issue about the EU, because it is seen as remote and so on, but it is undoubtedly democratic. However, we are telling our pupils that they do not need to know about that, so the myths about how the European Commission dictates everything easily take hold So there is nothing about Europe or the EU at key stage 3. At key stage 4, pupils have to learn about, "local, regional and international governance and the United Kingdom’s relations with the rest of Europe, the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the wider world" This is as if our relations with the rest of Europe are only about bilateral intergovernmental relations, on a par with the UN and the Commonwealth. There is no mention at all of the EU or how its supranational governance—it is not a superstate, but it is a supranational organisation—affects law and governance in the UK Under the history curriculum, key stage 3 pupils learn about, "Renaissance and the Reformation in Europe, … the Enlightenment in Europe and Britain", and then, "challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day", including, "Britain’s place in the world since 1945" There is absolutely no mention of the history, creation and development of the EU Lastly, under the geography curriculum, pupils are expected to, "extend their locational knowledge and deepen their spatial awareness of the world’s countries, using maps of the world to focus on Africa, Russia, Asia … and the Middle East" Europe does not exist, apparently; it is literally erased from the map. Then we come along with a referendum asking, "Do you like the European Union?", and find that they do not know anything about it So if there is one silver lining of the referendum, it is that in the two years since then we have had more discussion about the EU and, I hope, better chances of learning about it than in any previous time since we joined it. Really, what I am agreeing with is the absolute need for the Bill proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, but particularly with the focus on the national curriculum. Why does the national curriculum not have a single mention in citizenship, history or geography—and I am not aware that it has it in any other subject—of the European Union as such? It is quite astonishing.