Queen’s Speech — House of Lords, 2016-05-23
Topic: International Affairs
Jeremy Ashdown (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, on the eve of the Queen’s Speech I happened to catch Dr Liam Fox MP from the other place on "Newsnight". I was rather struck by something he said, and so I noted the words down immediately: "By leaving the European Union, we would bring the European Union to its senses". Leave aside for a moment the unreality of this statement—that somehow or another, on the morn of Brexit, European citizens across the continent will sit up startled in their beds and say, "Heavens, the Brits have left; now we must come to our senses". Leave aside also the revelation that the old arrogance Britain has held that everybody else takes their lead from our decisions still exists, and the revelation of what the negotiating strategy of certain Brexiteers in the Government has been with their European colleagues. Leaving all that aside, what struck me most was that as an expression of the isolationist mindset, that statement ranks alongside the famous Times headline: "Fog in the Channel, Continent isolated". It strikes, it seems to me, exactly at the fallacy at the heart of the Brexit argument: that we reform an institution by leaving it. We all know that, in fact, if you want to reform something, you have to be in it and acting for it, using your influence and building alliances to bring that about God knows, we should all want to reform the European Union: it is insufficiently democratic—although not as insufficiently democratic as the place at the other end of the Corridor, which is the only European parliament elected without proportional representation, with the result that we have a Government who enjoy less than a quarter of the available national vote. It is also less democratically deficient than this place, the only European second Chamber that is not elected and the existence of which has no connection with democracy whatsoever. Nevertheless, of course we should want to see democratic reform, and there are friends who will enable us to achieve that. The Danes, for instance, would like to see the Council of Ministers held in public, and insist that their Ministers are mandated before going to negotiate on their behalf with what they should do when they get there and are interrogated afterwards. That would vastly increase parliamentary control over the Council of Ministers, so of course we should seek that, and we have allies who will enable us to do so We should also want to see the European Union liberalised—its market is indeed too sclerotic—and we have allies there too, not least in Germany and among the northern European members such as Denmark, Holland, Sweden and Finland. All those countries could be used as allies if only we would care to do so, but we do not. We think that the best way to change the European Union is to cop out instead of getting stuck in. We think that the best use of our energies is to leave rather than to lead The other day, a very senior German Minister said to me, "Whenever I go into a European Union meeting with my British colleagues, their very first question is: ‘Excuse me, please tell me the way to the exit?’". They are spending so much energy trying to get out that they spend none building the alliances to try to win the things that we want. Canning and Castlereagh would be spinning in their graves. The truth of it is that there are things we can win in the European Union, but we will not win them by removing ourselves from it This morning, I heard Mr Duncan Smith on the "Today" programme say that all predictions are wrong—not that all predictions can be wrong but that all predictions are wrong. Presumably, that includes the prediction made by the Brexiteers that if only we could leave the European Union we would, like Prometheus unbound, leap into economic success, trading with further nations in the world beyond the European Union. How can it be then that we are near the bottom of the European league table, yet the other nations further up suffer exactly the same so-called burdensome regulations that we do The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, identified the reality that much of our business-destroying bureaucracy is homemade, not European made, such as a tax law that runs to 10 million words or broadband that in some cases works more slowly than it does at the base camp at Everest. If it is indeed European bureaucracy that prevents us trading to those nations that we would like to trade with beyond the European Union, how come Germany, at the very centre of the European Union, is able to trade at a volume three times that which we are able to If we want to put our economy right, we must look to ourselves. This idea that we can blame all on the European Union is a fallacy. The truth of it is that leaving will diminish our influence, wreck our economy and damage our security. Leaving the European Union would be an act of historic folly for which our children and grandchildren would pay the price.