European Union Referendum Bill — House of Lords, 2015-10-13
Topic: International Affairs
Michael John Dobbs (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I feel a bit like a shaggy old dog stirred from his hearth by a shadow at the kitchen door, the whistle of a familiar refrain and the instruction that it is time to go ratting again. I am in good heart, though, because although it has been a long day, it is not a Friday, we are dealing today with a Bill that has been endorsed by the voters at an election and—dare I say it?—it is a better Bill than the one that I had the honour and pleasure of presenting to your Lordships a year ago. Time and reflection have helped to tweak it, and perhaps it is appropriate for me to apologise to one or two noble Lords who came forward at that time with reasoned and perhaps sensible amendments to that original Bill. We knew that it was never going to work as a Bill, but it was the first light before the dawn I am the tail-end Charlie on this and I do not wish to go into too many details of the Bill since that has been done so eloquently by so many people today. However, I will say in passing that I look forward to the efforts the Minister will put into justifying how it is consistent to acquiesce to votes for 16 and 17 year-olds for a referendum on Scotland but not on Europe. I wish her luck—she may need it I am a passionate European. I was struck, as I often am, by the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London. We were schoolkids together—no, not at that school, at a grammar school in Hertford. His words have always been something of an inspiration to me. He asked, "What do we mean by Europe?". For more than 2,000 years Europe has been the centre of the world. In fact, for almost 2,000 years it was the world: Plato, Homer, Mozart, Picasso—the great artists, the philosophers, the statesmen, the writers, the musicians —Shakespeare, Chopin, Beethoven, the Beatles and all the rest. It has been a pretty formidable and often glorious history. We have been the birthplace of democracy. It is said that the Greeks invented democracy, although it appears that they have been in a measure of chaos ever since. We have been the champions of basic liberties. We introduced the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Okay, I accept there have been a few historical hiccups along the way—things that were less than beneficial—but in Europe we have been, and still are, a beacon of hope for those around the world who are less fortunate than we are It is 2,000 years of extraordinary achievement, and yet during those years we have had so many different forms of institutions. You can still hear the footsteps of Socrates and Michelangelo and the Venerable Bede, even though the streets they walked along have long been worn away and the institutions they served have gone. The republics, the monarchies, the empires, the leagues and the confederations are nothing but ancient echoes. The world has moved on. I think it is a great flaw in the wider debate about Europe that we have been having for so many years that it has focused excessively on institutions and not on those deeper issues, because our Europeanness is defined not by our institutions but by our culture That is why I was very distressed with the words of the German Finance Minister Herr Schäuble when he was talking about Greece. He said that elections would change nothing and that there was no alternative. I hope that his words lost something in translation because they are pretty cold, hard and unnecessary. The history of Europe tells us that there is always an alternative. In every corner of Europe that you go to nowadays there are voices saying that our institutions are wrong: both sides of this great debate agree on that. We must change, we must go off in one direction or another, but what we cannot do is stand still There has never been a better time for a British Prime Minister to argue that there has to be a better way for British leadership in Europe. I wish our Prime Minister well in that undertaking. It is an enormous task. We are playing with history here. This is not a light or an easy decision, but he is absolutely right in that whatever he manages to do, the people must be given the final decision. That is the essence of this Bill here. It is the people, not the institutions, who are the final source of political authority. We have just had this wonderful discussion between the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, and my noble friend Lord Lawson about ever-closer union. I have to tell the noble Lord that the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, is absolutely right. Right at the top of the treaty of Rome in 1975 the preamble talks first and foremost about ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe. Notice the plural—the peoples of Europe There are other words that I think are relevant: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", and that, "Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it". Those were the wise words of the authors of the Declaration of Independence and I think they are as relevant today as they were 240 years ago. They seemed to make quite a success of it—and entirely without the benefit of a government paper setting out the consequences of their actions I am a passionate European in a way that my father and my grandfather could never have been. If I may take the Bard’s words at liberty, there is a lot of good in the state of Denmark—which means that I desperately want the Prime Minister to come back with a deal that I can accept: a clear, strong, substantial deal and not vague promises that might disappear like vapour trails in an evening sun. That would be good not just for Britain but for Europe as a whole—and then let the people decide.