EU Referendum: Assessing the Reform Process (EUC Report) — House of Lords, 2015-11-03
Topic: International Affairs
Julie Smith (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I will endeavour not to detain the House for too long. As the noble Lord, Lord Howell, pointed out, we are already debating late into the evening. Many of us have been here debating late into the evening night after night. I note that we are missing the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth of Drumlean. I thought that he and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, constantly had to spend time interacting, but he and the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, seem to have been given time off for good behaviour Some of us are taking part night after night in the EU Referendum Bill, which is now in Committee. As preparation for that, I read the excellent report produced by your Lordships’ EU Committee on the referendum and the reform process. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, I found it a useful document and one that very much sets the scene for what we are thinking about However, I feel a little as if I am intruding on private grief or an internal dispute, because so much of what we have heard is from the Conservative Benches: differences of opinion, whether the renegotiation is doing the right thing, what the renegotiation may or may not be doing and whether there will be treaty reform. Essentially, it is asking what the Prime Minister thinks he is doing. There seems to be quite a lot of dissatisfaction on the Conservative Benches. In the very insightful comments from the noble Lord, Lord Howell, there was a comment about the timing for reform, renegotiation and referendum, and the fact that we ideally need reform to come first. However, it was not this side of the House or the Cross Benches that put forward the idea of reform, renegotiation and referendum. That was the Prime Minister in his Bloomberg speech of January 2013. It may have served him and his party well until 8 May 2015, but he now has to deliver it. The triptych of reform, renegotiation and referendum is very difficult to manage in the time he suggested. The fact that the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, is struggling to know whether there will be treaty reform, whether it will be legally binding and how it will come about very much depends on what the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary are asking. In response to one of the points in the report, I say that those seem to be the three key figures from the Government who are leading negotiations—that is certainly what I have been told privately—but clearly the Minister for Europe is playing an important role We know broadly what the Prime Minister is asking for. On several occasions your Lordships’ House has been told by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, about the four baskets that the Prime Minister is talking about. We have heard them again in Berlin today in various different iterations from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. We have a sense of what is being asked for. Obviously we are all very much looking forward to the letter that is officially going to President Tusk in, we assume, the next few days I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. While it is a nice idea that your Lordships’ House and the other place should get a running commentary on the negotiations—that we are apprised at various stages of what the Prime Minister is doing—it clearly is not appropriate for us to try to monitor the negotiations on an ongoing basis. We see that with the Danish model of mandating; one gets a Government who are very much constrained. Negotiations of this type—the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has already said that he finds this a very strange sort of negotiation—are a complete innovation. Nobody has tried to negotiate prior to a referendum on potential departure before, so we are in unknown territory. The idea of Parliament trying to mandate the Prime Minister, to second-guess what he is doing or to ask too frequently for reports back, is unhelpful, I suggest The noble Lord, Lord Desai, had an interesting idea about a group of privy counsellors trying to listen to the Prime Minister and maybe advise him, but given the differences—