---

European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I hesitate to contribute to this debate, given the long experience, expertise and record of campaigning on the EU that marks out participants today. For me, the EU has been part of the landscape just about all my life. For my mother, who had been endlessly evacuated from London during the war with the primary school children she sought to teach, the Common Market meant a reduction in the knee-jerk nationalism that she felt had contributed to what her father suffered in the First World War and what she, her family and friends suffered in the Second World War. She saw it as a remarkable, positive development. We must always remember the bigger picture, as my noble friend Lady Williams, the noble Lords, Lord Jay and Lord Tugendhat, and others have so strongly reminded us. President Sarkozy was surely right when he described the EU as, "““an unprecedented adventure in the history of mankind””." There seems to be greater acceptance of the EU among the younger generation. My own children, who are used to travelling to the Continent and who are, most importantly, avid supporters of Arsenal, do not see national boundaries quite as the older generation did. One of my sons, watching England versus France last week, supported France because there were more Arsenal supporters on the French side than on the English. He would have switched sides had Fabio Capello put on Arsenal’s Theo Walcott. Things are much more fluid than they used to be. My noble friend Lord McNally said in his passionate speech that we need to appeal to the younger generation. My noble friend Lady Williams put it beautifully, contrasting the two methods of attempting to spread democracy: to eastern European countries via the EU or to Iraq via invasion. Kids, many of whom are opposed to the Iraq war, will understand that. Younger people are often the ones who sense that globalisation means that we have to be part of a larger whole and that we are not an imperial power. Indeed, they cannot even remember those all-pink maps. We must be part of that larger whole if we are to tackle major problems such as climate change. A recent Guardian poll made this clear when it showed that 76 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds think the EU is good for Britain, against only 50 per cent of pensioners. Those of us who are pro-EU should take heart from that. One area that concerns the younger generation is worldwide poverty, on which I shall focus. The EU has already been a force for good, and with better streamlining it can be even more effective in the future. The EU used to look particularly to its near neighbours and its foreign policy objectives when delivering aid. That was unsurprising in a Cold War era when stability and prosperity on its borders were of key importance. That contributed, as we have heard, to the collapse of the Soviet Union and to the expansion of the EU, so it is not insignificant. The noble Lord, Lord Patten of Barnes, in particular can be credited with doing much to make EU aid more poverty-focused—something that is increasingly important in our globalising age generally. We cannot say that poor impoverished states such as Somalia or Afghanistan do not in the end affect us, even if we are looking only at self-interest. The Lisbon treaty takes this forward. It states: "““Union development cooperation policy shall have as its primary objective the reduction and, in the long term, the eradication of poverty. The Union shall take account of the objectives of development cooperation in the policies that it implements which are likely to affect developing countries””." For the first time, the EU takes the relief of poverty as its aim in giving aid, rather than seeing it as tangled with its foreign policy objectives. It also recognises that as the world’s largest trading block—it is surely through trade that the poorest countries will come out of poverty—that other measures that it takes are also crucial. In the 1960s, the development of Asia was despaired of. It would never develop, not least because it had the wrong religions. It did not have Calvinism, it seemed. How wrong we were. Africa often causes despair, yet we see hopeful signs of development. The EU has a major part to play, just as it must in assisting the peaceful development of areas such as the Middle East. Having a worldwide poverty focus and ensuring that we assist fragile states wherever they are is important for stability everywhere. Collectively, Europe is the world’s largest aid donor. Members of the European Union together provided more than half of total global development assistance. One quarter of the UK’s aid is channelled through the EU. Some say that we should offer aid only bilaterally, but then we lose our influence over the biggest aid giver, we no longer encourage other countries to come up to our levels and we risk duplicating effort. The need to streamline aid-giving is urgent. Forty years ago, most poor nations had an average of about one dozen donors. Now it is three times that number and the poorest countries may receive about two donor missions every day, for which they must prepare and must meet different targets. No wonder they spend so much time simply on that. It makes sense therefore to have fewer, not more, donors, and improvements in the way that the EU gives aid are very encouraging. The Lisbon treaty's statement on the EU’s new poverty focus is a further move in the right direction. The EU's strength in human rights, democracy and freedom, which we have heard about, is also critical for developing countries. We certainly heard about that in relation to eastern Europe. I would also add that equality for women is fundamental, especially in northern European countries, from which we draw strength in the United Kingdom, but it is also of vital importance for developing countries. HIV/AIDS will never be adequately combated without addressing gender inequality. When I first came to your Lordships’ House we were voting on Section 28. As we went down in flames on those first votes, my late lamented friend, Lord Russell, said to me, ““Time is on your side””. How right he was on that. My sense is that time is on our side in debates over the EU. To think of the nation state as the natural base for global action seems simply out of date. To those who are younger than me, as they surf the world on the internet, that must seem even more so. The fact that we now have 27 nations linked together does not seem for me so startling. As so many other noble Lords have said, if the rules need to be updated so that those 27 can work more effectively together, what is so frightening about that?