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European Union (Amendment) Bill

The noble Lord, Lord Jay, has spoken extremely wisely, and I very much endorse what he has said. It would be possible for the expanded European Union to operate effectively—indeed, more effectively than it has under Maastricht and Nice—as a result of certain administrative changes that can be made, as the noble Lord, Lord Jay, has said, without any new treaty. The role of the presidency and the size of the Commission, for example, do not require treaties. They can be agreed intergovernmentally among the member states of the European Union. However, I share some of the views expressed by the noble Lords, Lord Owen and Lord King, in that I believe that there are other lessons to be garnered from the Irish referendum, and they should be taken extremely seriously. The first lesson is that no political elite must simply assume that people will follow it because it is a political elite. I do not wish to be critical of my Irish neighbours, but they made one great mistake: putting a treaty to their people that they had not read themselves. The second lesson is that the Irish referendum tells us more widely that we badly need to be able to get factual information out to our people to counter some of the extraordinary rumours and stories that have beset the European debate. I shall not repeat except briefly the extent to which the Irish referendum was affected by completely unproven claims that Ireland’s neutrality was at risk. Noble Lords who have read the treaty of Lisbon, as a number of us have done word for word, will know that there was specific mention of the absolute right of a country to be neutral and of the absolute obligation of NATO members to carry out their obligations regardless of the obligations of the European Union more generally. It could not have been more precise, but that made no difference to the claims made at the Irish referendum. The same could be said of the ludicrous arguments about abortion, which is entirely a matter for domestic legislation. There is another conclusion to reach. We are just as guilty as the Irish people may be in that we have never effectively set up systems of information and communication that enable our citizens to find out the facts—the objective truths—about the European Union. Let me give the House just one example before inevitably I am interrupted. Noble Lords will see on page 17 of today’s Daily Mail, under the heading ““EU LIARS””, the following statement: "““What is true is that Britain’s ability to get its own way in the EU will be seriously undermined by the Treaty, as we will be giving up the veto in 61 areas and allowing our voting power to be cut by one third””." That is the exact opposite of the truth. Our voting powers under the Lisbon treaty would have been increased from 8 per cent of the voting total in the Council to 12 per cent—a substantial increase. Noble Lords who are mathematically inclined will note that the figure is exactly a third upwards, not downwards. That article appeared today. It would not have been difficult for somebody to check the treaty of Lisbon for the truth. Here is a distinguished, widely circulated newspaper repeating the exact opposite of the facts, and nobody rebutting that. The Government of Mr Blair had a heavy responsibility, not least because they were inclined to support referenda, to ensure that there was an informed and proper debate in which they would take part if necessary. That never happened, with the result that our electorate, like that of Ireland, have been under an illusion for a long time, because they have not had access to objective information. I do not mean information from people like me who are strongly pro-European, I mean getting as close to the truth and the facts as one possibly can. That is the real lesson of the Irish referendum: the need to stop behaving as though we can have a misinformed, poorly understood debate. Unsurprisingly, the largest group of ““no”” voters in Ireland said that they did not understand the questions put to them, as my noble friend Lord Goodhart pointed out. We have to take the European Union more seriously. We have to include information about us as EU citizens in citizenship education. Believe it or not, we are EU citizens, though one would never know it from our school curricula. We have to take the education of ourselves and our people more seriously by improving the process of European scrutiny and extending best practice—not least as exemplified by the European Scrutiny Committee in another place—to our neighbours in Europe. Before I conclude, here is one interesting fact: when the other member states of the European Union believed that the constitution was likely to go through, a large majority set up new scrutiny machinery to protect subsidiarity. Those machineries were dropped when the constitution went. It is vital that they are reinstated so that people’s doubts about where subsidiarity lies can be met properly in whatever we agree after the European Council. I wish the Prime Minister and the Government well, but I hope we will take into account the necessary humility that we should show as a country that has demanded referenda but failed to produce the necessary basis on which decisions can be made. That was a failure of the previous Government and is one that we, like our Irish neighbours, need to rectify as quickly as possible. The Council should look much more closely than it recently has at how we communicate with our citizens, and give them the opportunity to communicate with us.