Lord Tebbit.

Speech by Lord Tebbit


I’ve been lucky that as I’ve got older I’ve been blessed with always finding something new to do. Not that long back I was invited to become a Daily Telegraph blogger. I often heard people say, ‘ah yes it’s that old blogger Tebbit isn’t it’ or something like that.

And I think what is interesting now is how this event about our national future is being conducted in the so called blogosphere. I find it quite difficult to get to grip with some of these ideas in my old age. I’m so old that I remember when newspapers used to report what had happened in Parliament, what a funny old idea. There’s no room for that now between the lifestyle comment and the parliamentary sketch writer and there are not many of those who are as good as Frank Johnson was. But nowhere do you find what actually happened in Parliament any longer reported.

I’m not sure whether that is altogether about the media or something about Parliament or something about society, but it is a very worrying development. And I wonder what the papers will make tomorrow of what happened in Parliament today, both houses, when the Government brought forward its defence review.

Now I think I should just say something about that. It was not the one which anyone concerned with the defence of the realm would have wanted to hear. But as surely as it was the weakness of the Soviet Union’s economy which brought about the collapse of the Walsall Pact and the end of the Cold War, then so the weakness of our economy and the decisions of Government to give priority to spending on the health service and overseas aid and of course on our contributions to our friends in Brussels. Priority over defence and the weakness of the economy that have driven the conclusions of the defence review.

It is not all bad but we will need a great deal of good luck if its effects are not cruelly disposed by events such for example as another Argentinean adventure in the Falklands. I doubt if we could now reverse an Argentinean invasion.

Aircraft carriers without aircraft are really not much more useful than a pub with no beer. And to say that we’re going to rely on our French and American friends for aircraft to put on them if needs be is a policy which could have only have been designed by those who are too young to remember Oran in 1940 or Suez in 1956.

However close we are to our allies, at the end of the day the only defence forces we can ultimately rely upon are those of our own.

We can only hope that our economy responds to Osborne’s medicine and that the delay which is now inherent in the Trident decision will allow it to be made at a time when the economy has improved so that we may make the right decision.

I suppose if the coalition is both lucky and smart some or other of those decisions could be changed but it is not often that we are both lucky and smart.

But I turn away from those events if I may for a moment. The last time I spoke to the Bruges Group was on the 20th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s great speech. And I made the point in it then that nowhere in that speech did she use the words ‘better off out’. She acknowledged the need of a treaty to promote both open markets and mutual cooperation but she made clear that there were limits to the extent to which sovereign democratic states should, could or would go in giving up their rights to manage their own affairs.

That was then and it is now our position. It is supposed to be the position of the Conservative Party and of the coalition Government. We of course, the so called sceptics, would draw our lines in a rather different place to some of our friends, not least I think we would all say there is a point in the progress of the sausage of sovereignty through the salami slicer of Brussels where one is left itself more of a slice than a sausage.

And to my mind the surrender of a nation’s own currency and entering into a single currency pact by way of the Euro is pretty close if not beyond that point.

And the events of the last two years have demonstrated beyond any doubt that we who have constantly opposed entry into the Euro were absolutely and completely right.

I have heard none of the advocates of entry of three, four or five years ago putting their hands up and saying ‘we were wrong, how glad we are that we were defeated’.

You see it is still true that no currency can have more than one sovereign Chief Finance Minister or Chancellor. No currency can have divergent economic policies within its area. The economic problems of Greece, Spain and Ireland, like Ireland are of their own making but their imprisonment within the Euro is a major factor working against them in their efforts to recover. The Irish above all have acted decisively with great determination and quite extraordinary solidarity across all sections of society to return their pounds. But their recovery is being held back by their inability to allow their own currency to find its own value on the world’s markets.

As I said recently to an Irish friend, what a tragedy it is for Ireland that having gotten rid of us British you should now find you’re governed by Belgians.

Of course in terms of economics all these difficulties in Europe could be resolved by the institution of a single economic policy, a single tax system across the European euro area, a single welfare and security policy. That of course would be accompanied by a single central bank, a single treasury and a single government. And I would have to advise my friends in France that there would be a single pensionable age too.

But as we look at what is happening within the eurozone, it is a sort of slow motion political and economic car crash. There is no good news in that for the United Kingdom. There is no pleasure in seeing things go wrong for our friends on the continent and our only comfort derives from the fact that despite all the propaganda and the hype from the euro loons, the United Kingdom stayed out of monetary union.

And God bless Prime Minister Brown. I don’t know precisely what his motives were in not going in but by God he was right not to.

But none of this is going to deter the European Union from pursuing the ambition of the creation of a new European recovery. So the Conservative conference cheered loudly William Hague’s words on European policy and I quote him:

“The coalition has agreed that we will not agree to move more areas of power to the EU.”

He chose his words carefully. It was not a promise that no more powers would go to the EU but that no new areas of powers will do so. In Euro-speak that means that within the occupied field of course new powers would go but we would oppose the creation of new areas of common policy.

But the coalition has already given away more powers by opting into a directive giving foreign police forces powers over British subjects in that country. We didn’t have to do so. Having done so of course we now cannot opt out and nor can we resist changes by majority voting, even if they extend vastly the powers which are given to foreign police forces in our country. Nor it seems will we be able to do anything about European arrest warrants. What became of habeas corpus?

When a British citizen can be arrested on the say so of a Greek prosecutor or policeman, perhaps for having allegedly committed a crime in Greece which is not a crime in Britain and he can then be locked in a Greek jail for a couple of years or so while they look for evidence to bring against him. Now that’s not what was decided at Runnymede near thousand years ago.

Nor I think will Mr Hague’s words rob the EU of its powers, which were granted by the Lisbon Treaty to extend its powers over this country because that is not a new area of power. But what got the biggest cheer, and I think its worrying, was Mr Hague’s final assurance to the Tory Conference. I quote again:

“A sovereignty clause on EU law will place on the statute book this eternal truth, what a sovereign Parliament can do a sovereign Parliament can also undo.”

But what he said really worries me. You see I’ve always found it’s a general rule in life that if a man declares loudly that he is stone cold sober; the odds are that he’s drunk. And Parliament which is sovereign has no more need to legislate to declare that to be so than a sober man has to announce his sobriety.

Indeed by so doing it casts doubt on whether it is or it was sovereign to admit that there is a need to legislate, to assert that that is the case undermines the assertion itself and whoever slyly whispered into the ear of the Foreign Secretary must be well pleased with his work, after all all that is needed now is legislation by Parliament to assert that it is sovereign and then one day for a majority in Government to repeal that act and Parliament would be no longer sovereign and nothing could bring back its sovereignty.

Then of course Parliament would no longer be sovereign and the European Union will have won as poor John Major thought he had done at Maastricht, game, set and match.

Our task is to make sure that Parliament understands the dangers of going down that route. We have that battle upon the stage. We have the other battle on a broader front outside of Parliament on getting people to realise how much of their lives is now governed by courts and laws which they are incapable of influencing themselves.

I wonder how we can do it. I think we have to be careful that we do not bore the British public by some of the more esoteric arguments. I think we have to be clear that at a time when public expenditure is the big news of the day that we put some of our arguments in terms of public expenditure.

There are not two areas of public expenditure, the health service and overseas aid which are sacrosanct and ring fenced, there are three. The European Union expenditure is the third.

But for that we could afford the aeroplanes to put on our aircraft carriers.

And we should reach people who are worried about our health service by explaining to them what the European legislation is doing to our health service. Before long we will not be able to give the training to our young surgeons which would enable them to qualify. Even worse, it looks as though we will be forced under European law not to discriminate against doctors coming in to replace our young doctors and to qualify in their place and leave some of our young doctors forever outside.

I think we have to look very carefully at how we explain to people the effects upon their lives of European law. That sounds harsh because there is no point in having a European referendum unless it is one which we can win.

And that’s what we have to do and I’m glad that all of you here this evening have shown by your coming here that you are determined to help in getting it done.