Lord Howell of Guildford - 18/11/99

Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, it is my duty and pleasure to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond, on his excellent maiden speech. In a most genial way, he steered through highly controversial areas but in doing so sounded most objective. That is a great skill. I thought his speech a pleasant contrast with the slightly waspish tone of the first six minutes of the speech from his Front Bench. The noble Lord will forgive me for the adjective.

I, too, congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford. He is an old friend. I greatly admire what he said and what he does for Christian Aid. He understands, perhaps as some theoreticians and great philosophers do not, that development begins with people and not with economic models, gigantic aid budgets, hydro-electric dams and so forth. The process comes out of the history and culture of the country. He understands that and I was delighted to hear the voice of truth and reason from someone who comes from the city of Guildford where I spent most of my life and which I had the privilege of representing in the other place for 31 years.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, who opened the debate, on her new, exciting job. I must apologise to her and to the noble Baroness, Lady Scotland, for a discourtesy, but for inescapable personal reasons I must leave before the end of the debate. I hope that they will forgive me.

I wish to concentrate on two phrases in the gracious Speech relating to international affairs. The first talks of seeking,

the second of taking,

I hope that they are interconnected--"joined up" is the trendy phrase--but I am a little uneasy about whether they are. Some of us may not like it, but we are all agreed that a radical modernisation of our institutions is being pressed upon us by colossal developments in the global order. The entire capitalist system is undergoing fundamental, revolutionary restructuring. Certain principles endure, but the world is changing very fast. Business, retailing and social relationships have been transformed by the Internet, Cyberspace and so forth. In fact, that is not for tomorrow, it is yesterday.

It is dawning on the policymakers here and in other countries that our political structures must adapt to the new conditions. If power is being redistributed into the networks of existence and relationships, those who seek to govern must do so differently in the future. Let us hope that further reform of your Lordships' House will be part of the improvement and of the adjustment to new conditions. None of that is for debate today. Although we may have bitter feelings about the ways in which we should respond, most people concede that such change is taking place whether we like it or not.

I want to put a single, simple point. Is it not possible that the enormous pressures, which will change the lives of all of us, apply also to the European Union? The European Union is the child of the European Economic Community. It is a magnificent post-war structure. It was created for reasons some of which no longer exist: to keep western Europe from the communists; to stop the French and Germans killing each other; and so on. Those were admirable aims, many of which have faded. But it was created before anyone, except perhaps a few Pentagon officials, had ever heard of the Internet. It was created almost before the computer became a manageable part of life, and it was created much in the model of the old nation state writ large. The Monnet ideas of a Commission, of a Council of Ministers, and of nation states merging into a larger entity were magnificent, but they belong to an age of hierarchy and not to the age of the network into which we have now wandered.

Therefore, I ask those who come down heavily on the allegedly dithering British for not rushing into every European project whether it is right that we should embrace every dot and comma of the proposals in present or future treaties concerning those projects and whether those of us who hesitate over some European arrangements that belong to yesterday rather than tomorrow are really so sceptical and dumb and to be dismissed as anti-European.

I listened the other day to a senior politician, who, I confess, is a member of my own party, telling us that we were dithering; that the British were missing the bus again; that the great European project was the only game in town, and so on; and that we should rush ahead and embrace it. However, when one sees some of the patterns and attitudes to which the European Union adheres, and which are pressed upon us, and compares them with the extraordinary vigorous and vibrant nature of this island and its economy, which is currently showing that it can adjust to the network age, one wonders whether we do not have a few more thoughts to air and to argue with our European colleagues before we rush in and accept their version of the project.

There are other views which we should have as a nation--indeed, which we are entitled to have as a nation--to press upon the architects of tomorrow's Europe. That sounds high-flown and easy, but it is not. We know that the pressures on our own lives, on the European Union and indeed on every nation state are extremely dangerous and difficult. All parts of our economic life are being globalised into a system of unimaginable complexity. Economics is pulling the world together; politics are pulling it apart. All kinds of new searches for identity are leading to intense attitudes towards local cultures and tribalism in its most extreme form. That is very dangerous.

The picture is of the economics of the world dragging us together and the politics of the world fragmenting and atomising us. Those are extraordinarily dangerous tendencies. If we simply buy the "bigger is better" argument and say that as soon as we all enter the European system all will be well, we are missing out the fact that all may not be at all well in a network age and that we may well have given birth to some extremely dangerous atomising and fragmenting tendencies which undermine the coherence and cohesion of our societies.

The choice was expressed rather well the other day by the leader of the Conservative Party at the CBI. He contrasted the "mammoth" way of thinking with the more agile and fleet-of-foot way required in the network age. He asked what had happened to the mammoth that was recently dug up from the ice: why did it die? Are we not to understand that size can be disastrously weakening and undermine the kind of agility needed? The truth is that just as we on this island cannot escape the fantastic pressures of competition and transparency coming from the global system, nor is the European Union able to do so. Our partners in the Union cannot escape the forces of competition which will be doubly strong in every area.

The European Central Bank, a new institution, is trying to campaign in Brussels against the introduction of electronic money for a good reason. Electronic money will undermine the power of central banks to operate on the reserves of credit-creating banks. That, in turn, will undermine the precise control of the monetary system that central bankers like to impose. We were talking of that matter recently in your Lordships' House. The mood in the Brussels Commission is to place so many restrictions on e-commerce, on which we are about to legislate in this House and in the other place, that the liability on the seller on the Internet would be the liability of the law which operated in the consumer's country. As most e-commerce trade takes place across borders, those restrictions would kill e-commerce in Europe at birth.

Those are classic and unsurprising Luddite reactions to vast new technologies which will undermine the old hierarchical structures both of this country and of the rest of the European Union. Before we rush into enthusiastic endorsement of the European project, convinced that everything suggested to us is right and that our own doubts are wrong, we should pause and ask what structural institution will emerge from the dust that is neither so big as to be unaccountable and mammoth-like nor so small that it begins to break everything up. The answer must be the one institution that we know on a human scale which we can understand; that is, the nation state.

The more we move into the globalised age, the more sensible we should be to reconstruct and understand the limits as well as the strengths of the nation state: what it can no longer do in the economic realm where the individual is empowered; and what it can do in the realm of upholding the cohesion and civic order of society. That is my plea: let us be good Europeans, but let us understand that not everything in the European Union is right, and not everything that the British suggest is wrong.

Furthermore, let us in this House in the future, both in the transitional House and in the House to come, do as my noble friend the leader of my party rightly says. We must scrutinise, revise and possibly add the tonic of a touch of accuracy to the present Government's proposals. Accuracy does not seem to be their terribly strong point. As my noble friend's amendment suggests, let us also add some vision. Let us not only revise and scrutinise; let us put forward new ideas and show that there are new gateways to open and new vistas of how governments should work in a free society. Above all, let us show what being a good European really means, which is not quite what is sometimes implied by the more enthusiastic acceptors of everything from Brussels, Paris and Berlin, which may have many good motives behind it but is not always correct or perceptive.