Murnaghan Interview with Lord Owen former Foreign Secretary and SDP Leader, 28.02.16
ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS
DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now last week Lord Owen, the former Labour Foreign Secretary, added his voice to the campaign to leave the European Union. The man who went on to found the Social Democratic Party of course says remaining in the EU is the most dangerous option for the United Kingdom. Lord Owen joins me now and we’ll have some thoughts on Project Fear and other things with Lord Owen in a moment but why is it so dangerous to leave the European Union in your estimation?
LORD OWEN: I don't think it is dangerous to leave. I think it is actually a safer choice to leave because the European Union is broken backed because of the eurozone and because of the euro and although we are not a member of it, it drags the whole of Europe into a dysfunctional state. We spent the last six or seven years with everybody trying to get the eurozone countries to reform. G20 which comes out with a statement about whether Britain should or not leave the EU, actually has been urging the European Union to get their act together and change it, the American Treasury has gone in time after time. Our problem is, as a result of the Prime Minister’s negotiations we now know there will not be a treaty amendment for a substantial number of years and without treaty amendment there is no eurozone changes. That is deeply troubling for us so we ask to stay in an organisation that is basically dysfunctional and they can’t grapple with the problems, look at the way they are not able to grapple with immigration.
DM: We can leave them to it, to the dysfunctional bits, is that the sense that David Cameron was trying to give us?
LORD OWEN: Look, firstly let’s get David Cameron’s position. He chose to have a referendum and the reason he chose to have a referendum is that his party is divided and he can’t deal with Europe in the normal way in the House of Commons so you suspend normal parliamentary democracy and you hand it to the people. Now if you hand it to the people you must hand it to them as a choice. David Cameron is trying to have it in a very disreputable way actually, as soon as he announces a referendum he says there is no choice. Now if there is a referendum and if there really is no choice, if it’s such a disaster to leave you shouldn’t have a referendum and he should face that his promise to have one was ill-advised and he should say he will not do this because it is so damaging. It isn’t so damaging, he knows perfectly well that this is a wholly manageable solution. The Ministry talked about two years of chaos – it is exactly the opposite. In the old days there was no way to get out of the European Union, in the Treaty of Lisbon we introduced a procedure for leaving so we firstly have the European Union accept that one of its members can leave. You invoke Article 50, which the Prime Minister says he would do, and you start to negotiate an arrangement.
DM: But the Prime Minister and those on the remain side do have a point here though, is what are we negotiating towards. The Leave side don’t have a unified vision of what life in the UK looks like outside the EU.
LORD OWEN: The Leave side is only asked, like the Remain side, one question which is the direction of travel. Do you want to continue within the European Union or do you not? From that moment on, the government reforms, the government handles the negotiations, David Cameron has said – and I must say I don’t understand quite why but he says he wants to be the Prime Minister after a decision. Look, we went through all this in ’75, Callaghan and Prime Minister Wilson, Callaghan was Foreign Secretary – these two men never bullied or threatened us. The British people will not be bullied to stay with Brussels.
DM: You think it has turned like that already?
LORD OWEN: Oh yes, this is bullying. Look, Aneurin Bevan used to have a good phrase, he said why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book? There’s a book that’s just been published that is called Cameron At Ten, the Inside Story and there’s a chapter here on the Scottish referendum and it is all about this fear strategy and all about when the polls went wrong for them, they panicked and so they went into rapid action. It talks about warning Scotland of the dangers and so they decided to mobilise more business voices, we’ve seen them. The Cabinet Secretary has no business in a referendum period in calling in all the past senior generals and actually they got their comeuppance, Field Marshall Bramhall who is greatly respected said it wasn’t the sort of letter that he would have dreamed of writing and then you have the head of the SAS, Michael Rose, saying his signature was put on it inadvertently and he says well sovereignty is the issue. We have lost too much sovereignty and security and sovereignty do go together.
DM: So panic from Number Ten already?
LORD OWEN: Well it is even worse than that, they then say ‘Decide to mobilise more business voices, speaking out against it, at the most secret and confidential levels discussions are taking place between Number 10 and the Palace’. Come on, firstly the Queen doesn’t need to be told by them how to behave, she has shown us in her 90 years that she knows how but the idea that the Cabinet Secretary talking to the Palace about the whole issue of a referendum, this cannot be allowed to happen during this referendum. It should never have happened during the Scottish referendum. Journalists were briefed by the Cabinet Secretary, these things are not normally done by a Cabinet Secretary and now the Cabinet Secretary has issued this instruction that the Cabinet Ministers who want to leave are not able to see papers about the European Union. This is going on right until June 23rd, are they not going to be able to see what … I mean the virtual …
DM: Do you think the business of day to day running of their departments will suffer?
LORD OWEN: Well of course, of course, it is absurd. Fortunately he is going to be questioned on Tuesday by the House of Commons Select Committee which deals with House of Commons functions. When he tried to fix and rig the election then the whole question of the purdah period which operates during a general election for civil servants, he wanted to waive some of those rules. The Select Committee said no and the House of Commons changed the regulations so I believe the House of Commons will see this instruction of the Cabinet Secretary gets thrown out the window.
DM: As a man who knows a thing or two about divided parties, the parallel that doesn’t exist with the campaign, the Scottish independence referendum, is that the Conservative party is not fighting another party here, it’s fighting itself in parts here. What do you see the future for them, if you care?
LORD OWEN: That’s the nature of a referendum, the same thing happened in the Labour party in ’75. Labour was deeply split and that’s why we had a referendum but in fairness, Wilson made it clear I will be Prime Minister after the referendum and I will genuinely carry out the will of the people and I think Cameron has got to adopt that position pretty soon. This Project Fear has backfired very badly on him and he has got to keep his colleagues … I am not a Conservative, never will be but all I think is – and I want this because I want these negotiations that will take if, as I hope we do, we vote to leave, with a got, in place, no general election, a government has got four years in front of them and can negotiate seriously with the European Union and with other countries about trade but even then we will hopefully have come out of the European Communities Act of 1972, we won’t introduce anything until we’re able to do so but it’s not just about trade. We will start to be a self-governing nation again, this is what the people want. We ought to control our borders. I believe in immigration, they add value to the economy but we don’t have to take just from the EU automatically. We need to be able to control that amount that comes from the EU and that amount that comes from other countries and the main criteria is that they are going to contribute to our economy. Our economy is nowhere near as strong as they have been pretending and they are now claiming all these terrible drastic things are going to happen. I’ll tell you, the economy was worse actually in 1975.
DM: Lord Owen, thank you very much indeed and thanks for doing your research as well, as always of course. Lord Owen there.
