Lord Pearson: Strasbourg bureaucrats should not lecture us

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the former leader of Ukip, said ahead of Thursday’s vote:

“The UK set up after the last war the convention on human rights, because it was perfectly obvious a number of people in Europe weren’t doing very well on human rights. And then the Labour government, our political class, turned it into law in this country.

“My only comment would be we really do not need lectures from a bunch of bureaucrats in Strasbourg or Brussels or Luxembourg or anywhere. We should repatriate that entirely. Why are we getting lectures on that?

“The government is not resisting anything in Brussels. It’s gone along with the financial supervision of the City of London and all our financial services, by an organisation which hasn’t had its own accounts signed off by its internal auditors for 16 years.”