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By long tradition, as my noble friend Lord Forsyth has reminded us, your Lordships do not frustrate the will of the other place if a Bill reflects the Government’s manifesto. The reason is self-evident: the people have spoken. This time, however, it is the Government who seek to frustrate themselves, or rather their own democratic mandate. The people have indeed spoken—they elected a party committed to a referendum. In England a majority voted for another party that was also committed to a referendum. The Liberal Democrats, in third position, won many votes, again on the manifesto commitment of consulting the electorate. If the Government now use their majority to whip through ratification of the treaty, I believe that your Lordships should have no compunction in making any ratification by this House conditional on submitting the treaty to a popular vote. Far from being a break with tradition, we should count it a privilege that we have the right and the opportunity to uphold the express will of the people.
Of course voters do not always give you the result you want, but patronising them as incapable of understanding the issue and ignoring their wishes makes things worse. It makes them resentful and drives some of them, at least, into the arms of extremists. European voters everywhere already feel alienated from a remote Brussels political class, a class they cannot elect and cannot eject, which ceaselessly harries them with legislation that they cannot get repealed if it proves counterproductive. This is the famous democratic deficit. The European establishment frequently pays lip service to it, but it has no idea what to do about it because the obvious cure is devolution—to return some powers to the
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To those who are not at the sharp end of wealth creation, complaints about regulation often seem to be just a typical business grumble. However, it is far more serious than that. More than half the businessmen questioned in a recent poll said that the costs of European laws now outweighed the benefit of the single market. That is a shocking and astonishing verdict until you realise that the acquis communautaire is 170,000 pages long. That is five and a half times the length of my Encyclopaedia Britannica; and that is before it is transposed into English law and decorated with our own lavish bureaucratic extras. According to GĂ1/4nter Verheugen, it costs €600 billion just to administer, which is more than the entire Dutch economy. That does not include policy costs, because the Brussels set does not do cost-benefit analysis if it can help it. It simply is not real-world economics to believe that, in the long run, Europe can compete effectively with China, India and the other Asian tigers, or with America, with burdens like that around our necks.
In due course, we shall no doubt go through the pointless exercise of examining this take-it-or-leave-it treaty line by line. As we do so, we should at least use the opportunity to remind ourselves of the good constitutional reasons why the then Prime Minister promised a referendum on its predecessor: the entry of the Union into areas previously sacrosanct for the member states, the insertion into the text of crucial matters affecting sovereignty—which had long been openly and strongly resisted by the Government—and the growing attributes of statehood such as legal personality, a long-term president, a quasi-foreign minister and a diplomatic service. Whether one likes some, or all, of these aspects of the treaty, one cannot get away from the fact that they are important and constitutional.
Throughout this process, when the treaty comes to us as a Bill, we should keep in mind those three tests that I mentioned earlier. Will the treaty help to remedy the democratic deficit; will it help the Union to be more competitive; and is it sufficiently different from the constitution to justify the Government going back on their promise? In each case, the answer is straightforward. It is no.
7.32 pm
Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, a member of the general public, happening into this debate, might feel that he or she had stumbled on to an intensely private occasion. We are discussing points with which we are very familiar. Even the occasional exchanges of abuse have almost a Christmas-like feel about them. We recognise them. As we enter the festive season, it is rather like going into one of those Christmas occasions when a subject is suddenly raised and the
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However, I suspect that something else is happening in it. To use a different analogy, it is perhaps rather like the early stages of naval battle. What is actually going on this afternoon and this evening is that we are taking ranging shots. We are testing out positions; we are testing parameters of prejudice; and we are perhaps testing areas—I would not say of compromise—of common ground.
What is happening this evening is well worth while, despite the length of the debate. I detect that some of the ships of the line have slightly altered position. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, seems to have moved slightly. Mind you, it has been a steady progression and one has watched it in its various stages, but I seem to identify a slightly sharper and more attacking position tonight—but we shall see.
One of the strange characteristics of the premiership of Tony Blair was that, rather as this country flies the European Union flag on its embassies in different foreign countries but is reluctant so to fly it here in the United Kingdom, so the former Prime Minister tended to make his most enthusiastic European speeches in continental Europe rather than here in the United Kingdom. That was not an accident, but the result of certain timidity—I think that it is justified to use that word. He always had an eye and an ear for British public opinion, particularly as it might be expressed through the tabloid newspapers, and that produced timidity.
One of the strange aspects of the evolution of the European debate is that that timidity, over quite a long period now, has produced defeat on two fronts. It has produced defeat here in the United Kingdom, because timidity is not a characteristic with which one should confront the arguments of the Eurosceptics—one is not going to win the argument by evidencing a form of timidity. However, there is another front which is very important to the status, prestige and effectiveness of the United Kingdom. It is how these arguments, or rather these demonstrations of timidity, are perceived in continental Europe and among our allies. Perhaps I may share with the House an experience that I had a couple of weeks ago. I was attending a dinner and a public speech in the American Academy in Berlin. The main speaker was the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. The speech was focused primarily on the interesting topic of the future convergence of regulatory provisions on the two sides of the Atlantic, between the European Union and the Atlantic union, which is extremely important not only in accountancy but also in releasing a lot of the economic energy of the massive trade between the European Union and the United States. She used three times in the debate the phrase, “even in London, this argument might have resonance”. The assumption behind that was that a whole raft of arguments would have acceptance in all other European capitals, but that they might achieve it even in London. I am concerned by a growing sense among our friends—and the German Chancellor is definitely a friend of the United Kingdom, as she clearly is of the United States—but also among
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“Above all, the British, who have always put the brakes on the integration process and weren’t much more constructive than Poland during the drafting of the reform treaty, won’t be able to hide behind that country anymore. If British politicians still want to block European integration, a common foreign policy or the new EU reform treaty, they will have to do it themselves”.
I do not agree with that because it is unfair, but the tone of the article should be the subject of concern to us. If that feeling, not only that the British will argue and complain, but also that their instinct at a quite fundamental level is towards disengagement, gains a grip, the leverage that is available to our Government and our ability to influence the future direction of Europe will be enormously diminished.
Many references have been made today to how the public will see these matters. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, will forgive me for my earlier intervention, reminding him that when I was involved in these matters a bit, and in the first referendum, there was certainly no attempt to disguise the purpose of a European Community moving towards ever closer union. However, I was very encouraged by a speech made at the Royal Television Society a few weeks ago by the new chairman of the BBC Trust, Sir Michael Lyons, who said that the trust had been carrying out its own polling on what young people want from the BBC. Some of the things they want are what one would expect, including,
Were it not ever so? But then Sir Michael asked:
“But would you have expected that they would place very nearly the same importance on their third top priority—that the BBC should”,
Well, that remit involves understanding what is really going on in Europe.
What is really going on in Europe has nothing to do with tentacles. It has nothing to do with ensnarement, plot, or subterfuge. It is actually the fairly stumbling but nevertheless vital attempt by an enormously enlarged European Union to manage its affairs more efficiently, more effectively and, I hope, somewhat more democratically—and to keep the project going forward. Just to pause for a moment; if the process of the European Union genuinely faltered, and if we were sitting in this Chamber seeing the European Union not as it is now—without the success of enlargement or the euro—but as an organisation that was breaking up, and in which the processes and instincts for collective agreement had substantially faltered, we would be
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I fear I am sceptical about speeches telling me and others in one sentence, “All this is wrong; we wish to challenge it and want to stop it, but we are tremendously committed to Europe; we believe in Europe and we want everything to go forward”. That position is simply not tenable. We will, of course, want to do certain things differently in this country; and so will the Germans, the French, the Poles and others, including future new states. We either learn how to do that together within an agreed framework, or we risk break-up. That is why this slightly odd, ranging debate that we are having is important. It will be followed by many more, but let us have a sense—from the moment that this real debate is engaged—of what is at stake.
We are not playing with words here. We are not simply trying to score a point against the Government. We are not even trying to win points, or should not be, on who committed to what over a referendum. We are asking ourselves whether this European Union project is good for this country and can be managed well. I believe strongly that it is, and it can.
7.43 pm
Lord Campbell of Alloway: My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond—more than usually so on this occasion. The question that he has asked is the one that I proposed to address, and almost in that form. We have different means of address, of course, but I agree that that is the substance and heart of what we have to debate.
Speaking late in an important debate such as this, I do not propose to indulge in repetition. I will try, if I may, not to bore the House. I will therefore not speak about a referendum. What I think about it is relatively unimportant. In fact, I am not really so keen on a referendum but, as I said on a previous occasion, the Conservative Party should have a manifesto commitment on it. I should say at once that I do not have the privilege of speaking for my party; I do not think that I ever have had, or ever shall. Yet, speaking for myself, I believe that we really have to resolve the heart of the problem that the noble Lord raised by having a manifesto commitment at the next general election to withdraw from this reform treaty. I have said it once, I say it again: that is at the heart of this problem, because the electorate will then have the opportunity to decide. It is for the people to decide, not your Lordships’ House or the other place. The best way of deciding is on a manifesto commitment, not a referendum. However, I will say no more about that, because I do not suppose that anyone agrees with me much.
Taking the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, I would love it if the Council could take stock when it meets, but I do not believe that that is a viable proposition at this stage. We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, for the European Union Committee’s report. If its advice is read carefully, it draws attention to the need for the Government to explain the manner in which the European Court of Justice will interpret treaty
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We may have to face up to rejecting the treaty, but we cannot do that before there is another Government, because, whether you like it or not, and I do not like it much, this Government is our Government. They have made an agreement and, having done so, that agreement has to be ratified, because in the order of international affairs you cannot make an agreement and then not ratify it. The only way to extricate ourselves from this situation now is, as I have suggested, on a manifesto commitment and an election. That is because another Government will not be bound by what this Government did.
In that context, it becomes relevant to consider what our global and national interests are. I go back to the remarks of my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford—I am using some of his ideas. We are concerned with our Commonwealth, our special relationship with the United States, from which we should never step aside, our financial global interests and our massively expensive defence structure and commitments. Those alone are wholly disparate from the concerns of the 27 or more member states of an enlarged European Union, which, incidentally, has already engaged the sensitivities of Russia, a matter not to be ignored.
This enlarged European Union, seeking its ever closer relationship, cannot operate without a form of administrative integration and harmonisation of customs and law, imposed by the Commission as a matter of administration. With 27 states, how on earth is it going to operate without a very tight administrative structure imposed on it? That has been reflected in a series of decisions made by the European Court of Justice, which has interpreted the provisions of the treaty in different cases always in favour of integration on the balance of a series of objectives that, under this treaty, include Articles 1 to 3. I never refer to cases in your Lordships’ House because I know that it is very boring to do so, but with that series of cases I think that the principle of the balance of objectives would be accepted as common ground. It certainly is by lawyers who know anything about it. However, as my noble friend Lord Howell of Guildford said in a previous debate, we are already moving in the wrong direction. To avoid repetition, we can leave it at that.
The Government have, so to speak, supported ratification of this treaty on a series of ministerial assurances. One was that there would be no further step towards integration for 10 years; another was that there would be no adverse effect on employment in the United Kingdom; another was that competition law would remain unchanged. I am not going to read out my notes on that, as I have dealt with it at Question Time and on previous occasions and this is
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I am leaving the question of competition law and principle to the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn of Charlton, to deal with, as he dealt with it before on 9 October, at cols. 121-22 in the Official Report.
In conclusion, there is no cause for surprise that Russia should be sensitive about an overextending Union of integrated states on its borders. Indeed, the advice of the first Earl of Malmesbury would be welcome today, albeit that President Putin is not Catherine the Great. It would not have been expected that any dispute between the retention of state sovereignty insisted on by de Gaulle and a form of integration advocated by Jean Monnet which could not be resolved at Messina should be resolved by ratification of this treaty. It remains open; the door has not been totally closed. It was left open because there could not be agreement—left open in the Rome treaty to enable the Court to devise and implement its own procedures. At the UK accession to the EEC, the concept of integration was not accepted and, as far as I am aware, has never been accepted by the electorate, albeit that Governments have taken steps in that direction.
I conclude by referring again to my noble friend’s concept. He may be speaking for the party—I have no idea—but I am not. But at least he said, and I agree, for the reasons given, that the Government have taken a step too far in the wrong direction.
7.58 pm
Lord Watson of Invergowrie: My Lords, the European Union has been in the grip of stalemate since the rejection by the people of France and the Netherlands of what was then the draft EU constitutional treaty in 2005, but the signatures appended to the completed treaty in Lisbon next week will, I believe, see the completion of the preparations for the expanded European Union. After years of navel-gazing, the EU can now look outwards and beyond its own boundaries. This is good news, not just for the EU as a whole but for the UK, although you could be forgiven for failing to discern that in the light of the almost unrelenting whingeing, carping and often manufactured outrage that characterises coverage of things European in much of our media, predominantly of the printed variety.
The same might be said for an increasing number of parliamentarians, and not just the usual suspects. The European Scrutiny Committee has been mentioned by noble Lords in the debate this afternoon and evening. It recently published two reports critical of the terms of the treaty to which the Government have agreed and seeking watertight commitments designed to “protect” the UK from the perceived Europe-creep said to be lapping not just at our national shores but at those of
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While the European Scrutiny Committee reaches a number of rational and eminently sensible conclusions—not least in respect of the manner in which national parliaments were marginalised and public debate curtailed during the intergovernmental conference process—it seems most put out by the stipulation in Article 8(c) of the treaty that:
and shall do so by respecting the principle of subsidiarity. The principle of subsidiarity is designed specifically to ensure that decisions are devolved downwards wherever possible and is now widely accepted by Europhiles and Eurosceptics alike. If a member state objects to being required to contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union, it is questionable whether it should remain in membership. I of course accept that such an outcome would have its attractions for many people, but surely the European Scrutiny Committee is not seeking to argue itself out of existence.
However, once the ink has dried on the treaty, the biggest hurdle will remain to be overcome: ratification in all 27 member states ahead of the European Parliament elections in June 2009. The UK is not the only country where there is talk of the treaty being the subject of a referendum, with the same demand heard also in Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands. Not only do I not believe that a referendum is necessary, but I believe that it would be profoundly damaging, not just to the UK’s future role within the EU but perhaps, ultimately, to our very future as an EU member.
The prospect of the campaign around a referendum is one that I and no doubt many noble Lords would anticipate with foreboding, because it would present newspaper proprietors with an open goal, allowing them to pander to xenophobia and misrepresent every aspect of what the EU stands for, what it can do for the people of the UK and what positive contribution the UK can make to the development of the enlarged Union. As an example, a number of myths have been peddled repeatedly, despite firm denials from the Government and those involved in the process culminating in the reform treaty: an EU Foreign Minister will control our foreign policy; British embassies will be replaced by an EU diplomatic service; the UK will lose or have to vacate its seat on the UN Security Council; and so on. They are all no more than scaremongering, lacking any relationship with the facts, which those who continually circulate such disinformation know perfectly well. What the treaty will do, however, is increase the effectiveness of a Europe speaking with a common voice on the threats and challenges that face the world. My noble friend the Lord President outlined some of those in opening this debate, touching on places as diverse as the DRC, Iran, Burma and Kosovo.
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