House of Commons Hansard Debates for 18 Dec 1991

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but on another we said maybe. We should ask why, time after time, Britain seems to be the odd man out. One of the main reasons is that our system of democratic parliamentary self-government is incompatible with the Brussels machine, which has an unelected Commission with the sole power of initiative and right of veto, a Council of Ministers which legislates in secret, the so-called Parliament, which is not really a Parliament, has no roots in this country and will never be the focus of the hopes, aspirations and loyalties of our people, and a Community court, which in many ways is a political court and engine of federalism, standing above Parliament. That apparatus does not fit with parliamentary self- government. It already makes us do things that we do not want to do and stops us doing things that we want to do.

A second reason is perhaps that we have not obtained many of the much- trumpeted benefits that we were promised from the original Common Market. We were told that there would be substantial benefits to our balance of trade, but, in fact, we had a multi-billion pound deficit inflicted on us. There has been no reform of the common agricultural policy and the average British family now pays about £17 a week extra for its food.

This year we are paying into the Common Market budget about £2.5 billion more than we receive in order to subsidise richer countries. We give more money to the Common Market budget than we give in aid to the third world. What sense is there in that? Let us think what we could do with that £2.5 billion in the health or education services. Another possible reason is the deceit. Our people have often not been told the truth. Our political leaders have always moved in a crab-like fashion, saying one thing but doing another. Let us cast our minds back to the referendum. In the Government's manifesto which was sent to every household it was clearly stated that there would be no political union. The manifesto also said that there had been a threat of economic and monetary union which would have brought unemployment, but that that threat had been removed.

We often hear talk of trains. We were not told where the train was going, but we were told that we must all clamber aboard or we should be left behind. I always objected to the idea that everything is predetermined and that we have no choice. That is a fundamentally undemocratic argument. Maastricht has brought us some clarity, because we now know where the train is supposed to be heading. The original draft treaty spoke blatantly of a "federal vocation". Those words have been taken out and replaced by "an ever closer union" but what is the difference? There is none--it is merely semantic juggling. The people who inserted those words have not changed their minds. They made great strides at Maastricht and moved the train or conveyor belt a long way forward towards federalism. Of course, they did not get all that they wanted, but they will be back for more. Already, there are plans for another intergovernmental conference in 1996 and they already have a timetable for economic and monetary union. The mythical train has not only a destination but a timetable.

We are told that federalism means different things to different people, that it is a benign arrangement which does not centralise but pushes power downwards to the people and the regions and that it is based on subsidiarity. I think that that is another deception. Let us consider economic and monetary union and a single currency.

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What happens to economic and monetary policy, to interest rates, exchange rates, budgetary policy, taxing and spending which are the substantial bread-and-butter issues of our politics? Where do they go? Do they go downwards? Of course not--they go upwards. All those vital issues are to be rigidly centralised and that is the crux of the matter.

All of our economic life is to be decided by an unelected, unaccountable single central bank. That is not democracy or power to the people--it is all power to an autarchy of unaccountable conservative central bankers. That might be the heart of Europe, but it is certainly not the heart of socialism. The highly centralised single bank will be a law unto itself. It will be beyond the reach of the ballot box. Governments would have to undertake solemnly not to seek to influence it. I cannot conceive of anything more objectionable, more retrograde or more reactionary. If such highly centralised decision-making

Mr. Quentin Davies (Stamford and Spalding) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Leighton : No, because we do not have time.

If we had such highly centralised decision-making it would not matter who won elections or who was Chancellor of the Exchequer, because such issues would be decided elsewhere. The electorates of each country would be stripped of their powers. There would be no subsidiarity in monetary policy. Short-term interest rates would be uniform--identical throughout the area. Regardless of local circumstances, they would be the same in Glasgow as in Naples ; the same in Lisbon as in Berlin. There would be no local flexibility. We already have the first stage of economic and monetary union--the exchange rate mechanism--and it is already doing great damage to Britain. Everybody agrees that the present rate of inflation would justify a cut in interest rates--British industry is crying out for one. Yet we cannot have a cut because interest rates are now set, not according to the needs of our domestic economy, but for the sole purpose of propping up the pound in its ERM band, thus prolonging the recession. That will do great damage, but even after all the pain that it will inflict, it will fail. It is always dangerous to prophesy, but I am prepared to do so and say that it will not be possible to hold the pound at DM2.95.

Our inflation rate is now coming down to approach German levels--but any fool can do that by recession, by knocking the economy flat on its back and by causing mass unemployment. That is the economics of the graveyard. We are also told that wage increases have to come down to German levels, and there has been some movement in that direction.

The important factor, however, is unit labour costs, and they are decided by productivity. As a result of deflation, productivity in Britain went down last year, whereas in Germany it went up. So while unit labour costs in Germany increased by 3 per cent., in Britain they increased by 11 per cent. With a fixed exchange rate, that means that Britain loses competitiveness, and will continue to do so on a cumulative basis.

That all means that we pretend that the pound is worth what it is not. To see what happens when people pretend that a currency is worth what it is not we have only to consider Germany's monetary union. The Germans

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pretended that an east mark was worth the same as a west mark. At a stroke, overnight, east German industry was knocked out, and the work force was made redundant.

The exchange rate mechanism benefits the stronger economies, especially the German economy. It builds in and reinforces their dominance, but it damages the weaker economies.

The Select Committee on Employment took evidence from a variety of sources on the effect of ERM on Italy and France. It found that the system had inflicted an extra 1 million unemployed on Italy and more than half a million on France, and had slowed both countries' economic growth. The ERM is a high-unemployment club, with a slow growth rate. Already it is having the same effect on Britain. We have high and growing unemployment, and under those policies that high unemployment is built in for the whole of the 1990s, along with recession and slow growth.

Our public services are crumbling, our schools are rotting, our health service waiting lists are growing and our railways are not working--all because our economy has not produced the growth to pay for them. The ERM means that that situation will be perpetuated throughout the 1990s.

While we have separate currencies a poor economic performance will show up as a balance of payments deficit--but with a single currency that warning signal would disappear, and a poor performance would show up by whole regions or countries becoming depressed and blighted areas afflicted with mass unemployment.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) explained, at Maastricht not a single word was spoken about full employment. Full employment is no longer an aim of economic policy. Everything--growth, employment and prosperity--is to be subordinated and sacrificed to pegging the exchange rate of the pound. That means that people--human beings, flesh and blood--are sacrificed to an arid, dogmatic, mistaken theory of money. Money is to be the master, not the servant. The Labour party's role should be to bring those matters under democratic control and not to surrender them to remote, unaccountable central bankers.

What we had at Maastricht was old hat ; it was living in a time warp. Since the Delors committee reported, the whole world, especially Europe, has changed. The Berlin wall has come down. We have had the collapse of the totalitarian regimes. New democracies have been born, struggling against appalling odds to find their feet, with hyper-inflation and national rivalries. Those are the new issues, priorities and dangers. What was the response to all that at Maastricht?

Half our continent is an area of instability and need. There are a dozen states asking to join and participate in an all-European economic and political arrangement. That is the great historic opportunity. What did we do? What happened at Maastricht? The whole issue was virtually ignored. Instead, they want to waste the next decade poring over the details of economic and monetary union rather than dealing with the real issues confronting Europe. The more we deepen--to use the jargon--the Community, the more obstacles we put in front of eastern Europe. How do we imagine that the Poles could put the zloty in the exchange rate mechanism? How could the lev or the rouble be put in the ERM? We are building new obstacles and barriers.

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Our experience of multilingual and multinational federations has not been very good. There was one in central Africa, which collapsed. There was one in the Caribbean, which collapsed. Even in Canada, there are problems in Quebec. After the recent elections, even Brussels cannot govern itself and it looks as if the multilingual state of Belgium is about to collapse. There are the problems in Yugoslavia and in the Soviet Union, where a federation is moving towards some kind of commonwealth of independent states.

Maastricht was not the last word on the development and future of Europe. It was the wrong agenda. In the next decade--and let us bear in mind the next intergovernmental conference--there will be different Ministers who may have different ideas. They will learn from experience. I am convinced that the prospect held out at Maastricht will not be the prospect that we shall have at the end of the 1990s.

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12.36 am

Mr. Bowen Wells (Hertford and Stortford) : I hope that the Maastricht treaties will be the high water mark of federalism in Europe. That will be proved to be so because of the dogged, persistent and brilliant negotiating work by the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and his two Ministers of State, especially my good friend the Member for Watford (Mr. Garel-Jones). They have persistently insisted that the treaty we signed contained agreements to enhance democracy within Europe, within the Commission and within the European Parliament, and at the same time embraced closer European union by means of getting agreements between the Governments of the Twelve on foreign policy, security matters and matters connected with home affairs.

The means of negotiation has profound implications for our democracy, for the accountability of Europe to the electorates of Europe and for the accountability of Ministers to their national Parliaments. It is right that we should consider tonight the question how we enhance the democracy, responsibility and accountability of the European institutions and of our own Ministers to the national Parliament.

On European monetary union, it seems to me that it has long been the cherished aim of Conservative Governments to find a means by which we could control the value of our currency--to make it predictable in its exchange rate, as it was for much of the 19th century. In that time, we were tied to the gold standard, which we found to be inadequate and inflexible, especially as it depended in part on the mining activities in the gold mines of South Africa and the Soviet Union. We abandoned that after the war for the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. We did not at the time think that we were sacrificing sovereignty to join that system. It ushered in a period of expansion over the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the like of which the world had rarely seen.

It is essential that we should find a way to control our currency and to make it stable. I believe that joining a European monetary union with a single European currency would be a good way to achieve that. However, we should not do that if we joined at the wrong exchange rate--as happened, as the hon. Member for Newham, North-East (Mr. Leighton) explained, with eastern Germany. We should have the right not to join when the timetable date is reached in respect of the present European monetary union treaty.

We would be foolish to join if that meant serious dislocation of our social, economic and unemployment situations. I wish that all members of the Community had reserved a similar power not to join, but that was not to be. We have an extra lever in the establishment of European monetary union, because, in contradiction of what the hon. Member for Edinburgh, Central (Mr. Darling) and the Leader of the Opposition said, we are going to be fully involved in the negotiations for the establishment of the central bank and the way in which it will operate.

I hope that we will now discuss how to make that central bank responsible and accountable. That must be achieved not simply through ECOFIN, but through all 12 national Parliaments involving the Finance Ministers and Prime Ministers of the 12 countries. The decisions taken in the three pillars to which I have referred--security, foreign

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affairs and home affairs--should come back to this place for a decision whether the policies adopted at those Councils are correct. We must pay particular attention to the declaration at the end of the treaty about the role of the national Parliament. We in this House have a serious point to address in that respect. In addition to the three pillars that I have mentioned, we must consider the accountability of the European Council that will be the principal means of establishing policy.

The Council of Heads of Government meets without a published agenda that we can discuss before meetings are held, and it meets in absolute secrecy. At the moment, we in the national Parliaments simply receive the press releases that the Heads of Government decide to release after the events have occurred and policies have been made. That is a thoroughly unsatisfactory way of calling our Heads of Government and that Council to democratic account for their actions to this House and to our people.

The increased qualified majority voting in the Council of Ministers, to which we have agreed in the treaty, means that we must have a way of keeping our national Parliaments better informed than they are at present. The word "federalism" is seriously misinterpreted and misunderstood. It is an example of the ability of the Twelve to misunderstand one another. Only if delegations from this House regularly meet delegations from other national Parliaments will we be able to understand the arguments, appreciate them and become sympathetic to the problems facing other member states. In that way, we will generate the consensus that is absolutely essential in a democracy ruled by a democratically elected Parliament and, indeed, by an executive in Brussels.

As soon as we can after the next election, we must consider how we are able to carry out those essential functions if the European union is to be democratically accountable. That means bringing members of the European Parliament into the House and into our Committees. Members of the European Parliament receive warning of matters that are to be discussed by the Commission and by the various pillars and councils that have been established by the treaty.

The treaty has advanced Europe, but it is a Europe of nations which is on trial. Unless the European union works properly, democratically and accountably, we will begin to revert to the horror of a supranational federal Europe which we all fear, and which the majority of people in this country and most hon. Members will reject.

12.46 am

Mr. John Home Robertson (East Lothian) : As one who joined the Labour party to support my predecessor John Mackintosh as a great European enthusiast, I take great pleasure in the position that has been taken by my party in recent months on this important issue. I passionately favour the increased co-operation within the European Community and the developments that are taking place. However, I am very sad that the Government--for the next few months, anyway--are trying to drag their heels and opt out of so many important aspects of what the Community is doing.

The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr. Wells) said that he wanted more democratisation of the institutions of the Community. I heartily agree with him, and I suspect that that is really an argument in favour of

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federalism in due course--I would not necessarily be too frightened of taking that course. It probably will evolve, but no doubt slowly. However, the hon. Gentleman cannot expect me to agree with his preface, in which he said that his right hon. Friend the Prime Minister had negotiated brilliantly. If the Prime Minister was brilliant, he was certainly spectacularly outshone in the opening speeches. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition wiped the floor with the Prime Minister, and never has that been more spectacularly done.

The Prime Minister must be a considerable disappointment to his hon. Friends. He is certainly a bitter disappointment to people in this country. He will be labelled the drop-out Prime Minister. He is dropping out of progress for our people in the European Community. It is worth dwelling for a couple of seconds on what he has dropped out of.

It is a great shame that the social chapter has been excised from the treaty. Annex IV of the draft treaty on European union refers to the

"Agreement concluded between the member states of the European Community with the exception of the United Kingdom."

It goes on to state :

"The undersigned eleven have agreed"

to article 117, which states :

"The Community and its Member States shall have as their objectives the promotion of employment, improved living and working conditions, proper social protection, dialogue between management and labour, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion."

That is what the Prime Minister went to Maastricht to exclude Britain from.

It seems extraordinary that a British Prime Minister can represent such a betrayal of the interests of millions of people in Britain as a victory for British interests. Yet that is the giant con that has been peddled in the Conservative press in recent weeks. It will not stand up to examination by the electorate in the coming election campaign.

One aspect of Britain's opting out of the social charter is that it must surely undermine the single market. The Prime Minister says that it is an advantage to have low wages and longer working hours and that that will attract investors who want to take advantage of bargain basement labour. If that is so, presumably costs to industry will be that much lower here than in the rest of Europe, so there will not be equal competition with enterprises in the other 11 nations of the European Community. There will no longer be a level playing field and the single market will be undermined.

Mr. Quentin Davies rose --

Mr. Home Robertson : The hon. Gentleman should perhaps concentrate on feeding his sheep rather than intervene in the debate at this stage.

Mr. Quentin Davies : The hon. Gentleman has obviously recognised that the Prime Minister secured for us a major competitive advantage at Maastricht. The hon. Gentleman said so himself. We have a different regime from the other 11 member states, one which is more competitive. Is it not a considerable tribute to our diplomacy that we were able to persuade our Community partners to allow us to gain an advantage over them?

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Mr. Home Robertson : The hon. Member for Stamford and Spalding (Mr. Davies) seems to want to treat the work force of the United Kingdom in the same way as he treats his sheep. Yes, the Prime Minister has negotiated a set of circumstances in which it will be possible for employers in Britain to pay lower wages and work their employees for longer hours in worse conditions than their competitors on mainland Europe. That may be the competitive advantage that the hon. Gentleman wants for his constituents, but I do not want it for mine. It is important that we should recognise that Britain's opting out of the social chapter will create difficulties because the European single market will no longer be a level playing field. There will be a downside to that. We cannot expect our competitors on mainland Europe to put up with such discrimination. We are building up problems for ourselves. It must be a matter of concern that Britain will become a semi-detached part of the European Community. In this debate, we are confronted with a squalid abdication by the Government of responsibility to the British people. The Government deserve to be condemned by the electorate, as they surely will be.

However, I am confident that the European Community will continue to progress in the direction in which it has been driving--and rightly so--for the benefit of all our citizens and citizens on the mainland of Europe. I am confident that the Labour party will put Britain back into the main stream of Europe as soon as a Labour Government is elected. That will be a good thing for our citizens and for business and enterprises in the United Kingdom.

We keep hearing comments tonight--we also heard them in the debate before the Maastricht summit--about sovereignty. People talk about the great sanctity of the sovereignty of Parliament. Who is kidding whom that a middle-size country such as the United Kingdom is sovereign in the modern world? Are we sovereign in defence, in our dealings with multinational corporations or in any significant matter? No, we are not. The only way in which we can achieve sovereignty is by sharing it. By sharing our sovereignty with our partners in the European Community, we can begin to achieve some realistic control and influence over events. I say that with the most heartfelt

Mr. Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Home Robertson : The hon. Gentleman must forgive me : I want to be fair to other hon. Members who have been here for a long time. As a Scot, I speak about shared sovereignty with great feeling. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Saffron Walden (Mr. Haselhurst), who acknowledged that there was shared sovereignty within the United Kingdom. The sovereignty of the people I represent has been shared with the English since 1707. It has not necessarily been a good thing in all ways, and there has certainly been a downside. We have lost a lot, and there are ways to improve the structure of the United Kingdom which would improve democracy and accountability in our government. That is why I am passionately committed to establishing a Parliament in Scotland, and home rule for Scotland within the United Kingdom and within Europe. However, it has surely been to the mutual advantage of the people of

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Scotland and England that we have had that union for the past two and a half centuries. It has been of considerable economic advantage to both countries.

I am sad to say that some Conservative Members and one or two of my hon. Friends seem to have a little Englander mentality. The narrow nationalism expressed by people who want to cling to total sovereignty for the United Kingdom is rather like the arguments we hear from Scottish and Welsh nationalists--unrealistic and out of date. It is wrong for any realistic person to pursue such outmoded attitudes, especially anyone in government.

I am sad that the Government, in their dying months, have decided to cop out of the main stream in Europe. I look forward to the day, in a few months' time, when my right hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn (Mr. Kinnock) will be getting back into the main stream of that debate and participating fully in the European Community for the benefit of all our citizens.

12.56 am

Mr. Robert G. Hughes (Harrow, West) : Thank you for calling me, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I know that the winding-up speeches have to start soon, so I shall be brief and leave out much of what I wanted to say. I can cover the issue by associating myself wholly with the speeches by my hon. Friends the Members for Saffron Walden (Mr. Haselhurst) and for Crawley (Mr. Soames), who said precisely what I think. European idealism brought me into politics in the first place. I fundamentally believe in Britain as a part of Europe. Therefore, I welcome the tone and scope of the treaty that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister negotiated at Maastricht.

I shall home in on the social action programme and the declaration on racism and xenophobia, which was separate from the main treaty, but was signed at Maastricht. As background, there is no doubt that many black, Asian and Jewish British people are deeply concerned at racial attacks in the United Kingdom and even more concerned about what is happening in continental Europe. They ask what 1992 means for them.

They are especially worried about the success of the Vlaams Blok party in the elections last month in Belgium, about the rise of the Deutsche Volksunion and Republikaner parties in Germany and by the high opinion poll ratings of the national front, led by the odious Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. They will welcome enormously the steps forward that have been made in the signing of the new declaration on racism and xenophobia, especially the penultimate paragraph, which states :

"The European Council asks Ministers and the Commission to increase their effort to combat discrimination and xenophobia, and to strengthen the legal protection for third country nationals". Although the declaration was proposed by the Dutch presidency, British Ministers were its main friends during the discussions. They stopped it being watered down and prevented the part about combating discrimination from being taken out. I also welcome the role that the British Government played in this important new move.

There is no doubt that Britain does lead, in the sense that it is the only country with a comprehensive framework of race relations law. Our reputation is high on this, as is that of the Commission for Racial Equality. However, freedom of movement is limited to EC nationals only, and a significant proportion of Britain's ethnic

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minorities have citizenship of their country of origin and therefore will not be able to move freely within the Community. There have been some moves forward on this. The Commission, the European Parliament and the International Labour Organisation have discussed extensively the possibility of extending freedom of movement to third-country nationals. My concern is that the single market simply will not be able to operate effectively while one important part of the labour force lacks mobility.

I look forward to a directive under the social action programme. I welcome the declaration, which is a big step forward, but, given British experience and law, we could have had a directive in which we could have taken the lead. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to look at that. Britain has set the European Community on a course that I wholly applaud--an ever closer union of nation states. We have set the tone for the future, and that is to be greatly welcomed. I have been looking for that ever since I first became involved in politics. 1.1 am

Mr. George Robertson (Hamilton) : This has been an interesting and wide-ranging debate, in which some notable contributions have been made. It is unfortunate that some speakers in the debate--for example, the Prime Minister--have cast doubt on the quality of the debate on these momentous issues in other European Community countries. We have had more debates on these issues, but it is insulting to suggest that our partners do not give them sufficient attention. A debate that starts at 3.30 in the afternoon and goes on until 2 o'clock in the morning is hardly an advert for open government. It would have been better to hold the debate during the day, when television coverage would have taken the views of hon. Members to a wider public.

Mr. Andrew Hargreaves (Birmingham, Hall Green) : The hon. Gentleman has referred to what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said. However, to take an example at random, how many times does the hon. Gentleman think that the Bundestag discussed the Maastricht agreement before it was signed?

Mr. Robertson : Regularly. If the hon. Gentleman had been in earlier, he would have heard the hon. Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes) saying that last week he had attended a debate on this subject in the Bundestag. The hon. Gentleman would do better if he chose his targets with more precision. Much discussion took place in both the Bundestag and the federal German Bundesrat about the content of the intergovernmental conferences. Although our debates on this subject have attracted a flurry of interest, attendances at debates on the European Community are not noted for their large size.

Among the outstanding speeches made today, I have to mention that of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. I hear from those who have not been imprisoned in the debate for a long time that the electronic media have reported well the exchanges that took place. The political reporters on all stations have paid tribute to the outstanding contribution made by my right hon. Friend, and the way in which he trumped the sporting aphorisms of the Prime Minister, used in the orchestrated

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triumph that we have had to live through in the past few weeks from a Government rocked on their heels by the assault from the Opposition today.

I start on the same note as the Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend--by recognising the historic nature of the events through which we are living. Last night--or was it the night before?--I was in the House of Commons Library when a number of hon. Members commented when the Ceefax screen put up the headline

"Soviet Union to end on 31st December."

We can now believe that nothing is impossible in politics. Everything is changing rapidly and beyond all recognition. That is why the Maastricht summit was always going to be important well beyond its paper agenda. It represented a unique western European opportunity to grab control at that supreme moment of time and to consolidate the structure of what is one of the few secure fixtures in this fast-changing continent that we inhabit. In many senses Maastricht did just that. Deepening the foundations of the Community represented a quantum leap forward in the integration and the internal strengthening of what is the most successful voluntary grouping of nation states.

What happened at Maastricht last week--and I am not passing judgment ; hon. Members have expressed differing views today--was the start of the European common foreign and security policies, with their structures established in the treaty. There are to be powers of co-decision for the European Parliament. Although they were called negative assent procedures and now they are called article 189b procedures, the fact is that there has been agreement on areas where the European Parliament will share with the Council of Ministers the power to make legislation. They will have a veto that will allow them to complement, but not to rival, any of the powers that exist in this national Parliament.

The principle of qualified majority voting has become the norm rather than the exception in decision making and in European law making. The scope of the Community's interest has now been extended, whether through the treaty or through intergovernmental co-operation, into home affairs, health, education, research and development, trans-European transport and communication networks, industry and even culture.

The principle of creating a European Community defence arm has been conceded and is included in the treaty. Given the nature of the reply that the Minister gave earlier to one of his hon. Friends, it is worth reminding the House of precisely what the treaty says about defence. The Government moved dramatically from their previous negotiating position. The treaty says in the declaration on page 114 :

"WEU will be developed as the defence component of the European Union and as the means to strengthen the European pillar of the Atlantic Alliance. To this end, it will formulate common European defence policy".

In article A3, it states :

"The objective is to build up WEU in stages as the defence component of the European Union. To this end, WEU is prepared, at the request of the European Union, to elaborate and implement decisions and actions of the Union which have defence implementations." All that was agreed to and signed by the Government in Maastricht last week. However, all that happened despite the Government. All that was signed up, yet every

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one of those items was opposed by the Government. Their role in Maastricht was only in obstruction, in an attempted dilution and in a vague and futile effort to stop it all.

Mr. Garel-Jones : The hon. Gentleman has been fair up to now in what he has said. Surely he will recall that it was my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary who, more than a year ago, first proposed that the WEU should be developed into a European defence personality. He will also recall, because I know that he wants to be fair in these matters, the paper that was produced by the United Kingdom and Italy. The wording in that paper is what is reflected in the final treaty.

Mr. Robertson : If the Minister looks back slightly more than two weeks, he will find that the Government set themselves firmly against the idea of the European Community having a separate defence identity. The Government moved through the Anglo-Italian proposals and edged their way, crab-like, towards what came out of it, but, as with all these other areas, it represented a retreat.

I offer one example of many that I could give the House. No doubt my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Mr. Kaufman) will give more tomorrow. The Foreign Secretary said on 6 December last year :

"We are not persuaded by the case for adding again to the legislative powers of the European Parliament."--[ Official Report, 6 December 1990 ; Vol. 182, c. 483.]

That is not what the Government signed up to in Maastricht last week.

There has been a comprehensive series of cave-ins. And what was obtained in return for all the concessions made as grudgingly as possible by the British Government? The two words "federal vocation" were surgically removed from the treaty and replaced by the words "ever closer union". In addition, the Government got the two opt-outs--on the central, pivotal issues of monetary union and on the social provisions in the draft treaty. Some triumph for the Government ; some negotiation breakthrough ; some game, some set, some match.

No wonder the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the principal conservative newspapers in Germany, described the Prime Minister as

"the winner of empty victories".

No wonder Mr. Ian Davidson, the distinguished correspondent of the Financial Times, probably the most influential newspaper in Europe today, described Maastricht as

"a hollow victory for the Prime Minister".

From the point of view of the British people and of those of us who put their interests above the convenience of the unity of any party, the saddest aspect of the isolation of our Government last week was not just the pig-headedness on display or the defensive and negative posture that they always seem to strike but their inherent dishonesty. At the very core of the Government's attitude to the negotiations is a fundamental and deliberate deception. On economic and monetary union the Government have no intention of exercising the opt-out clause about which they make so much noise. They may still resist saying that they accept the principle of the single currency. They may still avoid telling the people of this country of any advantage that there might be in being part of the single currency regime. They may go on pretending

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that the calculation on whether to go into the third stage of EMU is exactly equally balanced, with no real penalties involved in staying out while everyone else is in.

The policy is based not on an economy of the truth but on a complete absence of truth. That is an accusation of some seriousness, but it is necessary to make it and I make it neither lightly nor alone. The right hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Tebbit) made the same accusation earlier this evening.

The Government know--the Minister knows--that Britain must be in if everyone else is in : that we cannot possibly afford to be outside an economic and monetary union with the other 11 inside it, while it is driven in every detail of policy by those who have fully signed up to it. It is just that the Government cannot admit this. They will not admit it ; they dare not admit it, lest they offend or alert some dissident elements on the Benches behind them--and we have heard several of their voices this evening.

The Government are frightened ; they are running away from this admission. They hide behind the right of Parliament to make the final decision. But the Prime Minister announced in the debate last month that the final decision on the ratification of the treaty--the European Communities (Amendment) Bill that will be necessary to enact the treaty of Maastricht-- will come in the new Parliament, after the election, so Parliament will have a decision to make even then. There is no real question about the Government needing to hide behind the figleaf of a parliamentary vote because we know that that is not the reason. However, some members of the Conservative party have the honesty to say things outright. In the European Parliament last week, Sir Christopher Prout, the leader of the Conservative MEPs, said : "I do not believe that my country will wish to remain outside this arrangement when the moment for decision comes".

Mr. Garel-Jones : I am interested to hear the hon. Gentleman describe this House as a "figleaf". Not today but in our previous debate, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said to the House that, if the conditions were met, a single currency could bring advantages to this country, but if those conditions were met, political sacrifices would need to be made. If that situation arose, the House would have the right to consider whether it wished, in the balance of advantages, to make those political sacrifices. Is the hon. Gentleman telling us that the Labour party is prepared to commit itself now to a single currency and to say that it is not prepared to give this House the political choice that it should have ?

Mr. Robertson : I did not say that the House was a figleaf ; I said that the Government's hiding behind the right of the House to make a decision was a figleaf. That is not in question. The House will make its decision in the new Parliament. When the Government have the courage and the guts to ask the people to choose a new Government, this Parliament will make its decision. We are not scared of Parliament making a decision. Parliament must and does have the right to make such decisions. We are clear--as are all other 11 countries--about where we intend to be--and that is in the first division of Europe. We intend to be among the top countries in Europe. In exchanges earlier this afternoon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was unable to answer the question that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition asked him time after time. In every living room

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