House of Commons Hansard Debates for 20 Jan 1993

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comply with its provisions or face action against it in the European Court of Justice. Our opt-out from the social chapter will not help us in that regard.

The protocol on social policy clearly states--this is important, because it divorces the social chapter from the main body of the treaty--

"this protocol and Agreement are without prejudice to the provisions of this Treaty, particularly those relating to social policy which constitute an integral part of the acquis communautaire.' "

It is clear that whether we have signed up to the social chapter is irrelevant ; we are already obligated to the parts of the treaty that we have already signed up to.

If we were taken to the European Court of Justice for failing to comply with that Community directive, how could I reassure business men in my constituency of Chingford that they would not find themselves at a considerable disadvantage as a result of the court's ruling, given the extra cost implications? The court would be likely to follow precedents established by previous rulings.

The court's ruling in the sex discrimination case of Defrenne v. SABENA in 1976 is important, as it gives a clear indication of the way in which the court would rule in this instance. On that occasion, the court ruled

"to avoid a situation in which undertakings established in States which have actually implemented the principle of equal pay have suffered a competitive disadvantage in intra-Community competition as compared with undertakings established in States which have not yet eliminated discrimination against women workers".

It is therefore already interpreting in the light of how the majority of the Community is likely to have worked.

Mr. Geoffrey Hoon (Ashfield) : Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he does not accept the conclusion in that case, which provided for equal treatment for men and women throughout the European Community? Is he saying that the court was wrong to decide as it did?

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Mr. Duncan-Smith : If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I am developing a case ; I am not judging whether the court was right or wrong in that particular case or with regard to sex discrimination in general. I am trying to prove that the aspects of the treaty which are justiciable from the European Court's point of view will lead the court and other countries to start introducing many of the elements in the social chapter from which we have opted out. I cited the ruling merely as an example of the court's thinking in terms of the acquis communautaire.

The Defrenne decision was based on the same title of the treaty of Rome dealing with social policy as the 48-hour working week directive with which we are threatened. Sex discrimination in fact falls under the following article, article 119.

There is powerful evidence that the court would rule that Britain was enjoying an unfair competitive advantage if it did not comply with the 48- hour directive which was in force in other member states. If there is the slightest doubt, it is wholly removed by title II of the Maastricht treaty, because the European Court of Justice would interpret article 118a under the new objectives of article 2, which are "social cohesion and solidarity". That is an important phase. The new objectives would be subject to interpretation under the commitments to which we have already agreed in article 5 of the treaty of Rome, which is an important and powerful article.

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Mr. Marlow : I am perhaps looking to my hon. Friend for legal rather than political advice. The Committee has been told many times that social cohesion has to do with the expenditure of funds in the poorer areas of the Community and nothing to do with social policy. Is my hon. Friend sure that the court would interpret it in that way? Under the new article 118a(2), the impositions under majority voting would have to have regard to the

"conditions and technical rules obtaining in each of the Member States".

To what extent would that be a safeguard?

Mr. Duncan-Smith : My hon. Friend makes an interesting and important point. I believe that "social cohesion" and "solidarity" must be taken together. The European Court must eventually have regard to the spirit underlying all the articles and, bearing in mind what is best for the majority of the Community, decide how the rest are proceeding and why there is some deviation. Essentially, I believe that the answer to my hon. Friend's question is that the court would not necessarily rule in our favour.

I give a specific example of article 5 being interpreted by the court to impose continuing obligations on member states. In Cullut v. Centre Leclerk in 1985, the court ruled that member states are allowed to adopt measures which would undermine the effectiveness of the community legislation, even if they do not directly contradict its terms. Therefore, article 5 of the treaty of Rome, although it is not being amended, is of major importance to the debate, because it provides a legal basis on which the general treaty objectives and goals, which many people view as general and undefined, suddenly become very clear and may be converted by a process of interpretation by the European Court of Justice to binding and specific legal rules.

Article 2, as amended by Maastricht, gives much greater precedence to social objectives. Accordingly, the court will give much more weight to social aspects and determinations.

Dr. Godman : I remind the hon. Gentleman of the 15th report of the Select Committee on European Legislation from the 1991-92 Session. It refers to the growing power of the European Court of Justice but points out a new factor. Paragraph 34 on page 49 states : "The jurisprudence of the Court recognised a right for individuals (in carefully defined circumstances) to sue their Member States in their national courts for damages flowing from non-implementation of obligations intended for their protection." I can envisage a flood of complaints heading for our courts in England, Wales and Scotland on the basis of the treaty.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point, which stands on its own. To some extent, I agree that these articles will come back to haunt us because of the great and growing power of the European Court to rule over nation state Parliaments and, necessarily, Governments. I believe that I am succeeding in proving that the text provides a route to the European Court of Justice on social matters. I list some of the new objectives of article 2 which powerfully prove my point. They include :

"social protection, the raising of the standard of living and quality of life, and social cohesion and solidarity among Member States".

That is powerful language. In the debate so far, many Members have said that they are general objectives, but I maintain that the general becomes specific once it is bound

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by a court which will rule and interpret-- and interpret behind closed doors--and issue its interpretation as a statement. I have already said that the protocol on social policy specifically states that it shall not

"prejudice the provisions of this Treaty, particularly those relating to social policy which constitute an integral part of the acquis communautaire'".

Therefore, the route that I have demonstrated leaves the door open for substantial Community interference in social policy, effectively undermining our exclusion from the social chapter.

Mr. Dafydd Wigley (Caernarfon) : I have been trying to follow carefully the hon. Gentleman's argument. Does it not lead to the conclusion that, if all the provisions can be secured by the courts or through other mechanisms, there is very little to be lost by including the social provisions for the United Kingdom as for the other 11 countries ?

Mr. Duncan-Smith : I disagree fundamentally with the social chapter, and I congratulated my right hon. Friends the Minister and the Prime Minister on their negotiating skills in keeping us out of it. However, having re-read the treaty, I believe that there is an established route for all of the social provisions to be implemented through the European Court. That poses a challenge, although I have not yet shown how that challenge would arise.

Mr. Garel-Jones : My hon. Friend is developing an interesting point. Does he agree that it is probably a fair assumption that the 11 parties which intend to proceed with the treaty will have read it very carefully? If they felt that the objectives were achievable under the treaty of Rome as amended by the Single European Act, why does he think that they went to the trouble of making these arrangements--or does he think that he and he alone has espied the route for implementing the objectives under the existing treaty?

Mr. Duncan-Smith : I am not sure whether I alone have espied the route, but I was hoping that my right hon. Friend would be able to prove that I was incorrect. I shall be looking for him to do that at the end of my speech. I could assume a Machiavellian intent on the part of other nations--perhaps they made a big fuss and pushed us to the brink, knowing that they could make a concession but still implement the proposals--but for all 11 countries to think in that way would imply an acquis communautaire which I am not sure necessarily exists.

Mr. Michael Spicer : Whether or not my hon. Friend is the only person to have espied that route, would it not be fair to say that previous British Governments of all complexions have missed the central point of previous legislation amending the treaty of Rome? As my hon. Friend is explaining, that central point is the importance of the preambles and listings of objectives in the legislation. We have sometimes overlooked the combination of the preambles and objectives with some of the detailed wording, because that is not the way in which we go about things. We simply look at the main text of legislation ; we do not have a tradition of examining preambles. But other countries have. That is a central point.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : Indeed, that has always been my point. In my maiden speech on Second Reading, I said that

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the European Court of Justice was a more significantly powerful organisation than many of my colleagues on both sides of the House thought, because it had far more latitude than our High Court. If we examine the European Court's rulings, we see that it tends to interpret more according to the spirit of legislation ; it looks to the general objectives underlying the words, not necessarily the words alone.

I believe that it was Lord Mackenzie-Stuart who wrote a couple of letters to The Times about article 3b. I apologise, Mr. Lofthouse, if I appear to be moving away from the amendment, but what I am saying is related to it. Lord Mackenzie-Stuart said that, although politicians had given the European Court a near-impossible task of interpretation, it would none the less do as it had done in the past and interpret according to what it found in the treaty. It has become clear that the court sees that part of its task as to ensure that the interests of the Community as a whole go forward.

Mr. Marlow : The intervention by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State must have been uncharacteristically naive--because I am sure that he was not dissembling. Is not the reality that the Government have to sell the treaty to a British public who are, to say the least, somewhat sceptical? Among that public are industry, the Institute of Directors and the Confederation of British Industry. It is important for the Government, as it was for Chamberlain when he stepped off the aeroplane, to come back waving a victory--the victory that we have been excluded from the social chapter. Yet the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan-Smith) thus far has conclusively proved that we have not been excluded from the social chapter at all. It will be interesting to hear what my right hon. Friend the Minister says about it later.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : My hon. Friend's objections stand on their own, and I shall not elaborate on them.

Mr. Bernard Jenkin (Colchester, North) : It is important to enlarge on the argument about the scope of article 2 and the activities of the Community. Where the Commission feels that it can make a proposal which would command the support of a qualified majority of the Council of Ministers, it merely needs a pretext, and can choose the article under which to achieve such a vote. It is inconceivable that the European Court would subsequently rule against a qualified majority in the Council of Ministers.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : Indeed. All that, which I have previously stated, underlines the point.

It is never enough simply to prove a route to somewhere. I dare say that it is not difficult to find a route to the European Court of Justice through many parts of the treaty. The key difference is the reason why we may proceed along such a route.

Mr. Garel-Jones : My hon. Friend is making an interesting speech, and the intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) pointed in the right direction, too. Of course, one of the things that we have learnt is that the Community is a developing process. In the previous debate I tried to clarify the fact that we have seen that there is a desire--understandable, perhaps--on the part of the Commission and its officials to extend their writ into more areas. They sometimes sought

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to do that in ways which did not seem proper to us. In various other debates we have attempted to close those gaps.

My hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan-Smith) raises an important point, and I shall seek to reply to it in detail later. He has made it clear to the House that we abominate the content of the social protocol--I believe that that is common ground amongst Conservative Members. We believe that it would not only undermine but reverse much of what we have achieved in the past decade. If my hon. Friend has identified a route by which the social chapter could be imported into the treaty, that would be a serious matter, and I shall try later to deal in detail with that important question.

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Mr. Duncan-Smith : I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. This matter needs much consideration, and I hope that it will receive it. As I was saying, it is not enough simply to prove a route. In legal terms, there are always routes to all sorts of decisions. The key is to prove that there is a reason for those routes to be taken. We must consider all 11 of the nations that were behind the social chapter--much of it was generated in France--and ask why we might be dragged down some of those routes. The answer must surely be that--not in one year's time, perhaps not even in two years' time, but as things develop--it will become clear that the United Kingdom is a low-cost country with much simpler worker-management relationships. I should applaud that--it will be lauded by all Conservative Members--but France or Holland may say, "It is unfair. The United Kingdom is part of the Community and has signed up to the spirit of all the agreements, yet underneath it all United Kingdom products are becoming very competitive. We are finding it difficult to compete with the British, and they have a right to our market. And it is all because they have no minimum wage and no social objectives, as we have. We can point out many ways in which they are not implementing the agreements."

Those countries would then encourage the Commission to examine the matter and report that the United Kingdom was in contravention of the body of the treaty. They will say that, under articles 2 and 3, in conjunction with article 118a and bearing in mind article 5, there is a good reason for the Council of Ministers to investigate and bring the United Kingdom into line. They could pick us off in one area at a time.

That is a powerful reason why either individual nations or the Commission will push for harmony. That would drive the others forward, with us as part of the process rather than our undermining them, which would otherwise happen--and which I should applaud, but which would be seen as a threat to the other nations.

That is why the other nations will wish to go down that route and challenge us in the European Court. That is why the European Court will, not for the first time, be called to make a judgment on a matter which is now supranational, in an area where we as a Government have distinctly refused to take part. Yet suddenly the European Court will find against us in one area and then another. As qualified majority voting cut in, we should find ourselves in dispute with the other members of the Community. Arguably, that

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would not be the best way to encourage a decent relationship with them--if that is what people want us to do.

I have tried to demonstrate that the social chapter is already to a greater or lesser extent in the body of the treaty. For Conservative Members the problem is that, although we all applauded the great skills of my right hon. Friends, hidden away underneath everything is not only the route but the reason why we shall be brought to account, whether we like it or not. We shall find that the invidious social provisions will be introduced bit by bit.

Yet again, the nation state will lose its position and its ability to make decisions. Our opt-out of the social chapter will be put on one side. Who here would say--it may be a wiser man than I--that in 10 years' time the opt-out will not be almost forgotten, and we will not already be tightly bound in to many of the social provisions ?

Mr. Peter Hardy (Wentworth) : The hon. Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan-Smith) will probably not agree with what I have to say, but I do not intend to take quite as long as he did.

On many occasions, I have been critical of several aspects of the European Communities, but I am certainly not critical of the approach to the social problems of Europe or the socio-economic management of the Community. A few moments ago the Minister of State expressed opposition to the social charter. He said that it undermines the achievements of the last 10 years. Well, what have we achieved? In 1979, Britain was the fifth wealthiest country in the world ; it is now the 15th. In the past 10 years, we have seen wastelands created, industries wiped out and social and economic devastation inflicted on many parts of the country, which is rapidly becoming criminalised. We have become a criminal, impoverished, under- invested and paganised nation. When someone, even in Brussels, offers to help to get us out of the mess, we have evasion, pompous and unjustifiable boasts, such as we have heard from the Minister, and further evidence of the decline in public standards.

In my brief remarks I shall refer to one aspect of the social policy of Europe--the structural funds through RECHAR. The hon. Member for Southend, East (Sir T. Taylor) will recall a debate of about a year ago in which he and I participated. Hon. Members with constituencies in which there are coalfields that have been devastated in the past decade became increasingly concerned about the fact that, although the British Government were receiving resources through the structural fund, we did not seem to be getting any benefit. We had very serious misgivings. We pressed the Government about the matter and, in response, they assured us that the money was flowing to the coalfields.

But then Mr. Bruce Millan, acting responsibly and properly in fulfilment of his duty as a Commissioner, established beyond all doubt that the Government were receiving this money but were not passing it to the coalfields. He said that, as the money was not going to the coalfields, he would not pass it to the British Government. Conservative Member after Conservative Member denounced Mr. Millan, and Ministers said that he was acting irresponsibly. Members of the Government subjected him to the most appalling, irresponsible and dishonest condemnation and criticism. Not a single Member from the Treasury Bench had the guts to admit that Bruce Millan was right.

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Some hon. Members went to see Ministers about the matter. At one meeting, I pointed out that the Government's claim that the money was being paid to the coalfield areas could not stand up. Let me refer to the way in which I illustrated the point. The Government had worked out their disbursements to local authorities in September of the year in question--two or three years ago--and said that in those disbursements they had allocated the RECHAR money. But it was not until three months after they had calculated the aid for the coalfield areas that the Government found out what the RECHAR money for the following year would be.

We challenged the Minister to consult the right hon. Gentleman who is now President of the Board of Trade but was then at the Department of the Environment, and find out whether he could deny that charge. The response of the right hon. Gentleman was to leak a letter referring to the pressure to which he and his colleagues were being subjected by Labour Members of Parliament who had--he did not use these words--rumbled the Government's approach.

At that point the Government, quietly--very quietly indeed--accepted that Mr. Millan was right. That was after we found out that they had not met Mr. Millan for about 18 months. But they did not tell their friends--or those whom they sometimes assume to be their friends--that Mr. Millan's action was justified. They had spent 12 months or more blackguarding the Commissioner for action that was entirely responsible and proper, but they did not take any significant steps to offer the public apology or expression of regret that was due to our former colleague. Indeed, I know that Conservative Members and Ministers tramped round the country linking Mr. Millan's action with the evils of the so-called social policy. How is it that Germany, France, Spain, Luxembourg and the Netherlands have all passed Britain in the international prosperity tables while they have pursued policies which are acceptable to their peoples but are apparently not to be accepted in this country, which is in rapid economic and social decline?

I assumed that the Government had turned over a new leaf--that they had accepted that Mr. Millan was right and that they would in future pass on the social funds. But, a short while ago, I received from the Minister for Industry a letter whose contents the Committee needs to know, because the Government are about to change their policy as quietly as possible--as quietly as they sought to retrieve their position following the dishonesty about Mr. Millan's intervention. The letter says :

"You ask about future assistance from European Structural Funds for coalmining areas. RECHAR must be considered together with all the other Structural Funds Community Initiatives Taken together, the Initiatives cannot be shown to have brought the UK more than if the same money had been spent on ordinary programmes."

What the Minister meant was that the initiatives could not be shown to have brought to Britain from Europe any more than had been received before, when the funds were buried in the moneys that allowed the Government to pursue a tax-cutting policy that did not have any economic advantage for the country.

The letter goes on :

"However, the Government shares the view that there have been too many Community Initiatives."

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For that reason, the Government will seek to end the RECHAR programme. However, they offer the comforting sop that they will make good use of RECHAR while it lasts. The letter continues : "the Government will continue to give all due priority to the needs of areas such as South Yorkshire, though you will accept, I am sure, that regions with needs unrelated to coal must also receive their fair share."

As my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Mr. Rogers) will recognise, even the current Government pretend to accept that the coalfield areas are in particular need. Brussels not only recognised that fact, but sought to do something about it. We were extremely grateful when Mr. Millan sought to compel the Government to do something about it. We had hoped that acceptance of the accuracy Mr. Millan's statements might lead the Government to maintain the provision of these funds for areas like ours, which, had the Government had their way in October, would have seen further blight at enormous public cost. We now have very good grounds to be suspicious of the Government and not at all ungrateful for some of the actions in Brussels.

Mr. Allan Rogers (Rhondda) : I thank my hon. Friend for his extremely powerful and knowledgeable argument. I think that no hon. Member knows more about this situation. Can he confirm that the obligations arising from RECHAR and other moneys intended to assist coalfield areas and other declining industrial regions arose as the result of an obligation under the treaty of Paris, which was subsumed within the treaty of Rome, and that the Government not only were duplicitous in their treatment of the RECHAR moneys but also offended against--if they did not actually break-- the treaty obligations undertaken when the European Coal and Steel Community was set up, long before the days of European Economic Community and the treaty of Rome?

Mr. Hardy : My hon. Friend is quite right. What we have seen from the Government is a repudiation of some of the basic principles on the basis of which they were eager to enter the Community. Apparently they are eager to remain in the Community so long as it does not affect that small proportion of the British people on whom they believe we all depend--the entrepreneurs. There is a place for the entrepreneur, but there must also be a place for a decent society. The Government have rejected that decency.

I mentioned the hon. Member for Southend, East. He will recall a debate in which we discussed RECHAR. I think that the hon. Gentleman will agree that his argument was that money should not go to the coalfield areas, but that it should be used to assist all the British people. I am sure that he accepts that, although people who live in places such as Southend are not free from problems, which may be exacerbated if the Government pursue their policy towards British Rail, there are areas in which levels of unemployment, and economic and environmental devastation have risen and have now reached chronic proportions.

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The Government now say that moneys from Europe should assist everyone and not only areas in which there are special needs. I submit that the Government have no sense of reasonable priorities and no understanding of the fact that they are supposed to represent the whole nation. Given that, it is wrong to have Britain in an isolated position in Europe.

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Mr. Llew Smith (Blaenau Gwent) : Does my hon. Friend accept that there are problems for some local authorities? There is a strong possibility that they will not be able to take up the RECHAR moneys because of cuts in public expenditure. They will not have the moneys to meet their part of the cost of projects that are so important to communities such as my own.

Mr. Hardy : I am sure that my hon. Friend is aware that I represent a coalfield area, as he does. I know that he has great familiarity with, and knowledge of, such areas. I strongly suspect that, when Ministers in the Department of Employment consider the implications of the 1991 census, they will be astonished. There is excessive complacency about unemployment, and the Government believe their own figures. They are foul in their present form as official measurement, and they are obscene in reality. In areas of high unemployment, the 1991 census will reveal the astonishingly low levels of people in work.

Given that reality, which is not exposed by Government statistics, there is an urgent need for a far greater priority to be given to social and socio- economic policy. It seems astonishing that there is a contemptuous rejection of the social charter, which is more relevant to Britain's needs than it is to the needs of most of our competitor countries, which have not suffered the economic decline that Britain has experienced over the past 10 years.

I am extremely critical of many aspects of Europe, but the social charter is not one of them. Of all the aspects of the treaty, the social charter is the one which we should be eager to espouse. We should not reject it with the rather contemptuous and careless approach which is typical of the Government's attitude.

Mr. Jenkin : This is the first time that I have been called to speak in a debate on the Bill. The present group of amendments allows a fairly wide-ranging debate. Before picking up two or three threads that have already been teased a little by right hon. and hon. Members, I will briefly set out my general attitude to the Bill.

I am pro-Europe and pro-Community and I have always been so. One of the disturbing aspects of the argument on this group of amendments is that I have never before felt the need to protest my pro-Community credentials. I have expressed my misgivings about the treaty on European union and people seem determined to misconstrue my motives. Why should the social aspects be brought into the Community at all? The true intent of the Maastricht treaty is that it should lead to a federal Europe. Why should a truly separate economic pillar include matters such as social protection and social cohesion and solidarity, especially if our opt-out from the social chapter is to free us from those very activities?

I do not suggest, as my right hon. Friend the Minister of state said, that I want to see nothing more than a market in the Community. I point out the inconsistency in arguing in favour of a union based on well-defined pillars while making changes to the economic pillar which weaken its identity. The indisputable effect of what my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford has already described in his extremely able speech, which included many cogent arguments, is to increase the breadth of the European Economic Community's activities so that the change in

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name is entirely relevant because it betrays the much expanded scope that was given to the Community at Maastricht.

I shall point out some of the developments that will not be reversed. The Maastricht treaty is determined to maintain what it calls the acquis communautaire. When Ministers speak to Conservative party conferences and publish Conservative party documents in which they claim that the direction of the treaty has been reversed, one can only assume that they have been deeply misinformed.

I take as an example the proposed directive on the 48-hour working week. The directive has been delayed, but the important point about it is that it was completely unforeseen by the Government. Assurances were given to the effect that anyone would have believed that such a directive was impossible to achieve. The Government have, admittedly, reserved their position to go to the European Court to plead that the matter is outside the scope of the powers of the Community, but Ministers have been advised to negotiate the 48-hour working week directive on the basis that they had better agree something because they might otherwise have something even worse imposed on them. What assurances can Ministers give us this evening that the process is not going to continue, using article 118a, and drawing on the objectives at the beginning of article 2, on the activities in article 3 and on article 5, as demonstrated in the case alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford?

I draw the attention of my right hon. and hon. Friends to another recent development on the social side under the existing treaty of Rome, which is being specifically preserved in the acquis communautaire to which the Maastricht treaty refers. I have here a cutting from the Observer of 17 January 1993, which says : "The Home Office has put on ice' plans to privatise prison education."

Opposition Members may be pleased. However, here we have another part of the social sphere being imposed on the United Kingdom without any warning. The article continues :

"Kent has won the go-ahead for a High Court judicial review and has been joined in the action by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education. Natfhe will argue that contracting out is illegal if it does not abide by European Community directive guaranteeing equal rights and conditions for public sector workers whose jobs are transferred to private companies."

Here we have the possibility of a European Community directive, whose scope is being potentially expanded by a European Court ruling, encompassing the entire contracting-out programme and the entire programme of a whole Government Department--the Office of Public Service and Science--and bringing the whole thing to a halt. That is the problem that we are faced with when implementing further competencies in the treaty, regardless of whether we feel that we have opted out of them. I do not wish to detain the Committee longer ; I simply wish to ask the Minister to give assurances that the social legislation that the Community seeks to put upon us will be prevented.

Mr. Garel-Jones : I accept--I think that it is widely accepted--one of the burdens of the point that my hon. Friend is making, which is that the Commission, sometimes for perfectly laudable, motives, sometimes not so laudable has sought in the past and will continue to seek, I am sure, to extend its writ into areas where we

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would not wish it to go. It is my belief, and we are making the case as we go through the Committee, that this treaty inhibits the Commission more than it was inhibited before.

The crucial point is this. I think that my hon. Friend would agree that everything in the protocol that is the subject of the Opposition amendment is unacceptable to him, to me and to most other Conservatives ; and even if I were to accept the risk that there will be efforts--of course there will be--to push the ball in another direction, surely he and I would not wish to bring about a position where there is any risk whatever that the opt-out that we have obtained from these provisions is put in jeopardy. That is precisely what Opposition Members are trying to do.

Mr. Jenkin : Whether or not I agree with my right hon. Friend on that point, I wish that the British Government would be honest about the effects of the treaty. We have one assertion after another that black is white and white is black, in defiance of the text of the treaty.

Mr. Garel-Jones : I do not know whether my hon. Friend was in the Committee when we discussed the last group of amendments to do with training and education. That is a very good example of where the Community has begun to insert itself into an area by simple majority voting ; under the terms of this treaty, its ability to do so is restricted and defined and we move up from simple majority to qualified majority voting. That is an advance on the earlier position and it is just one example of the way in which this treaty improves our position from the position under the Single European Act.

Mr. Jenkin : I gave way to my right hon. Friend, expecting him to make a point about the group of amendments that we are discussing at the moment. If there was some specific exclusion clause, apart from the exclusion clause to that protocol, which related to articles 2 and 3, I would feel more reassured, but that is not the case.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : Does my hon. Friend agree that the area which I touched on and to which he has alluded--article 5 of the treaty of Rome-- gives significant and powerful support to the case that the European Court will be forced to interpret ? Therefore, to some degree, it is irrelevant whether individual nation states or Governments wish a certain thing ; what is important is what the view of the European Court will be, particularly in the light of some of the judgments that Lasok and Bridge have produced in their period of recording.

Mr. Jenkin : I agree with my hon. Friend, and that leads me to my concluding point.

Mr. Marlow : My right hon. Friend the Minister is trying to cover his nakedness by referring to education. I am afraid that it does not cover anything and the sight is still pretty disagreeable. The Government thought that the Lingua programme was illegal, yet still, under the previous treaty, it was imposed upon us and in the new treaty the Lingua programme is enshrined. This just reinforces the point that my hon. Friend makes : the Government say one thing--they have said one thing before--but the reality is always different.

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Mr. Jenkin : I hear the point that my hon. Friend makes. I conclude by drawing attention to the motives of our European partners. They will wish to make us bear the same burdens of cost as they currently envisage bearing themselves under the social chapter and they will seek whichever way they can to make sure that we bear those costs. Even though we wish to opt out of the 48-hour working week directive--I must congratulate my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment on doing a very good job of muddying the waters--it is impossible to imagine a situation in which, 11 member states having voted for a particular directive, the court will not rule against us if we continue to defy the directive.

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Mr. Wells : The 48-hour working week to which my hon. Friend refers has been introduced by the Commission under article 118a of the existing treaty, as amended by the Single European Act. The British are disputing that the Commission can do so under that article because we do not believe that it is a matter of health and safety at work. The Maastricht treaty, with its subsidiarity clause, inhibits or begins to slow down the process and asks the Commission and the whole of the Community whether they are right to extend their powers into this domestic legislative arena. Surely, therefore, the Maastricht treaty is an advance in the direction in which my hon. Friend would like the Community to go.

My hon. Friend should have a little more confidence in the European Court sustaining British objections to proceeding on the 48-hour week under article 118a.

Mr. Jenkin : I draw my hon. Friend's attention to articles 2 and 3 of the treaty compared with what is in the existing Rome treaty. We have considerable additions which will widen the scope of the European Court's rulings and widen the competence of the Community, particularly in social affairs. Even though we have opted out of a separate list of social policy objectives, we are still wide open to the 48-hour working week, and perhaps more so, because we will have less defence against the 48-hour working week if we sign up to such matters as

"economic and social cohesion and solidarity among the Member States",

to quote from the treaty.

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