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Mr. Macdonald : On the implication of the sudden inflow of nationals, which my hon. Friend says clearly applies to persons from the Caribbean, India or Pakistan, he will see that article 100c, paragraph 2, concerns the need to introduce a visa requirement for countries which previously did not have such a requirement. The list of countries requiring visas produced by the Schengen countries includes the Caribbean countries, India and
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Pakistan, and so on, and likewise with the United Kingdom list of countries whose nationals require a visa to enter this country. Therefore, paragraph 2 cannot apply to those countries, because their nationals already require a visa to enter Britain or the EC. It must be directed at countries whose nationals do not presently require a visa--for example, Poland--where there might be some civil disruption which necessitated EC countries producing a visa requirement to cope with that emergency.Mr. Livingstone : My hon. Friend is right. The present system is appalling, and this will make it worse. We have seen what has happened under visa restrictions. During the past few years, the Government have introduced visa restrictions for Sri Lankans, with the result that the flow of refugees from Sri Lanka has dried up. They could not get here. How could they ? How can one obtain a visa while fleeing death ? A person about to be bumped off cannot stand outside the British High Commission waiting for it to open in the hope of obtaining a visa to get out of the country. People escaping countries do so without visas or with false passports.
Then the Government introduced visa requirements for Ugandans, despite that holocaust, and that flow of refugees dried up. Then they did it for the Kurds and that flow dried up. Then they did it for the Yugoslavians, with the exception of people from Slovenia and Croatia, and that flow of people dried up. Visas are used to keep people out. They are used to prevent genuine refugees from coming here.
Mr. William Cash (Stafford) : Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a deep strain of authoritarianism runs through the treaty ? Just as the laws could be manipulated to work in the direction that he has described, so it would be perfectly possible, under the authoritarianism that underpins the system, for them to be manipulated to work in the other direction.
Once such powers have been handed over, and, as some people may have noted, the European Court, after certain procedures under article K.6 had been followed, could take up the running of all this, not only might the system deprive our own Parliament and people of making decisions, but the decisions could be taken with increasing authority at the centre, by the unelected bureaucrats in the EC.
Mr. Livingstone : I agree. However, the problem is that one does not get much joy now from this Government when trying to obtain visas. We are already in an appalling situation. My worry is that it will get much worse. It is difficult enough to persuade this Government to allow someone into the country without having to trundle off and raise such issues in Brussels, where everyone will be passing the buck, blaming the Council of Ministers, and saying that a decision was not their fault and that they would have liked it to go the other way. That is the problem.
If the Maastricht treaty created a democratic Europe, that would unite people across Europe. Instead, it is a treaty that creates bureaucracy and rule by bankers. I fail to see how anyone on the left of the political spectrum--after, in the case of some of my colleagues, 20, 30 or 40 years of struggle for social justice--could say, "Here we are--Nirvana. The bloody German bankers are going to run What nonsense. That would be to turn our back on
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everything that we had fought to achieve as a party. Not only is that the situation, but have people looked at the voting system for the central bank? It is not one vote per country, but one vote--The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mr. Geoffrey Lofthouse) : Order. The hon. Gentleman's speech is entertaining, buit would help the debate if he returned to the amendment.
Mr. Livingstone : Decisions in the Council of Ministers about who should and should not obtain visas might one day be made under the same voting system as that for the central bank, so that the vote will be weighted by gross national product and population, with one nation having 25 per cent. of the votes. I hope that that will not happen.
My hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield made the most impressive presentation of Government policy that I have heard for a long time. He drew our attention to what has happened to asylum seekers during the past 20 years. He told us that, in 1972, 13,000 asylum seekers applied to come to Europe, and virtually all were granted admission. Last year, 600,000 applied, but only 20 per cent. were granted admission. I should have loved him even more if he had developed that argument to explain why.
Much of the argument on the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Bill and now on the Maastricht treaty and article 100c is based on the concept of the economic migrant who is abusing the situation. Many people who have been in politics for a long time will remember having struggled to get out of the country some trade unionist from El Salvador who was under threat of assassination, or some opposition leader who was being threatened by some brutal dictatorship somewhere.
That is the concept of asylum that we have in the back of our minds. The United Nations definition of an asylum seeker is someone who is in fear of persecution. As the world has changed, those seeking asylum in Britain have come from areas of armed conflict. They did not come because our social security system is the envy of the world--that is about 30 years out of date. If that were their motive, they would go to Germany, which pays decent rates. Applicants to enter Britain come from areas convulsed by violent struggle--Sri Lanka, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and Ethiopia. Often, they come from countries to which we have supplied arms, or with which we have some historic colonial link. They are not economic migrants, but people running in fear of their lives.
Let us consider the closest European conflict. The United Nations definition does not, we are told, apply to such people and to the 600,000 that I mentioned. Surely someone is in fear of persecution if that person is a Muslim woman being kept in a camp in Bosnia and raped daily by Serbian guards as part of a systematic campaign of terror and intimidation. I would say that such a person is a refugee, whether or not she fits neatly into the United Nations definition. I wish that my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield had gone on to argue that the United Nations definition was much too narrow.
Mr. Blair : If my hon. Friend will refer to column 1097 of yesterday's Official Report, he will see that I made precisely the same point. I said that many people not directly classified as refugees by the United Nations, because they are not subject to individual persecution under the United Nations convention, are none the less in
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desperate danger because of ethnic conflict or civil war. I made precisely the point that my hon. Friend accuses me of not making. 6 pmMr. Livingstone : I am delighted to hear that, and I shall be pleased to give way again so that my hon. Friend can explain how article 100c will assist such people to obtain asylum. Does he genuinely believe that the European bureaucrats will be more humane? Does he believe that the Council of Ministers, meeting in secret, will open its arms in a way that national Governments are not doing now?
Mr. Blair : Article 100c has nothing to do with asylum. That is dealt with by article K--and one does not even get to article K unless there is unanimous agreement. My hon. Friend may carry on making his point about article 100c, but it does not deal with the issue that he is raising.
Mr. Livingstone : We have seen that, whenever the Community reaches a crunch point, with half a dozen issues outstanding, there is a trade-off. The defence made so far in the debate is that unanimity is required, and that Britain will be able to operate its veto. What will happen in a crisis, when Britain's budget rebate may be at stake? Several other countries around the table could say, "If you are not prepared to drop the unanimity rule, we will vote not to renew your budget rebate."
That is exactly the kind of horse trading that we have seen in the Council of Ministers and at European summits. Our veto is not guaranteed for all time. A point will be reached at which a British Government will be prepared to surrender their veto, and that will be the end of it.
Mr. Marlow : Article K.3(2) states that the Council may "On the initiative of any Member State or of the Commission, in the areas referred to in Article K.1(1) to (6)"
which includes asylum policy--
"(a) adopt joint positions and (b) adopt joint action in so far as the objectives of the Union can be attained".
There is unanimity, but asylum policies can be decided by article K.3(2). It is somewhat surprising that the hon. Member for Sedgefield (Mr. Blair) is not aware of that.
Mr. Livingstone : Nothing is surprising. As was said yesterday in a point of order raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Dr. Jones), the way that amendments have been submitted, collated, and selected, and the general confusion surrounding all that, makes for extreme difficulties. It comes down to opinion. I wish that people's optimistic hopes about what the treaty would achieve were right. If so, I would vote for it. However, that is not the world that I know from my experience in local government and after six years in the House. One cannot work on the assumption that one can place the best interpretation on things, or that everyone will act with the best of motives. Usually, exactly the reverse is true : once people put their grubby little hands on a bit of power, they use it in their own interests.
Mr. Cash : Does the hon. Gentleman recall that, under not only Court of Justice arrangements but those of another place, proceedings, debates, statements by Ministers, and interpretations placed by Ministers on such measures are likely to be taken into account as travaux
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pre paratoire? Is it not possible that, if some of the statements made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary, which are matters of interpretation, are proved to be wrong, the Committee may find that it was misled--perhaps in all honesty--because it did not understand what it was doing? As a result, we may find that we are caught in the very traps that the hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone) mentioned.Mr. Livingstone : The one example used in all law courses about the problems of interpreting laws relates to a matter that is nothing like as complicated as the treaty. In 1968, the House passed the legislation on London Transport, which included a clause saying that the Greater London council should have the power to subsidise fares for whatever purpose. The then Member of Parliament for Finchley explained that that meant that there could be subsidised fare reductions, but when the Law Lords came to examine that legislation, they decided that it meant something completely different. If that is what the Law Lords can do with one simple sentence, I dread to think what they, or the European Court, could do with a treaty of such complexity.
When one compares the Maastricht treaty in all its complexity and deviousness--though perhaps one should not use that word--with the simplicity of the American constitution, one sees what a nightmare is being created for lawyers and judges.
I am drawing to a conclusion. I intended to make only a brief speech, but I received so much support from members of my Front Bench that I kept giving way.
I spoke earlier of the flow of refugees that had dried up as visa restrictions were imposed. As a consequence, of all those who sought asylum in this country every year, only about 30 arrived with visas. That is why the Government introduced carrier liability. One sees Mr. Big sitting on the Government Front Bench, saying, "This is all going to be wonderful," yet what was done by those who preceded him as Home Secretary--the right hon. Member for Mole Valley (Mr. Baker) and Lord Waddington? Theirs is a record of restriction and control. The Government now rely on foreign airlines to act as a policing arm for Britain, to keep refugees out. British immigration officers are sent to other countries to stand by airline desks and persuade airline operators that certain persons should not be allowed to enter Britain. That is the most appalling abuse. British immigration officers are sent to train airline officials in other countries how to decide whom to keep out of Britain. We talk about defending the powers of the House and of the British people, but in practice we are devolving those powers because there is a desire to keep people of colour out of Europe.
Also depressing is the fact that the new Europe will decide which countries are safe. It will be interesting to hear from the Foreign Secretary the thoughts of the Foreign Office on that aspect. The Maastricht treaty will be used to draw up a list of safe and unsafe countries before we decide who we will accept as refugees. What will happen in the case of Turkey? Will it be decided that Turkey is a safe country because it is part of NATO and an ally--or will those responsible be honest and offend Turkey by saying that it is a very unsafe country if one is a Kurd and has been subject to abuse, bombing, intimidation, and the suppression of one's culture? What nonsense. I suspect that the Foreign Office
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is not happy about that, and that it sees a nightmare of strange relationships as European Ministers sit down together and decide categories of safe and unsafe nations.The truth is that at the end of the day this is part of a long degeneration and that is why it has been seized upon so eagerly by both Front Benches.
Mr. Richard Shepherd : I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman will have adversely affected his Front Bench team's opportunities of being selected in my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's reshuffle, but I recognise that the Con-Lab Front Bench in this matter has thrown out of the window any regard for the power of the vote, the historic origins of the Labour party, the ability to change laws and hold to account Ministers, Executives and Cabinets for the policies that are the laws of this land.
That is the essence which the whole nonsense of Maastricht contradicts, that is why the House fights and that is why there is an identity on doing down the Bill, when both Front Benches are indistinguishable and are now jockeying to be included in a reshuffle.
Mr. Livingstone : Sadly, I have to agree with the hon. Gentleman. The Labour leadership does not find the Bill objectionable, largely because it has done so much to suppress democracy in the past 10 years. I would not worry about the power of the vote ; in the Labour party, we are moving towards one leader, one vote.
The First Deputy Chairman : Order. I cannot find anywhere in the amendment reference to the Conservative or Labour parties. If we could get back to discussing the amendment, we would make some progress with the Bill.
Mr. Livingstone : I am sorry, Mr. Lofthouse, but I was led astray by an older man.
I see the measure as a further degeneration from a point of principle. Just over 30 years ago, the House debated immigration policy for the first time, when the Macmillan Government proposed restrictions to keep black people out of Britain. Now that the Cabinet papers have been released, we can see that there was a fear of racism and the fear that there would be a backlash. Rather than standing up to that and educating people, the Macmillan Government gave in.
I remember those debates--they were the first of which I was aware. I was 16 at the time, and I saw one figure of principle, Hugh Gaitskell, who opposed that law because it was racist. He believed it was racist, and he said so ; he knew that he was alienating voters, but he fought for what he believed was right.
The treaty and the clauses are the result of 30 years of degeneration from that point of principle ; 30 years of running in the face of racism rather than standing and challenging it ; 30 years of pandering to racism by jacking up entry restrictions. Every time the Labour party has made a concession, racists in society have said that it is still too lax, and restrictions must be still tighter. We have reached a point where that means the most appalling injustice for many citizens of Britain.
If one marries a white person in America, Australia or Canada, that person will be allowed into Britain within days, but one can marry someone from India or Africa and never get them into Britain. Even after two or three children have been born into that marriage, an
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immigration officer can still say that he thinks it was a marriage of convenience. That is a disaster, and it has done a great deal to undermine morality in British politics.I am not attacking only the Tory party, although it is marginally worse. I remember that it was a Labour Government who stripped British citizens in Kenya of their right to come to Britain. I sat through five years of Labour government between 1974-79 waiting for them to repeal the Immigration Act 1971 that the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) had introduced and that we condemned in opposition but left on the statute book.
I remember reading in the accounts of that time, the biographies and diaries, the response to that wave of racism when Patrick Gordon Walker was defeated in the 1964 election. Were we principled? No. When Sir Frank Soskice, the then Home Secretary, presented a paper about immigration policy to the Labour Cabinet at the end of 1964, he said to the Cabinet : "Let us be absolutely serious about what we are talking about here. If we don't act to stop immigration, within a generation all our people will be coffee-coloured".
The debate on immigration has been a despicable record that besmirches the House. We have given in to reaction again and again and Maastricht is part of that. Finally, as I said earlier, even if everything else in the treaty were wonderful, I would vote against it because of this one clause.
Mr. Quentin Davies (Stamford and Spalding) : I know, Mr. Lofthouse, that you are keeping a careful check on the length of speeches in debates on the treaty, so I shall attempt to be brief. I wish to make four or five points fairly rapidly.
The outstanding thing about the debate this afternoon has been the fact that no one has stated or acknowledged that the free movement of persons is in itself an enormously desirable objective. Surely the free movement of persons is a great advance in civilisation. It is a desirable and humane objective to which right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House should aspire.
6.15 pm
Although I fear that it is not practicable to contemplate the establishment of free movement of human beings all over the planet, at least a regime of free movement of persons throughout western Europe would be a significant advance of civilisation.
There is a great danger that we shall fail to see the wood for the trees and become so bogged down by the detail--constitutional, bureaucratic, administrative or otherwise--that we shall fail to see the great principles enshrined in the treaty and the Bill, which ratifies it. Surely the achievement of the ideal of free movement of persons, which is already enshrined in the Single European Act, is a positive step forward.
Mrs. Teresa Gorman (Billericay) : I take my hon. Friend's point about the free movement of people, but what will happen if they do not keep moving and all want to settle down and they gravitate to those countries where the benefits are most attractive? Those countries will have to cope financially. That is a practical effect of the free movement of people. What does my hon. Friend think that we can do about that?
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Mr. Davies : I know that my hon. Friend shares with me a commitment to free market principles, so surely in the future it is right that people should be able to move. Market principles and constraints will operate so that if everyone wants to install himself in, say, London or Paris, rents will rise and wages will fall because the supply of labour will be greater than demand and people will move away again. Therefore, the natural economic mechanism will work towards equilibrium, even if we never finally achieve it. My hon. Friend should be satisfied by that response as I know she shares my faith in the economic mechanism.
The second thing that struck me about the debate was the suggestion that was almost explicit in the speech by the right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Mr. Shore) and was implicit in a number of interventions by Conservative Members, that somehow the establishment of the principle of the free movement of persons in the European Community would compromise the national sovereignty of member states. I thought that that was an extraordinary suggestion.
After all, before 1914 we had free movement of persons in western Europe. One could go to Victoria station and buy a ticket to Paris, Rome, Vienna or Berlin and travel to those places without any bureaucratic let or hindrance and without showing any passport or visa. One can make many comments about the world of pre-1914 Europe, but one thing from which it surely did not suffer was a lack of national sovereignty because we ended up with an appalling fractricidal conflict which was, I suppose, the ultimate proof of national sovereignty.
We need not feel that there is any conflict between the principle of national sovereignty and the free movement of persons. Surely the re- establishment of the free movement that was enjoyed in the civilised world before 1914 is a considerable advance. Thank goodness we can now look forward to it after the unhappy interval of most of the 20th century.
It is also more than a little naive of hon. Members, most of them Conservative, to believe that frontier controls are an effective way of barring the entry of illegal immigrants or criminals, including terrorists. So many millions of people cross internal frontiers in the Community every day that it would be impossible for immigration officers at those frontiers to examine microscopically every passport presented to them and ask the many questions necessary to make the controls effective. The only answer is to have better internal controls, and I hope we shall have them. We must vet social security registers and have more checks on employers suspected of employing illegal immigrant labour.
If we are to make a reality of the free movement of people in the Community --a desirable objective which every humane person supports--we must also strengthen controls on the external frontiers of the Community. I am not satisfied that we should leave it to, say, a Greek immigration officer on the Thracian frontier with Turkey to decide who shall and shall not come into the Community and thereby acquire the right to install himself or herself in Lincolnshire. A successful regime of free movement must be based on the same high standard of control of immigration applying at all external frontiers.
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Mr. Davies : I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention, albeit sedentary, because it gives me the opportunity to come to my final point, which is that we need a mixed-man force of immigration officers who will be responsible for common external frontiers. They should be recruited from all the Community countries and be in the employ of the Community. That will ensure that the same criteria for admission are applied to the same standard and with the same effectiveness throughout the Community.
Mr. David Trimble (Upper Bann) : This is the first time I have spoken on the Bill and on the treaty on European union, so at the outset I express my appreciation to the British Management Data Foundation Ltd., which was responsible for producing consolidated text without which I would have been in the same difficulty as the Home Secretary, who confessed his problems in coping with the legislation. Like him, I cannot claim to have read and fully digested the entire text, but without the document we would have been floundering.
There has been much discussion about the extent to which decisions on immigration policy would be subject to unanimity or qualified majority and the extent to which the competency of the Community could be extended to cover other matters. Assurances have been given by the Home Secretary and others about there being a double lock on those matters, so that we need not be concerned about whether there are adequate safeguards for national sovereignty and the authority of the British Parliament.
I intervened yesterday to point out that part of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that we did not have in the United Kingdom constitution an adequate procedure for dealing with those issues. We do not have an adequate ratification procedure. What in substance we are doing in these proceedings is ratifying the treaty on European union. We are doing that not by considering the treaty but by debating a short measure of two clauses. To smuggle in the substantive provisions of the treaty on European union, we must go through the elaborate procedure of tabling hundreds of amendments, some of which, according to our procedure, are selected and others are not.
In that context, I agreed with a point of order raised by the hon. Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing) about the difficulty in following the procedure. Life would be easier and our proceedings would be more coherent if we adopted the sort of procedure followed by other member states by which the treaty is embodied in legislation. Legislators can then discuss the provisions of the treaty in a coherent way.
Mr. Spearing : The hon. Gentleman is dealing with an important point. Titles I, V, VI and VII of the treaty would be dealt with by the prerogative and would not necessarily be susceptible to a Bill. Does he agree that if the Government really believed in Parliament and had put down titles II, III, IV and perhaps part of title VI as schedules to the measure, we could have tabled amendments to those schedules, which would have been the text of the treaty, presenting us with a fair, open and democratic way of conducting these affairs?
Mr. Trimble : I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and it would be opportune if, at an appropriate point in the near future, the House considered ways to ensure that we have more effective control not only over treaties but over the
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issues flowing from them. The hon. Gentleman made an important point in referring to the use of the royal prerogative.Many Community provisions are operated through the European Council. Governments are represented on that body--they may act by unanimity or qualified majority--and we are assured that, because of the presence of Her Majesty's Government, the national interests of the United Kingdom are protected. But we in Parliament will not have an opportunity to deal with many issues because they can be brought into force with the use of the royal prerogative or existing statutory powers. Only when fresh legislation is required can we have any effective control over what is proposed.
Mr. Ray Whitney (Wycombe) : Given that we are now on our ninth day and are looking forward to several months of Committee stage, remembering that we started it all many months ago--in other words, we shall spend more time debating the Bill than any other legislature in the Community--may I ask the hon. Gentleman to say, given that he is not satisfied with the degree of attention that it is receiving in the British Parliament, how long would satisfy his needs?
Mr. Trimble : It is a question not of time but of the way in which we are dealing with it. As I said at the outset, we are not proceeding in a coherent manner. We are compelled by our procedures and by the way in which the Bill was drafted to proceed in a crab-like manner, a subject to which I shall return, if the rules of order permit me to deal with the issue.
I was glad yesterday to hear the Home Secretary express surprise that certain documents relating to the convention on frontiers had not been lodged in the Library. He promised to make them available and I am glad that he has done that. If we are to deal effectively with matters arising under the treaty--immigration, security, policing, justice and so on--we must examine the way in which information comes to us, in particular ensuring that it is readily accessible. 6.30 pm
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North) : There are many aspects of immigration and refugee policy which are, in effect, decided elsewhere by the British Government through the Trevi group and other ad hoc meetings and which become Government policy because of the way in which immigration law is now drafted, which gives almost complete power to the Home Secretary. The hon. Member is pointing to a very pertinent example of a long-term and serious problem with immigration law which will be worse if the Bill goes through.
Mr. Trimble : I take the hon. Gentleman's point, but I am not sure that I fully agree with it. However, I certainly agree about the unsatisfactory way in which the Trevi group has operated and I take his point about our Government's policy being decided in those discussions and, consequently, not fully debated here. Perhaps, as a result of those proceedings, we shall move into a slightly better phase and reform our procedures. The fact that the treaty on European union is putting ad hoc arrangements with Trevi on a more formal footing and providing a better basis for them to proceed may give this House, if it changes and adapts its procedures, the opportunity to have some involvement in matters that have hitherto been dealt with
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through Trevi and other ad hoc groups. So there might be some occasion for improvement, if we so decide, if we address ourselves, as I think we must, to the issue of dealing with policy matters, and if the treaty goes ahead. It is essential for the House to get to grips with the issue.That was a comment on our discussions yesterday. Our problems would be eased if we had a proper application procedure.
Mr. Nicholas Winterton (Macclesfield) : The hon. Member is making an extremely thoughtful contribution to the debate on this series of amendments. My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Whitney) talked about the number of hours that the House will debate the Committee stage of the Bill. Is not one problem that the Government cannot afford to allow one amendment to succeed? All the discussions on the Bill, however valuable, can achieve nothing because the Government of this country have agreed to something before it has come to Parliament. Should it not have been the case--
The First Deputy Chairman : Order. The hon. Gentleman must surely know that that is a procedural point and nothing to do with the amendment. Mr. David Trimble--
Mr. Winterton : If the hon. Member will allow me to intervene again, I will seek to bring my intervention within order, Mr. Lofthouse. We are dealing with justice, law and order, security and asylum. These are all matters which create tremendous interest in this House and about which most Members feel very strongly. The hon. Member for Brent, East (Mr. Livingstone), who led or who was certainly involved with the Greater London council for many years, made a very emotional and impassioned speech. We cannot improve this Bill without the Bill being destroyed. That is the point I am trying to make, and I agree with the hon. Gentleman.
The First Deputy Chairman : I hope that the hon. Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) will not reply to the procedural point but will stick to the amendment.
Mr. Trimble : I eschew the temptation to reply to that very valuable and interesting intervention. The hon. Member has a fair idea of my views on the matter, but I was reflecting on the difficulties arising because we do not have a procedure for ratification.
Dealing with the relationship between articles 100c and K.9, which was discussed at some length yesterday, another point that occurs to me is that with this procedure, as with so many things in connection with the European Community, we are dealing with a ratchet effect. The Home Secretary said that we do not have to worry, because there will have to be a unanimous decision before various matters move from unanimity to qualified majority. That is all right up to a point, but there only has to be one decision and it is over the dam and never comes back. We only have to have a Minister or a different Government who decide to adopt a different policy and it goes over the dam and moves from unanimity to qualified majority, and it never comes back. That is part of the problem.
I remember many occasions on which the former right hon. Member for Finchley, Baroness Thatcher, used to complain about the attitude within the British body politic about socialism and the ratchet effect. She was determined
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to unwind that, and succeeded. Unfortunately, it will take a considerable effort to unwind the ratchet effect that is operating here.Hon. Members have pointed out that much of what we are dealing with here is related to free movement of people and passport and border control provisions. They flowed from the basic concept of the free movement of persons which was written into the original treaty of Rome and was one of its central provisions. If free movement is to be implemented, it produces a common travel area within the entire Community. It is extending to the entire Community the common travel area that exists within the British Isles. Perhaps that is not a very good point or a helpful or encouraging analogy, but basically that is what it is doing.
When people were expressing concern about whether extension of the common travel area would have implications for the powers under the prevention of terrorism Act or exclusion orders to deal with terrorism, the Home Secretary offered reassurance. I should like him to look more closely at that reassurance. He was referring us to paragraph 3 of article 48 of the treaties, which says :
"It shall entail the right, subject to limitations justified on grounds of public policy, public security or public health :". At first sight, that seems to preserve measures such as the prevention of terrorism Act because they come under public security, but paragraph 3 of article 48 is under the heading "Workers" and paragraph 1 of the article is about freedom of movement for workers which shall be secured, and so on. Article 8a, which is about citizenship, will be discussed later. It says :
"Every citizen of the Union shall have the right to move and reside freely within the territory ".
There may be a difference of meaning between citizen and worker and I should like the Minister who is to reply to consider that. Am I right in suggesting that the power to have limitation on public security grounds operates only with regard to movement of workers and not with regard to the movement of people who are not workers? I hope that I am not right in that supposition, and I hope that it is possible to have restrictions on public security grounds generally, because they are extremely necessary and desirable.
If we move into this new era of freedom of movement and a common travel area within the Community, it also follows, as has already been said, that controls designed to prevent crime and terrorism will have to switch from borders to operate internally. If we are to enable those to operate effectively internally, it is no good requiring every citizen to carry a passport at all times, to enable them to establish their identity. The hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), who was opposing the suggestion, said that an inevitable corollary of adoption of the travel area will be a requirement for identity cards and a power for the police to be able to stop people and require them to establish their identity. I agree with her that if we go down this road we shall go to that conclusion. She did not like that conclusion, but I have no problem with it. I think that it would be desirable and necessary, in order to have some effective control on drugs and terrorism, but it is only a small point.
The hon. Member for Stamford and Spalding (Mr. Davies) said that other steps would have to be taken to ensure that checks were made within member states. He
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pointed out, for instance, that checks would be necessary to ensure that people were not employing immigrant workers. That is an excellent idea ; I hope that, at the same time, the authorities will check that employees are not "doing the double".This group of amendments is headed "Justice and Home : Frontiers, Visas, Asylum". I want to concentrate not on the detail of article 1000c, as most hon. Members have, but on article K.1, and, in particular, paragraphs 7 and 9. I trust that I am right in thinking that I shall remain in order in so doing : I tried to track down all the amendments listed under that heading, but that proved very difficult.
Article K, and indeed title VI as a whole, set out provisions for "Co- operation in the fields of justice and home affairs." The concept of co- operation is fine in theory, and, were they to be implemented effectively, the provisions in paragraph 7 of article K.1, which refers to
"judicial co-operation in criminal matters",
and in paragraph 9 of that article, which refers to
"police co-operation for the purposes of preventing and combating terrorism",
would be excellent. I do not want my comments to be misinterpreted : I do not want it to be thought that I consider co-operation anything other than necessary and desirable. The effectiveness of co-operation, however--I refer to intergovernmental co-operation, under article K--depends crucially on the integrity of the Governments of member states, and on their willingness to co-operate.
I cannot discuss police co-operation in the handling of terrorism without mentioning the serious terrorist problem that exists within the Community. Co-operation is supposed to deal with that, but we must ask whether the necessary integrity exists. Progress will depend on a recognition by member states that they have a common interest, and should pull together. It ought to be incompatible with the existence of a European Community for one member state to have a territorial claim against another ; it should be even more incompatible with the existence of such a Community for one member state with a territorial claim against another to pursue that claim actively.
Claims that are merely historical survivals, as it were, may not cause much of a problem. Within the British Isles, however, a member state has a territorial claim against another, and is actively pursuing that claim in terms of diplomacy and discussion. During the recent inter-party talks on Northern Ireland, we discovered that the Irish Government, far from eschewing their territorial claim, were using the talks to advance it. That is one of the reasons for the foundering of those talks.
Hon. Members who watched the BBC2 programme "Timewatch" last night will have noted that, in the recent past, the Irish Government even contemplated advancing their territorial claim by means of armed aggression : indeed, they put in train the necessary steps for a form of proxy warfare whereby they would support and assist a terrorist organisation. Moreover, they contemplated the further step of actual invasion. The programme referred to a planned invasion of the spring of 1970, but did not deal with the planned invasion of August 1969. I know that the programme makers gathered material relating to that invasion ; I am surprised that no mention was made of it. I observe some puzzlement on the Conservative Benches. I should be delighted to be able to go into the
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