House of Commons Hansard Debates for 22 Apr 1993

Mr. Budgen : Before one pours too much scorn on that political court, I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree that it is important to recognise that if we have a written constitution with a very large number of constituent organisations belonging to it, we cannot easily make law. Therefore, we have to have some form of political body at the head as a supreme court with a law-making power. We complain about the political nature of the court, but it is inherently necessary for it to be a political body.

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Mr. Jenkin : I note my hon. Friend's comment.

In responding to the ruling made in July 1992, my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford explained that the case was a temporary aberration. He said :

"I feel that the case that I was discussing before the intervention was an example of the court marking time. It does not like derogations and never has. At best, it sees them as temporary and transitional means. However, that case followed closely on the Barber case, and just as the court was not willing to make that additional leap in the 1978 Defrenne ruling so soon after the significant advance made in the 1976 case". [ Official Report, 24 March 1993 ; Vol. 221, c. 940.]

My hon. Friend explained why the court is likely to pause after a major ruling.

My right hon. Friend the Minister of State sets great store by the July ruling. He says that it clearly indicates a change of mood in the court. However, not one week after the debate in which the Government reiterated all those assurances, a ruling was given on 30 March 1993 in another case between the Secretary of State for Social Security and the Equal Opportunities Commission which came before the European Court. I am referring to the case of Mrs. Thomas and others in respect of equal treatment relating to invalidity benefits and the link with pensionable age.

The ruling refers to the derogation in the equal treatment directive, article 7(1)(a) of directive 79/7, which states "according to which the directive is to be without prejudice to the right of the Member States to exclude from its scope the determination of pensionable age for the purposes of granting old-age and retirement pensions and the possible consequences thereof for other benefits."

The arguments deployed in that invalidity benefits case about men and women qualifying for invalidity benefit at different ages relates directly to the 1992 EOC--NICs, case. [Interruption.] I am grateful that my right hon. Friend the Minister of State has come into the Chamber to listen to this crucial point.

I re-emphasise the point that we lost the ruling on 30 March. The ruling provided in July was explained thus :

"it can be deduced from the nature of the exceptions contained in Article 7(1) of the directive that the Community legislature intended to allow Member States to maintain temporarily the advantages accorded to women with respect to retirement in order to enable them progressively to adapt their pensions systems in that respect without disrupting the complex financial equilibrium of those systems, the importance of which could not be ignored."

That actually says that the Secretary of State's victory in July 1992 was allowed because of a reason that the court invented to create a temporary derogation and not a permanent one. That is clearly stated in the ruling.

In determination of the case, the ruling continues :

"determining a different retirement age according to sex is only applicable if such discrimination is objectively necessary in order to avoid disrupting the complex financial equilibrium of the social security system or to ensure consistency between retirement pension schemes and other benefit schemes."

Therefore, the court has progressively introduced an entirely new basis for interpreting that particular derogation and it means to chip it away. My hon. Friend the Member for Chingford explained that process of incremental interpretation so ably in his speech about the European Court.

Mr. Fabricant : Given that we are going to adopt the Maastricht treaty, is my hon. Friend arguing that we should adopt the social chapter and protocol because we

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will have more influence in those matter or is he saying as I believe he is--that we should not adopt it because the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has said that the social chapter is the single biggest element responsible for producing unemployment in France? We have already heard that it creates unemployment, so what is my hon. Friend arguing?

Mr. Jenkin : I am simply making the point that the assurances that the Government have tried to give throughout this Committee stage cannot be guaranteed or taken at face value.

Mr. Garel-Jones : I hope that my hon. Friend will agree that I do not argue, and have never argued, that the British Government or any Government will win every case that comes before the European Court of Justice. In addition, I hope that my hon. Friend will agree that the case to which he is referring at the moment relates to the treaty of Rome as amended by the Single European Act. Presumably my hon. Friend is not making that a case for voting against the Maastricht treaty which, in a number of respects--there is no need to repeat the debates that we have already had on the issue--strengthens the position of member states.

Mr. Jenkin : I note my right hon. Friend's reticence to draw conclusions from rulings of the European Court when that does not suit him. My right hon. Friend drew conclusions from three recent rulings before the treaty was ratified. He used that as evidence that the mood in the Community was changing and that that was what was going to change the rulings of the European Court. That is what he said.

Mr. Garel-Jones : The difference between my hon. Friend and me is that I recognise, as I believe does the majority of the House, that we are signatories to the treaty of Rome as amended by the Single European Act. Unlike my hon. Friend, I do not regard that as a disaster for Britain and I do not regard the Community and its institutions as the enemy of the United Kingdom. I regard the European Court of Justice--and this point has been made extensively--as a court of justice manned by distinguished judges. I do not expect, and have never argued, that Britain will win every case. I simply made the point, for which I believe there is evidence, that recent judgments tend to show a growing acceptance and importance by the court to states' rights. I did not go any further than that and I never have done.

Mr. Jenkin : I have never said that our signing the Single European Act or acceding to the treaty of Rome was a disaster. I hope that my right hon. Friend will accept that and not attribute to me words that I have not uttered.

My right hon. Friend has been quite acerbic with other hon. Members on the same point this evening. I hope that he will also accept that I am not disputing the fact that we will lose some cases and win others. The point about the way in which the European Court works is the process of incremental revision. Earlier in our Committee proceedings, my right hon. Friend the Minister of State seemed to indicate that the tide was changing. I have just shown that the court is still behaving in its centralising way and is likely to continue to do that.

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Mr. Garel-Jones : If I have placed words in the mouth of my hon. Friend that he has not uttered, that was not my intention. Naturally, I apologise to him. The case that he is making is based on the treaty of Rome as amended by the Single European Act. If he is making the case, he is steering a wayward course in this matter. Sometimes, it is difficult to know his position. If his position is that we should not ratify the Maastricht treaty--I do not think that that is his position--he is not making a case for it at present.

Mr. Jenkin : In Committee, my right hon. Friend referred to three cases which he adduced as evidence of a changing mood in the European Court. By quoting from those rulings, I am merely demonstrating that the court is reserving its position for future centralising judgments. Indeed, we have never said that the doctrine of the occupied field has been reversed and that we are moving away from the principle of the attribution of powers, which is the basis of the legal underpinning of the European Community.

Mr. Budgen : Does my hon. Friend agree that his point is not that he regrets the Single European Act or the treaty of Rome? All he is saying is that we are giving more powers to the European Community and, therefore, we should understand that the central and most important body in the Community is the European Court. Two things can be said about the European Court : first, it is a political body and, secondly, it has a track record for centralising and federalist decisions. The court is likely to be reverted when it becomes politically possible so to revert.

Mr. Jenkin : I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend.

Mr. Iain Duncan-Smith (Chingford) : Does not the nub of the argument essentially relate to the clear problem of the way in which our opt-out of the social chapter will be viewed by those who are not necessarily influenced by the views of Her Majesty's Government? My hon. Friend is saying that the other 11 nations will use the European Court to implement and adjudicate their specific chapters and that, naturally, we will be sucked in by a bypass mechanism through the court.

Mr. Jenkin : My hon. Friend reiterates a point that was made in earlier debates : he is absolutely right. The purpose of my speech--I can sum it up in a few words--is that the derogation on which my right hon. Friend the Minister set great store in an earlier debate has been clearly shown to be a temporary derogation. In the ruling, we see the preserving of financial equilibrium as a completely new element to the ruling of the court, introduced only by itself. That is the danger with the way in which the social policy will continue to develop in the European Community.

My hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary set great store in last night's debate on the authority of the Committee and how it should not be interfered with. We are putting ourselves progressively in a position in which the authority of the House of Commons is simply being passed to alternative institutions.

8.15 pm

Mr. Barnes : I support new clauses 74 and 75 entirely, without having any illusions about what they would achieve. The social protocol does not necessarily mean that we have introduced a socially progressive set of measures or high standards in Europe. It is simply what

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someone has described as a framework or a set of possibilities in which various regulations and directives can be introduced later. Regulations and directives on a number of topics, such as the working environment, working conditions and information to and consultation with workers can be introduced--generally describing social in terms of labour and work--within the institutions of the European Community in different ways. They can come forward slowly or progressively. On occasions, they can be regressive and--to use another

term--anti-social.

The way in which the provisions in the protocol will be used is important. I would like us to have the social protocol but I would like to see a different framework in which it could operate so that its provisions would begin to be interpreted in an improving and advancing way. We do not have a set of arrangements in the treaty that would allow us to do that.

We have what has been described by hon. Members, especially the rebels in the Labour party, as a treaty of institutions and their powers. Those institutions include the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European bank and other institutions which are not subject to any democratic checks and controls and do not have established democratic systems in which to operate.

Many decisions are ratified by the Council of Ministers. I have tried to get the Minister to agree to publish information and records about the votes which take place in the Council of Ministers. At present, I must put down a set of questions, which are pursuant to planted questions, to get a report on which is going on in the Council of Ministers and the votes that are taken.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister provided information in an answer about the number of votes that had taken place recently. I wanted to know when the most recent vote had occurred in the Council of Ministers. At the previous 11 meetings, all the matters had been cut and dried and no votes had taken place. The most recent vote was taken by the Agriculture Ministers on the issue of bananas. Germany and two other countries voted against the proposal, and it was carried by that arrangement.

Far from us seeing what takes place in the Council of Ministers, we cannot see what has taken place in terms of voting and the decisions adopted. In the end, most matters are decided by deals done among people without qualified majority voting entering the picture or operating. Such arrangements are entirely unacceptable. We need to move towards proper democratic arrangements in the European Community. To do so would give considerable life to the social protocol.

It would mean that many items could be dealt with through the Community's institutions, and the best progressive standards could be argued and developed. The arguments about those standards would then become a matter of public concern. They would be in the public domain and in front of the democratic institutions. Democracy seems to be a much more important element in the production of social provisions than some technique, some device, some protocol and some handing over of measures to officialdom in the hope that things will be done on behalf of people.

We have a Europe that is looking for a set of Bismarks so that the Bismarks will come forward and do things to a reasonably high standard. I would rather have democratic institutions that did not give high standards because there is a chance of doing things in the future than rely on someone to grant me authority from the superior

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position that they hold. Developments are made only by having democratic institutions and democratic movements and argument. In the United Kingdom, we advanced the social provision, which is described in a wider sense than being about only work and labour, through the development of our democratic institutions. For example, we moved towards elementary education through a Conservative Government in the late 19th century because more people were getting the vote and people were saying that we had to educate our masters and our work force, who were becoming significant. The House of Commons decided to introduce old-age pensions under the Liberal Government in 1910 when Lloyd George was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Labour introduced the provisions of the welfare state, which have been considerably dismantled in recent years.

Such use of democratic institutions to extend social provision is required within the Community. People talk nonsense about a federal Europe or a unitary, centralised Europe. There is a conflict between the notions that are expressed. We should seek to advance towards a fully fledged, democratic, federal Europe in which the division of its powers is described. Instead, we have a bureaucratic, developing, unitary system which takes more and more authority away from us without any democratic checks and controls.

Governments enter into deals. They might sometimes have to listen to their Parliaments. They are often able not to do so, and they hoodwink those Parliaments to a considerable extent. Parliaments should be involved in social provision. They do so only in so far as democracy is extended and developed. The provisions to which I referred came about thanks to the work of people such as the Chartists and the suffragettes. They achieved a universal franchise. In the preamble to their charter, the Chartists said that it was about improving social conditions. They wanted working-class men to have the franchise so that conditions could be improved. Unless we think about Europe in that way, we shall make considerable mistakes. So I support new clauses 74 and 75, but I have no illusions about what they will achieve.

The Government have adopted a peculiar position on the social protocol. On many occasions the Minister of State and the Foreign Secretary have told us about the fantastic advantages of subsidiarity. They have said that it is a democratic substitute which pulls power back to national parliaments. I disagree with them. However, according to the logic of their argument, they should be able to accept the social protocol because it is subject to subsidiarity. They should say that some aspects of Europe's social policies can be dealt with at European level, but many items such as directives and regulations will be subject to subsidiarity. According to the Government's arguments, the social protocol should be acceptable. I do not accept their arguments, because I believe that subsidiarity is an absolute load of rubbish. It means anything that anyone wants it to mean. It allows centralised decision-making to take place. Therefore, the treaty does not have proper democratic arrangements built into it. We do not want subsidiarity, which merely allows further centralisation. We want federalism of a democratic nature.

Federalism which links with centralism is like the federalism of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. That was never federalism--it was centralism, because

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power was subsumed by bureaucratic centralised forces. That is the danger of the treaty. I support new clauses 74 and 75 without any illusions, and I oppose the Bill.

Mr. Hugh Dykes (Harrow, East) : At the beginning of the debate, there were marginal differences between the two sides. It gave a bizarre impression. I felt that one could imagine Opposition spokesmen saying, "The gulf between us and the Government on this subject is huge. We believe that the social protocol has a circumference of 30m and the Government believe that it has a circumference of 30m. That is a huge and unbridgeable gulf. We believe that the Government are wrong."

Mr. Duncan-Smith : How many centimetres does my hon. Friend say it is?

Mr. Dykes : I should not like to suggest how many. It might be shrinking or expanding.

The debate has been bizarre. The divisions between hon. Members have widened with the more recent speeches. I certainly do not agree with the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) in his lengthy speech--I think that he spoke for 25 minutes or more.

I sense that hon. Members, including those who have not taken part in the debate, would like it to conclude fairly speedily. For that and for other respectable reasons, my remarks will be brief. I do not challenge the Chair's judgment on the length of the debate, Mr. Lofthouse. It is a matter for the Chair. But I imagine that it might be the overwhelming feeling of hon. Members that the debate should conclude.

I am perhaps more enthusiastic about the development of the European Community than some of my colleagues. I use the word "some" deliberately. I certainly do not include among them my right hon. Friend the Minister of State, who has done excellent work. I know that he is justifiably keen on the developments in Europe, because they enhance the national interest and the intrinsic national sovereignty of the United Kingdom working with our partners. Inevitably, in the debate on new clauses 74 and 75 during the last days of the Committee on the Floor of the House, we are taken up with our preoccupations in this ancient and important House of Commons. But we seem to have the impression that we are in a vacuum, and that the other member states of the European Community are of no consequence.

We should remember that 10 member states have ratified the treaty. The exceptions include the eccentric actions which have taken place in the federal supreme court in Karlsruhe. I believe that they will shortly be determined. The judges may be presiding over them at this moment. With that exception--I cannot think of any other--10 member states have ratified the Maastricht treaty in respect of all their constitutional requirements. They are waiting with mounting impatience for the eccentric hesitations of the United Kingdom and the even more eccentric hesitations of the Danes to catch up with that reality and that process.

Britain's process of ratification will now be further extended as a result of new clause 74, and to a lesser extent new clause 75. I regret that. I assume, optimistically, that the votes on the resolutions that will be presented to the

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House under new clauses 74 and 75 will take place fairly quickly. Perhaps the Minister of State will clarify that today or on a later occasion. Some hon. Members have suggested that they will take place before Royal Assent and others have suggested that it will be after Royal Assent. That is a matter for abstruse argument--perhaps it does not matter--but I hope that the motions will be introduced soon. I assume that the Bill will take a minimum of six or seven weeks in the House of Lords, and that those who intend to rebel against the treaty and the legislation will be ground into the dust by the natural majority in the House of Lords in favour of the treaty. I look forward to that process. Some distinguished and eminent Members of the upper House will be involved. I am sure that they will be crushingly defeated during that six or seven- week process. That will bring us--without anticipating the progress of the Bill in this place and incurring your displeasure, Mr. Lofthouse--to the third week of July. That will be enough.

I believe that, on 18 May, there will be a positive yes result in Denmark. I was telephoned by a journalist who is a famous and distinguished member of the Lobby--deliberately, therefore, I will not mention his name-- a powerful yes vote. They had tried to put articles in their respective newspapers, but the editors were not keen on taking them. That is the black press of the United Kingdom newspaper industry. It is not keen on giving good news about the European Community.

In his amusing account of "Dancing with Dogma", Lord Gilmour, a distinguished former colleague in the House, gave essential good advice. He said that Baroness Thatcher wanted everyone to cease to be citizens of the United Kingdom and become consumers. I remember visiting in Brussels Madam Papandreou, who causes a great deal of excitement, anxiety and bitterness among some of my Tory colleagues because of her reputation as a social reformer. She said that Mrs. Thatcher wanted to make the whole Community into one big supermarket. I suppose that that was the essential approach of the previous Conservative Government, at least in respect of its leadership. That is no longer the case. We now have a balanced Conservative Administration running pragmatic policies from the centre. Although we shall not be present for it, I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister's speech on Europe at the meeting of the Conservative group for Europe at one of the leading west end hotels tonight will be enthusiastic.

8.30 pm

I cannot understand all the excitement about these matters. I cannot see any differences on social policy between the provisions in the Maastricht treaty and the provisions in the Single European Act. I suppose that the provisions in the treaty are softer in tone and refer more to commencement reflecting unanimity rather than majority voting ; otherwise, they seem exactly the same. It is almost as if the Maastricht treaty had been written by the same officials on the basis of the Single European Act. I would not trespass on the patience of the House by reading them all out, but they are similar. I am fascinated by the reference to article 118B in the Single European Act which says :

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"The Commission shall endeavour to develop the dialogue between management and labour at European level which could, if the two sides consider it desirable, lead to relations based on agreement." By the way, the French text and the German text refer to legal agreement. There may have been nifty footwork, or whatever the equivalent is with the pen, by British officials when they ensured that "legal" was left out. I am only guessing that ; I am not sure that it is so. Some people might say that the reverse was true, because the others wanted to include the word "legal". I doubt that. However, it shows that the United Kingdom has already signed up to the concept of the social protocol.

Ms Joyce Quin (Gateshead, East) : Given that the hon. Gentleman says that there is not much difference between earlier commitments on social policy and the commitments in the social chapter of the Maastricht treaty, is he saying that he does not agree with his Government's opt-out in the treaty, and that he will therefore vote with us in trying to ensure that Britain becomes part of the social chapter?

Mr. Dykes : Because the relevant motions in due course will be merely expressions of opinion and nothing more, we will have to judge them when the time comes. I suppose I would be one Conservative Member who would be less intensively opposed to our inclusion in the social chapter. Because I recognise that this country has had recessionary problems which are more severe than those of some other member states--including France, despite what has been said by other hon. Members--I want to give the Government the benefit of the doubt when they say that it would be wrong for us to be included in the social protocol at this stage.

As the Conservative party returns to a tradition of pragmatism and moderation, and gets away from the narrow and mean-minded attitude of keeping the workers in their place, a future Conservative Government will probably have more self-confidence in respect of acceding to the then developing social protocol. I do not believe that there will be anything to worry about, but the United Kingdom economy should perhaps be stronger before we accept that position. No one can say with certainty how matters will develop.

It is farcical to say that there is anything terrifying in these matters intrinsically, because no specific proposals have yet been made by the 11. They will use the machinery of the Community and the Commission to produce proposals. When they roll off the production line, I think that they will be few in number, because the other member states are beset as well by recessionary anxieties, and they will be mild in character. It will be left to member states to decide the framework. Indeed, that is laid down in the relevant parts of the Single European Act and the Maastricht treaty. Therefore, I have no great terror about them, but I understand the Government's hesitation.

People have said, with justification, that the Government acted as they did because they felt obliged to keep their own supporters in place. Bearing in mind what has happened during the prolonged Committee stage, that calculation may not have turned out to be accurate. Be that as it may, it was a legitimate political calculation for any Government to make, even if the so-called supporters who were being wooed were rather ungrateful, cavalier and churlish about it, and did not respond to the effort at appeasement. We will see later how matters work out. In

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the meantime, I am happy to support the Government enthusiastically in their suggestions about new clauses 74 and 75.

Mr. David Lidington (Aylesbury) : I confess that I am slightly disappointed that the Government have chosen to accept new clauses 74 and 75. It would have been helpful to have a vote and to put the debate on the social chapter behind us. Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East (Mr. Dykes), I have no compunction about opposing the notion of the social chapter. I understand the honest advocacy of it by Opposition Members. It seeks to move Europe, including this country, in the direction of economic and social policy which is in line with their honestly expressed political philosophy. I cannot blame them for that aspiration.

This is a debate in which there are cannons to the right as well as to the left. I want to spend some time addressing the arguments of some of my hon. Friends, expressed most cogently and strongly by my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North (Mr. Jenkin) in his speech and by my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford (Mr. Duncan-Smith) in interventions in this debate and in previous Committee sittings.

Their objection seems to fall into two parts. They argue basically that the social chapter is obnoxious and that it runs counter to Conservative principle and policy, but that nevertheless the Government's opt-out is meaningless. I think that they have two reasons for saying that. I shall try to present the argument at its strongest and not to misrepresent it. The first strand of their argument is that the opt-out does not matter because any regulation which was important could be forced through the institutions of the Community and imposed on this country by qualified majority vote under article 118A of the existing treaty concerning health and safety or article 100A concerning the single market. Certainly Commissioners, notably the unlamented Mrs. Papandreou, have sought to stretch the meaning of the Single European Act in recent years beyond what had been anticipated by politicians or lawyers in this country when it was negotiated.

Against that assessment by my hon. Friends, one has to consider the view of fellow members of the Community on the British opt-out from the social chapter. One has to ask oneself why the 11 other member states thought it necessary to have the social protocol attached to the treaty, and why they believed that it was not enough to rest on the provisions already included in the Single European Act. Presumably they felt that their ambitions for a grander European economic and social strategy could not be realised under the existing treaty.

Mr. Delors' talk of the United Kingdom becoming a paradise for inward investment has often been quoted. There are other examples. There were reports that the German Social Democratic party and the German Trade Union Federation were considering action to question the legality of the British opt-out because they were afraid of its effect on German competitiveness. The Portuguese Secretary of State for European Integration, Mr. Vitor Martins, said last year that the social protocol put the 11 other members of the European Community at a disadvantage compared with the United Kingdom. In recent months we have heard dark mutterings from French politicians about the relocation of jobs from France to the United Kingdom by Hoover and other firms. Whatever

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the reasons for those decisions, French politicians have questioned our opt-out and argued that it presents economic dangers to France. There will be those in the Community, notably in the Commission, who will seek to stretch the rules. We have seen that in the past and no doubt we shall see it in the future. My hon. Friends the Members for Colchester, North and for Chingford, however, underestimate the legal grounds that are available, in the last resort, to the British Government and the practicalities of current political trends within the Community.

Mr. Bill Walker (Tayside, North) : I should not like my hon. Friend to be under any misapprehension. During the passage of the Single European Act some of us did draw attention to the fact that what he described as stretching might occur. We did not see it as stretching--we saw it as an inevitable process,and we believe that the same will happen under the Bill.

Mr. Lidington : I know that my hon. Friend and other senior Members of the House have been consistent in their opposition to EC legislation for many years.

The legal case which would be available to the British Government, should they choose to take it, could rest on the words of article 118A, which limits qualified majority voting to directives brought forward on the grounds of health and safety. They could also refer to the restricted wording of article 100A, which refers to the internal market--a definition made tighter by the wording of the Maastricht treaty. Article 3 describes the internal market as one

"characterized by the abolition, as between Member States, of obstacles to the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital".

The concept of the internal market is therefore separated within the treaty from the objectives of the union towards strengthening economic and social cohesion, as listed in article 3(j) and the objective of contributing to a high level of health protection, listed under article 3(o).

We must also take into account, as my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East acknowledged, the political and practical arguments now at play. We should consider the considerable successes of my right hon. Friends in moderating some of the proposals from the Commission so that they are at worst unobjectionable, and at best often desirable from our point of view. Faced with the pressures of recession and the threat of severe competition from the developing economies of the Pacific rim, other European countries have begun to question whether new regulations are needed. At the last ECOFIN meeting we were treated to the spectacle of the Spanish and German Ministers saying that there was no longer any need for extra regulations and, indeed, that the reverse was true.

The second argument advanced by my hon. Friends the Members for Colchester, North and for Chingford related to incremental revision by the European Court of Justice. They argued that because the court can look to article 2 of the treaty, which sets out the aim of strengthening economic and social cohesion, the court will use that, case by case, to undermine the exemptions given to us by the social protocol.

Article 4 of the treaty says :

"Each institution"--

including, of course, the court--

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"shall act within the limits of the powers conferred upon it by this Treaty."

We must also consider what the protocols mean. I have not read all the detailed papers, so I shall not enter into the argument between my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester, North and my right hon. Friend the Minister about recent individual cases heard by the European Court of Justice, but I believe that there is a substantial difference between the court ruling on the meaning of directives approved by the member states, through the institutions of the Community, and the court seeking to overturn, in whatever manner, a protocol which has equal status with the main text of the treaty.

Mr. Duncan-Smith : I am glad that my hon. Friend has quoted my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, East, who has already categorised him and me as mean-spirited people for finding great fault with the concept of the social chapter.

The nub of my argument, which I believe that my hon. Friend has slightly missed, is that the problem lies in the protocol, which states :

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

The court does not set out to reverse anything by itself that would be done as a result of what is brought before it by a variety of challenges. It is a fact that that protocol cannot be invoked by us to reject the fact that we shall be bound into certain social provisions--I say certain, not all-- because the court will not take the protocol or the chapter into consideration because it is obscured by the protocol. That is the danger. The protocol is the threat ; it is kept around the treaty when it should be banished.

8.45 pm

Mr. Lidington : The battle over the interpretation of "acquis communautaire" embodied in article 118 and in others will continue and both the political and the legal arguments will come into play. The crucial point about the protocol is that it is explicit and lays down with the authority of a treaty that the United Kingdom is excluded from measures brought forward by the other 11 member states within the context of that protocol.

Mr. Jenkin : Will my hon. Friend give way?

Mr. Lidington : I apologise to my hon. Friend, but I must draw my remarks to a conclusion.

I shall be with my hon. Friends the Members for Chingford and for Colchester, North in arguing, as we approach 1996, that we should seek further treaty revisions, further protocols, which define, limit and make more precise the remit of Community institutions as opposed to those of individual national Governments and Parliaments. As to the debate on which we are embarked now, the decision of all Conservatives to reject the social chapter accords with political principle and with our national interest.

Ms Joyce Quin (Gateshead, East) : We have had an interesting debate on the procedure and the substance of the social chapter. My hon. Friend the Member for Hamilton (Mr. Robertson) explained clearly the Opposition's view on the procedure that we are adopting and I support what he said. I also support what he said about the continuing

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importance to us of amendment No. 27. I share his hope and that of other hon. Friends that that amendment will be dealt with on Report. We also attach considerable importance to new clause 74 because it is an effective way in which to ensure, before the Act comes into force, that the Committee can express its view on the social protocol and the social opt out that the Government negotiated at Maastricht. It would be outrageous if the Committee did not have an appropriate opportunity to vote on the desirability or otherwise of the United Kingdom's incorporating the social chapter in its version of the Maastricht treaty. There is no doubt that the exclusion of Britain from the social chapter is by far the most important way in which the deal on offer to the British people differs from that on offer to all the other people of the European Community. It is, therefore, one of the most important aspects of our considerations of the Maastricht treaty.

The Foreign Secretary did not say a great deal about procedure and I got the impression that he was not terribly keen to speak at length on the procedural issues involved, despite the fact that some of his hon. Friends tried to embroil him in precisely such a discussion. In answer to one of my hon. Friends, he said that the Government would simply have to reflect on the position depending on what happened when the Bill had completed all its stages and we were faced with a motion on the social chapter.

I hope that the Government will reflect on this matter. I do not know whether the Minister is planning to give us any more information on procedural matters, but Members on both sides of the Committee would welcome further information from the Government about their thoughts.

I am glad that the Government have accepted new clause 74, although I agree with my hon. Friends that the Government probably had no alternative, because they would have been defeated. There is no doubt, however, that the Foreign Secretary skated over the implications of a defeat on whatever motion is eventually put before us on the social chapter and our adhesion to it. I should welcome from the Government a clear commitment not to oppose the will of the House if hon. Members vote against the Government's view on the social chapter. An aspect that will be of interest, although it has not been clarified in today's debate, is the likely attitude of the nationalist parties towards whatever motion is tabled on the social chapter. We in the official Opposition have often referred to what we regard as the shabby deal that was done between the nationalist parties and the Government over the question of the Committee of the Regions. That shabby agreement seems to have resulted in the nationalists supporting the Government on all sorts of procedural votes since. I do not know whether the nationalists also plan to support the Government in whatever motion is tabled on the social chapter. I hope that they will not, because it would result in a bad deal for the people of the constituencies they represent and for Britain as a whole.

Like many hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, I am not a lawyer. I am not even a jobbing lawyer, a phrase which calls to mind an exchange between the Minister of State and the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South- West (Mr. Budgen). So I was glad that, although the Foreign Secretary disappointed us by not saying enough about procedure, he at least referred at some length to the substance of the social chapter. Again,

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