| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
9.31 pm
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. David Davis): This has been a serious and reflective debate--perhaps, as the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) said, more so than usual. It has certainly not been a routine debate. That, in part, is because it has taken place at a timely moment--two days after the signature of the study group report on the IGC, and a week before the European Council in Madrid that will preface the IGC. These two events offer an illuminating perspective from which to gauge the recent change in attitude within the EU.
Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that subjects such as subsidiarity and deregulation would have featured prominently on the European Council agenda. A study group report that extolled the virtues of national parliaments and nation states and made no overt reference to federalism would have been equally inconceivable. Yet those are today's realities. The change has come about to a very large extent because the United Kingdom has been resolute in pressing our vision of an effective, responsible and flexible European Union.
Let us be clear: we need an effective European Union. We need a Europe that can deliver the single market, a Europe that can promote effective co-operation on cross-border issues and a Europe that will keep up the effort to contribute to opening markets, both within the Union and outside it. We want a Europe that recognises that it must win back people's confidence. I take the point made in the excellent speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr. Whitney) about the need to handle the public's perception of the Union. He made some wise and insightful comments.
We need a Europe that will not interfere where it is not needed and will not undermine national sovereignty. We need an effective Europe with an institutional structure that harnesses the strength and diversity of member states, and I stress "diversity", which was recognised in the reflection group report. Britain's agenda for Europe concentrates on the real issues--job creation, encouraging enterprise, scrapping unnecessary regulations and making a real and effective effort to tackle the fraud and waste that damages public respect for the Union. It concentrates on enhancing Europe's security through practical measures, rather than through doctrinal Euro-waffle and Euro-theology. The British people have no time for arcane and obscure institutional irrelevances--what the hon. Member for Clydesdale (Mr. Hood) rightly called the dry rot of Europe.
We need a flexible Europe that builds on the innovative, intergovernmental arrangements created at Maastricht instead of trying to dismantle them. We need a European Union that recognises that the structures that work well for the single market would not work for foreign security policy or for a number of other policies. We need a flexible Europe that can cope with countries with different traditions, different histories and, certainly, differing economic circumstances.
I began by noting that what was once unthinkable--at least outside London--now obtains in at least some parts of mainstream European thinking. As the problems facing Europe change, we are often the first to face up to the new realities. It is not always comfortable and it is not always politically expedient, but being in a minority has never deterred us before. My right hon. Friend the
Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath) made a powerful speech in which he mentioned being one of a minority. He said, rightly, that when we are isolated we must know the purpose for standing out; I agree. We must consider each proposal on its merits and, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary said, in the light of our national interest. If we had been deterred by being in a minority we would have forgotten about ensuring that the principle of subsidiarity was accepted in the treaty; we would have abandoned enlargement; we would have given up our competitiveness and we certainly would not have had a Commission President whose motto is "Less action, but better action."
Within this framework we have developed our approach to the IGC. My right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary has outlined our general approach. During the study group meetings it has been noticeable that some of the wilder ideas that emerged two or three years ago have failed to surface. No one ran with the idea of exclusive hard cores; no one mentioned the prospect of the Council becoming a second Chamber of the European Parliament.
Hon. Members should not get me wrong: the federalists have not given up; the federalist impulse has not disappeared and there are still many who fight hard for more centralisation and more power for Brussels. Those points were made in the excellent speech of the right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney (Mr. Shore) and picked up, in his usual assiduous way, by the hon. Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing), who mentioned some of issues in the study group's report.
The balance is changing--the changes are sometimes driven by popular opinion in member states and by circumstances. The debate has moved on from what became known as the fundamentalist agenda. My right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Mr. Howell) was right when he quoted the Italian press--albeit that it may have been too flattering about me. When the Italian press interviewed members of the study group and asked whether they were concerned about the "Obstructionism of Britain", they replied that they were not at all concerned. They said that Britain was constructive and that the biggest problem arose from the fundamentalists. I should say to my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe that it was interesting that virtually every member of the British press asked the same questions and was disappointed with the answers, so his adage is doubly relevant.
It is not surprising, therefore, that I found significant support in the group for many key UK themes. We were supported on subsidiarity, on competitiveness, on the role of national parliaments, on enlargement and on relevance to the citizen--a point that came up time and again, partly because we pushed it very hard. There were also matters on which there was no consensus, but in those cases we were frequently one of a majority or one of a large minority--one such example involved common foreign and security policy. Some of our views on this were put rather well by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier). In our view, a more effective common foreign policy can be achieved by improved CFSP machinery and by the exercise of more political will to use it. It will not be achieved, as some would like, by voting models that override the key concerns of minorities, replacing a common policy with a majority one--a single loud voice with a babble. That would allow
foreign policy questions to isolate and ostracise members of the Union, thereby internalising what were external problems before.
My hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Waterside (Mr. Colvin) made a number of important points on defence, WEU and security issues. He said that there should be no membership of WEU without prior membership of NATO. I could not agree more. Membership of WEU requires the sort of security guarantees that only NATO can deliver. A country cannot logically be a full member of WEU, therefore, without also joining NATO.
My hon. Friend highlighted the combination of special circumstances: the situation of the neutrals, the need to preserve sovereignty in defence and the need to preserve and reinforce NATO. These led to the careful design of the policy proposal that my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State published earlier this year on WEU and its relationship with the EU. It is a policy that I believe will gain supporters in Europe as the IGC progresses.
As for the so-called third pillar--justice and home affairs--we have argued, and will continue to argue, for improved co-operation in the fight against drugs and international crime. The federalists--the centralisers-- wanted to communitise some of these areas, arguing that the third pillar had not worked. We do not believe that. It is new, and much has been achieved in practical terms in the past two years, besides four major conventions and a deal of useful co-operation behind the scenes between national law enforcement agencies. I think that about 600 items of information have already been exchanged in connection with international crime. There is still scope for streamlining decision-making procedures in this area, but it must remain firmly intergovernmental.
I also argued in the study group for a European Union that is more relevant and acceptable to people. People rightly say that there is still too much over-regulatory, ambiguous and intrusive legislation from Brussels. To deal with it, we need further to entrench subsidiarity, to prevent interference in matters that should be ours to decide. My right hon. Friend the Member for Guildford made some excellent points in this connection; I agreed with much of what he said.
The Commission must also be obliged to consult more widely before preparing major new harmonising legislation. We shall pursue our efforts to deregulate in Europe, in parallel with, and if necessary within, the IGC.
We need to reform the European Court of Justice, not to weaken it, which is an occasional misapprehension. We must make its judgments more appropriate and more acceptable, and we have submitted a paper to the study group to that effect.
I also explained to the group the priority that the Government attach to improving democracy in the European Union, with a bigger role for national parliaments and a bigger say for member states following enlargement, in terms of the weighting of votes. The hon. Member for Clydesdale talked about his Scrutiny Committee, which has made extremely positive proposals that were well received by the study group. I took the liberty of recommending the proposal that declaration 13 be incorporated in the treaty. I am glad to say that that was later agreed by the Cabinet committee that gives me orders. That would help to meet the points that the hon.
Gentleman raised in respect of timing and of proper information being passed to the Scrutiny Committee and other Committees of this House before measures are taken in Europe.
It is a pity that the hon. Member for Clydesdale is no longer here, because I should like to thank him for his compliments. I look forward to the Committee's next proposals in response to the points that we have made. I reinforce the hon. Gentleman's point that declarations are not good enough--action and performance matter, and we need practical measures.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |