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Mr. William Cash (Stone): Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Cook: I cannot resist giving way to the hon. Gentleman, but if he will let me, I shall proceed a little further, and then give way.
I can understand why, against all those improvements, the Leader of the Opposition decided that a referendum may not be a great idea. It would be difficult for Conservative Members to campaign against such a collection of improvements to the European Union. I can also understand the right hon. Gentleman's reservation about having a referendum, because, although he may be able to coax all his party into the Lobby tonight, he of course has no idea which side they would support in a referendum when the Whips were safely out of earshot.
Only a month ago, Norman Lamont praised the Leader of the Opposition's latest decision on the single currency, saying:
The Tory party has been too busy having its own referendum to have a referendum for the real people of Britain. If it consults the real people of Britain, it will find that the provisions in the treaty that I have outlined are welcome throughout the whole of Britain--except in the Tory party.
I understand, though, that the shadow Foreign Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), has one last criticism of the treaty with which I have yet to deal: the treaty extends qualified majority voting. Yes, it does. It extends QMV precisely to 15 areas. That is exactly half the number of areas to which the Maastricht treaty extended QMV during a period in which the right hon. and learned Gentleman sat throughout in the Cabinet.
Moreover, both the Maastricht treaty and this treaty are as nothing in their extension of QMV as the truly massive extension of QMV from the Single European Act 1986.
Mr. Giles Radice (North Durham):
The right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) was in the Government all the time.
Having swallowed whole those two banquets of extensions of qualified majority voting, it is humbug to gag on the bite-sized extensions in the treaty.
In any case, those extensions are sensible. We have talked about the new powers on fraud. They have to operate on qualified majority voting. If they did not, any member state that was being penalised would have a veto. Is that what the shadow Foreign Secretary wants? Does he want countries that milk the budget to have a veto on action against them?
Of course the new provisions on transparency are triggered by qualified majority voting. Otherwise, those countries that wanted to keep a cloak of secrecy could do so by retaining a veto. Is that what the shadow Foreign Secretary wants? Does he not recognise that it is in our interests to ensure that a member state that wants to keep secret something that it does not want to do in public should not be allowed to do so?
Mr. Cash:
Will the Foreign Secretary take note of the fact that Mr. Joe Carey, an eminent member of the Court of Auditors, has written an important paper on the way to improve methods of dealing with fraud in the community? In the previous Parliament, there were exchanges on the role of the Public Accounts Committee. The suggestion was made that we should insist on other member states applying the same criteria for determining fraud as we use in our Public Accounts Committee. That would establish a proper network of control over fraud. Is that the Government's intention? Are they pressing for such measures?
Mr. Cook:
We could not get agreement on applying the British standard in other countries. However, the treaty says that every country has to apply to European spending the same standards and tests that it applies to its
There are sensible, practical reasons for the extensions of qualified majority voting in the treaty. However, there is one other, larger reason--the enlargement of the Union. Within the next decade or so, it is possible that the European Union will have not just 15 members, but 26 members. The Council of Ministers will face paralysis if even a decision on the award of a research contract has to be passed by unanimity, with each of the 26 countries clutching a veto, as the Conservatives apparently want.
The rest of Europe is queuing up to get into the European Union. There are a dozen applicant countries. They want in because they recognise, as the Opposition apparently do not, that membership of the European Union could give them greater prosperity through more trade, greater security through political co-operation with their neighbours, and greater clout in international negotiations than they could have by themselves. The European Union's historic mission is to open its doors and embrace the new democracies of central and eastern Europe.
Mr. Ian Taylor (Esher and Walton):
Many of the aspects of the treaty that the right hon. Gentleman calls advantages are undoubtedly advantages. We were negotiating them when we were in government. The sin of omission in the treaty is the one that he has just put his finger on--its failure to anticipate enlargement. The deficiency in his negotiating position is that, when agreeing to the social chapter, he did not demand a trade-off that the treaty would contain the institutional changes that could have hastened enlargement to the east.
Mr. Cook:
We signed up to the social chapter not to be nice to the rest of Europe, but because we believe that it is in the interests of the people of Britain. Of course, the hon. Gentleman is right about the reform of institutions on one level. Changes will be necessary before enlargement. Some of them will be tough changes. Applicant countries will need to make changes to their economies, and there will have to be changes in the European Union.
One essential change is a rebalancing of the votes in the Council of Europe to protect the larger countries from being out-voted by a growing number of smaller countries. I am pleased to say that we have had it explicitly written into the treaty that that issue of the rebalancing of the votes in the Council of Ministers must be addressed before any further enlargement takes place.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex)
rose--
Mr. Cook:
I am sorry, but I will not give way. I have been generous so far, and I must at some stage allow the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) to make his speech.
One of the great gains of reaching agreement at Amsterdam is that that has cleared the way forward for enlargement. The provision, as hon. Members will know, is that negotiations on enlargement were timed to start six months after the completion of the intergovernmental conference at Amsterdam. If we failed to reach agreement at Amsterdam, it would still be ahead of us at the coming Luxembourg summit. That would have meant that
enlargement negotiations could have started only in the latter half of next year. As it is, they will now start during the British presidency.
As a nation, we have a golden opportunity to show the other member states of the European Union that Britain can set a direction for Europe, and we have an opportunity to prove to the applicant countries that they have a reliable ally in Britain. None of that would have been possible if we had failed at Amsterdam.
Mr. Cook:
I have given way for the last time.
We did not fail at Amsterdam--we succeeded, because the Government have transformed Britain's relations with our European partners. Britain is now respected as a constructive partner with which the other countries of Europe can do serious business. It is no longer resented as a persistent opponent which sabotages the business of Europe. Because of that, we got a better deal for Britain than the Conservatives ever could have achieved.
We went to Amsterdam determined to put border controls for Britain on a secure legal foundation. We came back with that agreement. We went to Amsterdam determined to retain a veto on defence and foreign policy and to preserve NATO as the cornerstone of Britain's defence. We came back with that agreement. We went to Amsterdam determined to extend to the British people the same rights at work that are enjoyed by the other peoples of Europe. We came back with that agreement.
"It has already created a more united party."
Sadly, Mr. Lamont may be a little out of touch, since he is no longer with us in the House, because history has dealt unkindly with that prediction. One month later, there have been so many expressions of dissent on the
Conservative Benches that the hon. Member for Leominster (Mr. Temple-Morris) got headlines for the unusual news story that he was a Tory who was not resigning.
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