House of Commons Hansard Debates for 12 Nov 1997 (pt 25)

4.18 pm

Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): Today, the House has the opportunity to assess the action taken by the Government at Amsterdam on behalf of the British people and to judge whether the Government's rhetoric after the summit matched the action taken at it. Above all, we have the opportunity to vote on the Amsterdam treaty.

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We should judge that treaty in the light of the challenges facing our nation. We should judge it on its impact on British competitiveness and British jobs, and on its consequences for the people of eastern and central Europe who yearn to join the European Union. We should measure the skill of those ace negotiators on the Government Front Bench by the way in which they protected and enhanced British interests.

On each of those criteria, Labour's performance at Amsterdam was lamentable. The truth is that Labour failed. Of course, one would never get that impression from Ministers' words. The Foreign Secretary returned from the summit claiming a negotiating triumph. But then, he also claimed that his recent tour of India was a great success.

The right hon. Gentleman's first six months as Foreign Secretary have been utterly disastrous. From Washington to Islamabad and from Jakarta to Delhi he has put his foot in it--and his long-suffering officials have been left to pick up the pieces.

The right hon. Gentleman is not the first Labour Foreign Secretary to act in that way. When one of his predecessors upset a distinguished foreign guest, his officials were asked for an explanation. "The trouble with the Foreign Secretary," they replied, "is that he is not very good with foreigners."

At least the current Foreign Secretary appears to recognise his own shortcomings. Eager to avoid another diplomatic incident in a sensitive area, he has, I understand, recently cancelled his planned trip to the middle east. The sad reality is that the best contribution that he can make to peace in that region, or indeed in any region, is to stay well away.

It must be especially galling for the Foreign Secretary that his task today, on his first important appearance at the Dispatch Box since taking office, is to defend the Amsterdam treaty--a treaty designed to deepen the European Union, not to widen it. After all, it was he who said that the European Union would succeed only if

"it can jettison the dead ballast of the efforts at integration which offend national interest".

At least the right hon. Gentleman appears--not in his speech today, but elsewhere, last week--to have grasped the fact that what his Government signed up to at Amsterdam is not quite the brilliant deal that they originally thought it. Last week he was forced to admit to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs that there had been a "misunderstanding" in the early hours of 18 June. That, he explained, was why he had failed to challenge a late amendment by the Spanish Prime Minister that handed Spain a powerful bargaining chip on Gibraltar.

Of course, the Foreign Secretary was quick to make it clear that that was not his fault, and assured us that he had not, as some had suspected, nodded off during the negotiations.

"This was one of the areas",

he said,

"where I have to say that our satisfaction with the note-keeping of the Presidency was not as much as we would have wished it would be".

The right hon. Gentleman did not tell the Select Committee how he proposed to remedy the deficiency. Will the Prime Minister bring a tape recorder to any future discussions that he has with his European colleagues,

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or will he insist that note-taking at such meetings be added to the responsibilities of the Minister without Portfolio? What is clear is that the Foreign Secretary cannot be trusted either to raise such points at the right time, or even to take a proper note of them.

The point at issue was not an esoteric detail but one of the many so-called triumphs on which the Prime Minister preened himself when he reported back to the House on the outcome of the Amsterdam summit. It relates to the sensitive area of asylum and immigration.

This is what the Prime Minister said about those subjects to the House on 18 June:

"We have no obligation to be in that at all, but what we have secured, which is important and a better way of going about things, is what I call an opt-in. We have the power within the treaty to go into any of these areas if we want to. If we do not want to, we need not, but if we do, no other country can block us going in."--[Official Report, 18 June 1997; Vol. 296, c. 319.]

Strong words--but the Prime Minister was wrong.

As the Foreign Secretary told the Select Committee last Tuesday, each of the other member states will have a veto over a future opt-in. Any one of them can "block us going in". If at any time Britain wanted to opt in, in whole or in part, to those arrangements, Spain, for example, could block us unless we were prepared to make concessions on Gibraltar.

When will the Prime Minister apologise for his and the Foreign Secretary's negligence, and for giving the House a thoroughly misleading account of the outcome?

Mr. Robin Cook: As I understood the right hon. and learned Gentleman's complaint, it was that we agreed to too much qualified majority voting. He now seems to be complaining because there is provision for a veto in the Bill. If he reads the evidence that I gave to the Select Committee, he will see that we secured a declaration of the whole Council, which clearly sets out that admission to the Schengen acquis will be on the basis of an opinion of the Commission, and that any member, including Spain or any other country, is obliged to use its best efforts for us to join.

There is no question of our making any concession over Gibraltar to obtain access. As the right hon. and learned Gentleman is making such a fuss, is he really suggesting that a future Conservative Government would want to accede to the articles of the Schengen acquis and thereby give up Britain's border controls?

Mr. Howard: I am dealing with the Prime Minister's claim. Is the Foreign Secretary suggesting that the declaration to which he referred, and by which he now apparently sets so much store, has any legal effect? The amendment that the Spanish Prime Minister secured is part of the treaty; it has binding legal effect. I suggest that the Foreign Secretary is cautious before he claims that the declaration has any legal effect to compare with that of an amendment to the treaty, which is what he failed to prevent.

Mr. Cook: The declaration is binding on all members. It is a declaration of the whole Council, to which the whole Council, including Spain, committed itself.

Mr. Howard: The Foreign Secretary did not answer the question, which is whether it is legally binding and

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has the same legal impact as an amendment to the treaty. If he does not appreciate the importance and significance of that distinction, he is not fit to hold his office. It is no good prattling on about whether it is binding. The question is: does it have the same legal effect as the amendment to the treaty that the right hon. Gentleman failed to prevent?

Mr. Cook: The right hon. and learned Gentleman must understand that any accession to Schengen will be a political judgment by the Council. The declaration is binding on all the members that made it, including Spain, which did not object to it.

Mr. Howard: We have the answer: it is not legally binding. The Foreign Secretary was free to confess to the Select Committee last week, and I do not know why he does not confess it to the House now, that, as he said, a misunderstanding took place; a mistake was made. The Spanish Prime Minister's amendment should have been blocked, but was not, as a result of the Foreign Secretary's negligence.

The Government have been quick to claim the credit for what is in fact an opt-out on border controls, even though they do not like to call it an opt-out, because when they were in opposition they said that they were against any permanent opt-outs. That opt-out was secured by the previous Government.

It is not necessary for the Foreign Secretary to scour the cabinets to find out about the opt-out. He need only look at the Financial Times of 12 February 1997, well before the general election. It states:

"After a decade of battling against pressure to open up the frontiers as part of the EU's single market, the UK now seems certain to be offered an 'opt-out' from a new treaty agreement which is expected to set 2001 as the target for banishing customs and police checks at national ports. Mr Michel Patijn, the minister for European affairs in the Netherlands, said it was now an accepted political fact that the UK's borders would not be given up in the interests of EU integration".

The deal was done before the general election. The Foreign Secretary had the task of putting it into the treaty to reflect the agreement that had been reached, and that is what he has done.

That was not the only make-believe triumph for which the Prime Minister claimed credit when he returned from Amsterdam. He said that real progress had been made on quota hopping. Before the general election, as Leader of the Opposition, he was keen to give the impression that there was no difference between his policy on quota hopping and the then Government's. He told the BBC's "The World at One":

"we certainly have not ruled out holding up IGC business in order to get the right changes to fishing policy in the British interest. . . . where Britain's interests are at stake we are perfectly prepared to be isolated. Of course we are."

Bold words, but when it came to the summit, the Prime Minister lacked the stomach for a fight.

Terrified of being isolated in Europe, the right hon. Gentleman was too frightened even to back the protocol for treaty change tabled by the previous Government. Instead, he settled for a worthless letter from the President of the Commission restating existing policy. Why? Because, in the Prime Minister's own words, the other member states did not support the proposed treaty

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changes. So much for being prepared to hold up the intergovernmental conference. So much for being prepared to be isolated.

With that feeble attitude, the previous Government would never have negotiated Britain's opt-out from the single currency, never have won Britain a rebate and never have gained an opt-out from the social chapter. I hope that, at the end of the debate, the Minister of State will tell the House whether the letter from the President of the Commission has any legal authority, and exactly how the provisions set out in that letter differ from the previous arrangements on quota hopping.

The truth is that there has been no progress on quota hopping and, not surprisingly, British fishermen feel betrayed. What will be the attitude this evening of hon. Members on the Government and Liberal Democrat Benches who represent fishing constituencies? Can we expect any of them to stand up for their fishermen tonight and vote against the treaty? I suspect not. I hope that I am wrong, but if I am right, I hope that we shall not see those hon. Members getting up in future to complain that the right to fish in British waters is being lost to our industry and transferred to the fleets of other member states. Unless they vote against the Bill, those hon. Members will be letting down their fishermen and letting themselves down.