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7.48 pm
Mr. Christopher Gill (Ludlow): I am sorry that the hon. Member for Leominster (Mr. Temple-Morris), my constituency neighbour, is not in his place, because one of life's ironies is that I take such an interest in European affairs because, 10 years ago, he recruited me to the Conservative Back-Bench European affairs committee. The more I saw, studied and analysed what went on in Europe, the more I concluded that European union, by which I mean economic and political union, was not in the United Kingdom's best interests.
I invite the House to look at the events of this week, because we have seen in Great Britain a development of great significance. Although I will not pretend that it is unprecedented in the annals of British history, it is novel in my lifetime. I am referring to the action of Welsh farmers at Holyhead and Fishguard which is now replicated at ports in Scotland.
Farmers are acting out of frustration or sheer desperation as they see their livelihoods taken away from them. Their action is prompted by a slump in cattle prices, and is compounded by the Government's refusal to make compensation payments for the strength of sterling or to increase hill livestock compensatory allowance payments. In addition, the Government have terminated rendering subsidy, imposed arbitrary weight limits on over-30-months scheme cattle, reduced the rate of compensation and declined to renew the £60 million special assistance paid by the previous Government.
One might ask what this has to do with the European Union. I shall demonstrate as I go along that it has everything to do with the European Union. I am not talking about the export ban--which, as we all know, was imposed not for any scientific reason or any consideration of human health, but purely for political reasons. Nor am I talking about the European directive on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. I am talking about developments in the European Union that have so undermined the process of democracy--the House will have been interested to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson), who referred to legitimacy in the process of government--that farmers have been driven to their action this week.
The farmers may not necessarily see it in these terms, but, by their actions, they are demonstrating their recognition of the fact that the conventional democratic process cannot solve their problems. They have lost confidence in the traditional process of democracy to obtain redress, for the simple reason that, as far as farmers are concerned--the same applies to fishermen--the conventional and traditional democratic process no longer exists.
Gone are the days when convincing a sufficient number of Members of Parliament of the strength of an argument produced change in agricultural policy. Gone are the days when Agriculture Ministers would use discretion in dealing with genuine mistakes made by farmers in filling in forms, for example. Gone are the days when Ministers who failed to measure up would be dismissed. It is probably true to say that Edwina Currie will go down in history as the last Minister to be drummed out of office on an issue affecting agriculture.
Nowadays, there is a grim realisation that neither changing the Minister nor changing the Government has anything other than the most marginal effect on agricultural policy. The reality is that agricultural policy is determined in Brussels. Under qualified majority voting, the United Kingdom currently has only 10 votes out of 87.
To those politicians--there are many of them--who say that reform of the common agricultural policy is the answer, I invite them to explain how that can be achieved. How will they achieve unanimity for any radical change, given that the French, for example, oppose Agenda 2000? How will they stop the creation of a blocking minority in circumstances in which several countries are such net beneficiaries that they would not dare to bite the hand that feeds them? When we talk about reform, it must not be thought of as a panacea because of the difficulty in achieving that reform. Talk of reform is merely a placebo--in other words, a medicine given to humour rather than to cure.
I return to my theme, which is the significance of the action taken by Scottish and Welsh farmers. By dint of the failure of the now virtually defunct traditional conventional democratic processes, they are driven to take direct action. They have seen that simply replacing a Conservative Government with a Labour Government has not in any way changed agricultural policy, which is dictated from Brussels and is not decided where it should be decided--here in the Westminster Parliament.
The failure of political parties to give satisfaction--because they have surrendered the power to do so to a higher authority--is leading inexorably to anarchy. Hon. Members may not wish to contemplate the fact that in the areas most affected by this week's disturbances, the electorate has already explored the whole gamut of party political possibilities. The voters are now discovering that, whereas they previously concluded that none of the major parties could satisfy their aspirations, the nationalist parties that represent those areas cannot do so, either.
In those circumstances, the farmers have taken direct action. They have gone to the barricades, driven there by the craven action of successive Parliaments here in Westminster which have given away--and continue to give away--the sovereign right of the British people to be governed by their own laws, made in their own Parliament, in accordance with their own free choice expressed in British ballot boxes.
The new Labour Government--still in a euphoric mood as a result of their success on 1 May--will not be disposed to heed my warning, but the writing is on the wall. Just as the previous Conservative Government were swept away on May day, so too will new Labour be driven out of office when it is seen that, in spite of wrapping itself in the Union Jack, adopting the British bulldog as a mascot and generally playing the patriotic card, it intends neither to stem the flood of parliamentary sovereignty away from these shores nor, least of all, to reverse a process that has already gone too far.
There is a notion in the minds of people who should know better that, in making an ever-closer union with the other nations of Europe, we are simply exchanging one sort of democracy for another. Nothing could be further from the truth. However else one might describe the EU, one cannot pretend for one moment that it is democratic. Labour Members have described it in previous debates as corporatist. I prefer to describe it as collectivist. How else can one describe a regime that tells the farmer what he may or may not grow, in what quantity, to what standard and at what price? How else can one describe a system that tells a fisherman what he may catch and where he may catch it, and results in hundreds of tonnes of perfectly saleable fish being dumped back dead into the sea?
The lesson for politicians is this: if neither they nor the parties they represent reflect the aspirations of the people they purport to represent, they deserve to be swept away, and swept away they will be. The precedent was created on 1 May. If, in turn, each party--because of its dalliance with European union--is seen to have rendered itself incapable of responding to the British people's natural and legitimate aspirations, the people will despair of the whole democratic process and turn to anarchy. That is the lesson of Holyhead, Fishguard and Stranraer, a lesson that the House ignores at its peril.
I, for one, stand four square with the farmer and the fisherman--mere pawns in the game of politics, but without whom we would all starve, just as surely as
the people of North Korea starve today because of their Government's rigid adherence to the failed policy of collectivism.
I am not a collectivist; I am a Conservative. As a Conservative, I want to see the restoration of the situation in which I can act as a Member of Parliament on behalf of the people whom I represent and give them satisfaction. Within the collective in which we now find ourselves, neither I nor any other Member of Parliament can do that, because, by definition, the collective can act only in the interest of the collective and not in the interest of its component parts.
Mr. Oliver Letwin (West Dorset):
I share many of the views that my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) expressed. The democratic deficit is perhaps more structural--because of the wide diversity of culture and the distance of the population in the centre of Government--than my hon. Friend the Member for Wantage (Mr. Jackson), in a characteristically intelligent and illuminating speech, allowed, but it is not to that, or to any of the important matters in the Amsterdam treaty and in the many directives that we have considered in European Standing Committees, that I wish to allude today. We have ample opportunity to consider those matters in other places and at other times. I should like to sketch a matter that is of moment to the House, if not to the European Union as a whole: the attitude of Her Majesty's Government, as illustrated by their attitude to the Amsterdam treaty and to directives that have been considered by the House recently.
When I was somewhat younger, I was instructed by a great British statesman in the extraordinary feature of our constitutional arrangements: each Department of State sponsored someone. I was told that the Department of Trade and Industry sponsored British business, that the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food--perhaps less under the current Administration than hitherto--sponsored farmers and that the Foreign Office sponsored foreigners.
That is a travesty. In many respects, the Foreign Office has acted zealously to defend British interests for many years, but I fear that the current Government are coming close to making a reality of that unfair truism. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) illustrated clearly that the Government's actions have brought no greater influence over events in Europe. On the contrary, as he eloquently described, the Government appear to be entirely stranded. Their actions have led in other directions and it behoves the House to note two or three things to which the Government's attitude is leading.
Recently, we had occasion to debate article K.7 of the Amsterdam treaty. I endeavoured to persuade the House that there was a problem with paragraphs 1 and 6 of that article. In his closing remarks, the Minister entirely failed even to advert to my remarks or to challenge them. My assertion was--it was of some significance in the sense that it was either true or false and, if true, important--that, on 18 June, the Prime Minister had made an entirely false statement when he told the House that the European Court would not intervene in United Kingdom criminal justice as a result of those paragraphs.
I may be wrong about the matter. Goodness knows, a young Back Bencher, uninformed by the weight of legal opinion in the civil service, may make a terrible error. Why then did the Minister not take the trouble to say why I was wrong, or to defend the Prime Minister's position in the House? That oddity suggested that the Minister did not consider it important whether my assertions were true or false.
It is noticeable that, during the entire proceedings of the Committee when it considered the social chapter, no Government Member made the slightest allusion to paragraph 1 of article 109p, which states:
I am not raising that point to comment on the substance of article 109p. My comment is merely that the article is of the highest importance and that Ministers have not so much as alluded to it. I have gone through all--I hope--the statements by the Prime Minister and other Ministers since the Amsterdam treaty was under consideration and finally signed and I have not found the slightest reference to the article. I take it, therefore, that the Government consider that it is of no importance whether there is an article in the social chapter on which much else can be hung.
There is an oddity about European Standing Committee B. Although the Labour Members appear, they are broadly silent and, although there are only some 160 Conservative Members, the Conservative party regularly brings between five and 10 members to the Committee--about a 15th to a 30th of the party's strength. By and large, the Liberal Democrats are not present. The Committee's task is to vet a lot of important European legislation. Some hon. Members do not believe that it is necessary even to be present. Often, Labour Members do not believe that it is necessary to speak about those matters.
The situation is much worse than that. The Government bring explanatory memorandums before the Committee. Associated with those are compliance cost assessments and risk assessments. In a recent example--for the sake of brevity, I give just one--the Government brought before the Committee an important constituent of the
social chapter, the parental leave directive, and a compliance cost assessment, in which they calculated the effect on British industry of unpaid parental leave.
The calculations, which I take it the Government asked some official to perform, were based on the assumption that the replacement cost of the labour--the marginal cost of the labour--was £1.70 an hour. Why is that of any importance? Only because, if the marginal cost of the labour is £1.70 an hour, the Government's minimum wage, which is always rumoured to be a multiple of that figure, would entirely destroy this country's employment base. The importance lies in the fact that the Government do not believe their own figure of £1.70 an hour.
When the Minister was pressed on the matter in European Standing Committee B, he showed every sign of not having the slightest idea whether that was the figure, why it was the figure or whether it justified the directive. Again, I allude not to the substance, but to the form.
In those three examples, we see a Government who are so cavalier about the extensions of the European Court's powers that they do not bother to answer a serious allegation. They are cavalier about the widespread, long-term effects of clauses in the Amsterdam treaty to the extent of not even mentioning them. They are cavalier about the way in which they bring directives before the House to be vetted, to the extent of offering justifications that they cannot possibly believe are consistent with the rest of their policies.
Why are the Government cavalier in those ways? Since 1 May, I have sat here in the House desperately trying to find out what motivates them in that pursuit and that attitude. I have been able to discern only one recurrent theme--a search for modernity. It is a search to be in tune with the piper and not to be left behind. In all the statements from right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Front Bench I have discerned that sense of a search to be modern. Above all, the House and the country need to guard against that attitude.
The desperate desire to be modern today and, hence, not to consider the long-term effects of major constitutional changes goes against the nature of those changes. Constitutional changes have their effects over, not five or 10 years, but 50 or 100 years, or even several centuries. The House and the country have much to fear if a Government pursue constitutional change and undertake such a major programme--that it is a major programme for constitutional change must be common ground on both sides of the House--in the earnest desire to be modern in 1997, with a view to advantages in 1998, 1999 or even 2000, but neglect to question whether the hundreds of years of history of this country and the others around it will be compromised in a future that might not contain the stability, freedom, democracy and rule of law to which we have become accustomed.
"The Community shall contribute to a high level of employment by encouraging cooperation between Member States and by supporting and, if necessary, complementing their action."
Anyone remotely familiar with the progress of European law and the European Court in interpreting treaties, and with the way in which the Commission uses treaties--which is subject to the Court's interpretation--will be fully aware of the effect of paragraph 1 of article 109p. It will be a Christmas tree on which many currently unpredictable directives, decisions, framework decisions and regulations will be hung. In short, it is an analogue of the famous article 100, on which so much that was unpremeditated has been hung.
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