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Mr. Cook: The right hon. and learned Gentleman asks why we have not come and asked the Opposition to agree to a timetable motion and I must answer, although I do not think that it is an answer he will find comfortable. We have not come and asked him to agree to a voluntary timetable motion, because we knew that he could not deliver his own Back Benchers. As he has discovered all these weighty arguments against a guillotine motion, will he now tell the House which of the arguments he advanced inside the Conservative Government when they guillotined the Bill that became the Local Government Finance Act 1988, which introduced the poll tax?
Mr. Howard: These arguments were highly relevant to that Bill--the conditions were fulfilled. That is the difference between the two cases.
Let me make the position clear. There are those of my hon. Friends who can argue the case tonight on the basis that no guillotine is justified, but I do not argue the case on that basis. Of course I recognise that guillotines can be justified, but I accept the criteria that I have just put forward. Those criteria, or at least one of them, have to be met if a guillotine is to be justified. All the Foreign Secretary could say in answer to my challenge to identify which of the three criteria was being used to justify this guillotine was not to identify any of them, but to give a reason why the Government had not even approached the Opposition with an offer for an agreed timetable for the rest of the Bill.
Mr. Norman A. Godman (Greenock and Inverclyde):
I am grateful to the right hon. and learned Gentleman for showing his characteristic courtesy to me. With 1997 hindsight, can he now say that the guillotining of the poll tax legislation was justified? That Bill imposed the poll tax on Scotland a year ahead of its introduction in England, and was, in my view, the beginning of the end for Scottish Conservative representation in this House.
Mr. Howard:
The hon. Gentleman is perfectly entitled to his view on the merits of that legislation, but the justification for the guillotine was ample. If he goes back and sees the extent to which these criteria applied to that Bill, he will find his answer.
There are, of course, some who claim that the constitutional issues to which I have referred are not really of any interest to people, and that people are really interested only in the nitty-gritty issues such as jobs; but I do not share that view. I think that the people of this country are keenly interested in their rights and freedoms and the extent to which those will survive; but even on the least abstract test--the extent to which people's jobs and livelihoods will be affected--the Bill is of supreme importance, because it would incorporate the social chapter into our law. It would enable our European partners and our competitors to force us to impose on British business the burdens that are having such a significant impact on their own firms.
Jacques Delors said that the social chapter opt-out won by my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major) would make the United Kingdom
I now turn to the areas of the Bill that have yet to be discussed in Committee--vital areas, about which we will barely have time to say a word or two because of the guillotine.
We are opposed to the extensions of qualified majority voting and the co-decision procedure agreed at Amsterdam, because they would take power from this Parliament and give it to Brussels. On institutional changes, we fail to understand why the Government agreed to more powers for the President of the Commission. Why should he have the power to veto Commissioners recommended by the member states? What was the justification for a change that takes power from democratically elected Governments and gives it to an unelected official?
On the question of free movement of people, we support the British opt-out on frontiers. It was not I who had the privilege of negotiating that opt-out, nor have I ever suggested that it was, but it was a Conservative Foreign Secretary who secured agreement to it. Policy on frontier controls, asylum and immigration should be decided in Britain, not in Brussels.
We must have an opportunity to debate the Government's extraordinary allegations about the behaviour of the Spanish and Dutch Governments at and after the Amsterdam summit. The Government of the United Kingdom are alleging that those governments did a private deal in the margins of the summit, failed to report it to the other members of the Council, and smuggled it into the treaty. In other words, say the Government, they cheated.
That is a truly astonishing allegation. What confidence does it foster in the decision-making process of the European Union? After all, no self-respecting golf club would allow two members of its committee to do a hole-in-the-corner deal, keep it secret from the rest of the committee, and smuggle it through into the minutes of the committee decision.
We are told that the Government made representations to the Dutch presidency, but they clearly did not think it serious enough to raise at the Luxembourg summit. Why on earth not? Why on earth did they not complain at that gathering? We know that the Dutch Government are concerned about the allegations. We know that they wrote to the British Government about them as long ago as 16 July, but the Government refuse to publish that letter.
We are continually being told about the Government's devotion to open government. Indeed, the treaty of Amsterdam introduces a requirement for the European Union to espouse the cause of open government.
Why, then, will not the Government publish the letter of 16 July? I hope that the Minister will deal fully with that point when he replies to the debate.
I have not dealt this evening with all the shortcomings of the Amsterdam treaty; it would not have been appropriate to do so, serious and far-reaching though those shortcomings are. The treaty was as bad for what it omitted as for what it included--nothing to stop quota hopping, nothing to reform the European Court of Justice, and nothing to help enlargement. The treaty was a negotiating failure for the Government: bad for Britain and bad for Europe.
Mr. Menzies Campbell (North-East Fife):
The great Arizona senator, Morris Udall, was once asked why the convention of the Democratic party, of which he was such a distinguished member, lasted for four days. He said, "It is really quite simple. After two days, everything had been said, but not everyone had said it." For those who have had any connection with the Second Reading or Committee stage of the Bill, that judgment applies as equally and acutely as it possibly could. Everything that the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said, in outraged tones redolent of his previous practice, seemed to me to be things that I had heard before--if not from him, from the phalanx of eager-faced young men recently elected to the House of Commons and anxious to make their mark on the Benches of the Conservative party. Those of us who have sat through--[Hon. Members: "Where are your colleagues?"] They have every confidence in me to deal with these matters.
Those of us who had to listen to the Conservative party's participation in the debate felt that there was nothing new to be said.
Mr. Campbell:
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is about to demonstrate that once again.
Mr. Blunt:
The hon. and learned Gentleman's observations would carry more weight if he had been in the House for rather more of the Committee stage.
Mr. Campbell:
That is untrue; I have been present for 80 or 90 per cent. of the Committee stage. That compares pretty favourably with other hon. Members. Hansard will show that many of the speeches have been repetitious, rehearsing points that had been made on Second Reading. Indeed, in some cases they were merely a rehearsal of the speeches made on Second Reading.
"a paradise for Japanese investment".
He was right. Because we have a flexible labour market, excellent industrial relations and low overheads, Britain's firms have been able to take on and beat the competition. That is why we have created the jobs and why unemployment has come down, but that opt-out will now be ended. There are already proposals on the table to which even the Labour Government are opposed, but which we shall be powerless to prevent as a result of the Bill. What an outrage that such a far-reaching measure should be subjected to the guillotine.
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