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Mr. Swayne: Will the hon. and learned Gentleman give way?
Mr. Campbell: Not for the moment.
I have noted with interest not only the duration of Conservative Members's speeches, but the number of interventions that they have made and the number of artificial interventions that they have made on each other. That, perhaps more than anything else, gives the lie to the notion that there has been no effort at stringing the Bill out and at filibuster.
It has not only been the length of speeches or the frequency of interventions: some of the quality of argument has shown that there is no serious intent to deal with the issues that the Bill raises.
For example, the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe became very exercised about article J16 and the role of the Secretary-General of the Council, high representative for the common foreign and security policy. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that he had the powers of a Metternich or a Kissinger, but when we read the article, we find that the high representative
As has been pointed out, the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) described the treaty, for which the Bill is the enabling instrument, as a mouse of a treaty. Of course, in those days, the official position of Her Majesty's Opposition was that, so important were the issues raised by the Bill--they were so fundamental constitutionally--that there had to be a referendum. The referendum, along with the baseball cap, appears to have disappeared from the political scene, but that does not alter the fact that the Bill does not justify the apocalyptic terms in which it has been described, or the synthetic description of the consequences of the guillotine motion that is to be passed by the House.
I would prefer it if it were not necessary to guillotine legislation at all, but that could be achieved only if we were to adopt what the Select Committee on Modernisation of the House of Commons has accepted,
for the purpose of experiment, as a matter at least of principle: that all Bills should be timetabled from the beginning, so that there would be proper opportunity for scrutiny of all relevant parts of all Bills, and there would not be either the need to impose guillotines or encouragement to create circumstances in which guillotines might be imposed.
As the Bill has gone through the three Committee days on the Floor of the House, it has been obvious that the official Opposition were almost willing the Government to impose a guillotine, so that the official Opposition could reflect the synthetic anger and anxiety of which we have heard so much. It was clearly part of the tactic. Unable to deal the merits of the argument, they think that there may be something a little more substantial to attack in the imposition of a guillotine.
The Bill should be passed as soon as possible. It is in the interests of all our constituents--
Mr. Campbell:
If the hon. Gentleman thinks of our constituents as subjects, and if that was a common view among Conservative candidates at the general election, it is perhaps not surprising that so few Conservative Members were returned to Parliament. I did not hear my Conservative opponent saying that the electors were all subjects, but perhaps Conservative candidates in other parts of the United Kingdom thought that that was the appropriate way to proceed. If so, it would explain their lack of numbers.
Sir Michael Spicer (West Worcestershire):
One thing that has to be said about the Committee stage of the Bill that enshrined the Maastricht treaty in law--I had the honour to play a part in it--was that there was no guillotine. My colleagues and I who took part in the Maastricht debate were trying to guess how many times the Government had to bring the Committee stage to a close. We may not be absolutely correct, but we guess that it was about 30 times. If that is the case, I had the honour to vote against the closure 30 times, as did several of my hon. Friends who are here now.
The then Government used the usual procedures of the House in dealing with a highly controversial Bill that they could have guillotined. They had the power to guillotine it and certainly had the votes. The Opposition, who were in collusion with the Government on the matter at that time, would no doubt have abstained or faded into the night, and the Government would have got the guillotine motion. However, the Government chose not to take that route.
It is perfectly legitimate for my hon. Friends, and especially my colleagues on the Front Bench, to argue that it would have been appropriate to use the usual procedures to deal with a highly contentious Bill now. As
I understand it, part of the Government's argument is that this is not a very important Bill. They say that we are making too much fuss about it. I have to say--this may surprise my colleagues as much as it surprises the Government--that large parts of the Bill are simply more of what we already have.
We have not yet got to the foreign and security policy aspects of the Bill, but, when we do, we will find that they are simply more of what we have had before. The same is true of qualified majority voting--one can happily argue that, to some extent, the pass was sold on the principles of QMV. It might also be contentious to say from the Opposition Benches that the social chapter provisions were pretty well established through the parts of the treaty dealing with health and safety. I would make the same case for the frontier opt-out which matters enormously to the Danes. However, the opt-out can be circumvented.
I suspect that one would not need to be a very clever lawyer in the European Court to start arguing about the frontier opt-out on the grounds of competition policy, as happened with health and safety on the social chapter. Of course, it is better to have the opt-out than not to have it; nevertheless, one suspects that, in the context of the movement that Europe is making at the moment, it does not amount to a tin of beans.
Among the issues in the legislation that we will not be discussing in the detail that we should is human rights--which, one must accept, is a new matter of principle: the idea that a member state will not be expelled but will be refused its voting rights because it does not comply with the will of the majority. Ministers have asked, "Who would possibly attack or gang up on the United Kingdom on human rights grounds? Only the Greeks will be in the dock on that matter."
One could, however, quite easily conceive--as some have conceived in debates on the Bill--of circumstances in which it might be said that what we were doing in Northern Ireland, for example, was unacceptable to other member states. If they do not like what we are doing on the single currency, for example, perhaps they will gang up on us. They certainly have the power to do so, and that is the important point. The powers now exist, and that is a new step and a new matter of principle. It is an important matter, and we should have further time to debate it. Although it has been wrongly caricatured by Labour Members, the Government have conceded a new principle. Other member states will be able to gang up to remove all voting rights from one of their number. Ministers may shake their heads, but that is the established principle.
The point that really worries me is one that we have not yet debated and one which the Government make a big play of in their favour: subsidiarity. Subsidiarity was presented to those of us who had concerns about the treaty of Maastricht as one of the treaty's fig-leaves. It was always said that, in the treaty of Maastricht, we had at least started to establish some counterpoise to the movement towards a federal, centralised, socialised European state. Time and again, during that Bill's passage, the argument from both Front Benches was that we had firmly established something called subsidiarity. The wording in article 3b was said to be quite clear. It stated:
"shall assist the Council in matters coming within the scope of the common foreign and security policy, in particular through contributing to the formulation, preparation and implementation of policy decisions, and, when appropriate and acting on behalf of the Council at the request of the Presidency, through conducting political dialogue with third parties."
It would be hard to imagine a more lukewarm job specification for someone acting in the common foreign and security policy arena. That sort of argument in the debate was as much of a window on the attitude of the Conservative Opposition as were the duration of their speeches or the frequency of their interventions.
"In areas which do not fall within its exclusive competence, the Community shall take action, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity".
17 Dec 1997 : Column 421
The wording was given as some kind of answer to hon. Members who said that we were moving inexorably towards a federal state of Europe. Some hon. Members asked, "Who will determine which matters fall within the competence of the nation state, and which matters fall within the competence of the federal state?" We never received a proper answer to that question, although it was obvious that federal institutions would ultimately determine which bits they would have the goodness of heart to cast back to national authorities. Those bits were few. I remember having long discussions about planning decisions, many of which were to be reserved or at least held at the discretion of the federal authority.
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