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Mr. Ben Bradshaw (Exeter): Does the right hon. and learned Gentleman recall how long it took the previous Government to do anything in Bosnia? Was it five years?
Mr. Howard: Most people will agree that circumstances in Bosnia were different in a number of crucial respects. In relation to Kosovo, we have had a series of final warnings from the Government, none of which were followed through. That was partly responsible for the devastating events which occurred there earlier this year. To listen to the Foreign Secretary this morning, one would have thought that the intervention in Kosovo had been a great success. In fact, the record in Kosovo is one of great failure, with hundreds killed, hundreds raped and thousands driven from their homes.
Seven months elapsed between the start of the appalling violence in that region and the outline agreement reached with President Milosevic--an agreement brokered, one might add, not by Europe at all, but by the special envoy of the President of the United States. Europe was unable and unwilling to show leadership--Europe had indeed been "dithering and disunited". Let us be clear--that failure was not a result of a lack of any institutional machinery. It was not a consequence of a lack of political integration. It was because the nations of Europe simply could not agree what to do.
Nowhere was the failure more marked than here in Britain. There was no greater example of dithering than the approach of the Foreign Secretary to the ban on Serbian airlines. In July, he told the House that he had introduced a ban on Serbian airlines. In September, we discovered that that was quite untrue--the Foreign Secretary had not imposed any ban, and was not intending to impose any ban for another year. There were, we were told, clear legal reasons why a year's notice had to be given.
I said that that was outrageous, as did others. Even Jacques Santer accused Britain of undermining Europe's efforts to impose sanctions on the Milosevic regime. Within days, those clear legal reasons had mysteriously vanished. What was impossible on 11 September was put into effect on 16 September. Who on earth could the Prime Minister's official spokesman have had in mind when he talked of dithering, if not the Foreign Secretary?
More recently, the agreement between Mr. Holbrooke and President Milosevic has run into difficulty. At the start of this month, the Yugoslav authorities refused to grant a visa to the prosecutor and president of the international criminal tribunal. This followed the Foreign Secretary's assurance to the House on 19 October that "full compliance" with Security Council resolution 1199 was an integral part of the settlement which had prevented air strikes from taking place, and that this resolution called on Belgrade to co-operate fully with the war crimes tribunal.
Therefore, President Milosevic is now in breach both of the agreement which averted air strikes, and of previous UN resolutions. As the Minister of State, the right hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) explained in a recent letter to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Mr. Trend), a new resolution on the issue--resolution 1207--was adopted on 17 November. I hope that the Secretary of State for Defence will tell the House when he comes to wind up the debate what response has been received from the Yugoslav authorities since then, and whether full compliance with Security Council resolution 1199 remains an integral part of the settlement which is preventing air strikes from taking place.
On Wednesday, we discussed in detail in this Chamber the response of the United States and the United Kingdom Governments to the latest crisis in Iraq. I shall not repeat today what I said then. The whole House will want to resolve the crisis in Iraq, including the latest episode, without the need to take military action. However, the situation must be resolved. As I said on Wednesday, if it can be resolved only through the use of force, the Opposition will support any action that is clearly related to achievable objectives.
I raised a number of questions in Wednesday's debate, and I make no complaint that the Minister of State was unable to answer them there and then. However, I hope that he will write to me with the answers to all those questions.
The first 18 months of the Government's term of office have included the United Kingdom's presidency of the European Union. At the start of the presidency, the Prime Minister announced that it would be an important test for Britain under the Labour Government. He said that it would be
Britain's presidency failed completely to deliver on the key objectives that it set for itself. In place of the promised economic reform, it delivered burdens on British business through the social chapter. In place of a successful launch of economic and monetary union, it delivered fudged criteria for the single currency and a botched summit, which led the Austrians to remark that they had now learnt how not to organise a summit. In place of progress on enlargement negotiations, the Government put off all difficult decisions on key areas of reform such as the common agricultural policy.
Yet still the Government have not learnt their lesson. The Gracious Speech includes the phrase:
Mr. John Bercow (Buckingham):
Should not the Foreign Secretary have told the House whether he saw a copy of the "New European Way", drawn up by the Party of European Socialists, before it was published and whether he endorsed all its contents?
Mr. Howard:
I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. The Foreign Secretary's speech was noteworthy for the absence of any reference to that document--in which, we understand, leading members of the Government took a prominent role.
It is in the area of European policy, from Amsterdam to Cardiff to Portschach, that the Government's failure to fulfil their promise to make Britain a leading player has been greatest. Earlier this month, the Foreign Secretary told the CBI that the Government were taking a lead in the debate on the future of Europe. Fine words indeed. However, the reality of the Government's behaviour in practice was neatly summed up by a British source, following the latest capitulation last week. The Prime Minister, he said, had decided to "go with the flow".
"Going with the flow" would be a suitable title for Labour's European manifesto. It perfectly encapsulates the Government's approach and, at a time when Europe is
lurching to the left, "going with the flow" is an extremely dangerous approach to adopt. We saw the result of "going with the flow" after the Government signed the social chapter. Now, they find that they oppose measures such as the extension of works councils but cannot do anything about them because they have signed away their ability to do so.
We saw the result of "going with the flow" in Amsterdam, where the Government gave up our veto in 15 areas, gaining nothing in return and directly contradicting the Foreign Secretary's claim that Maastricht was the high-water mark of integration. The Government then went with the flow at Portschach. As a result, an informal summit billed as a forum for discussing ways of returning Europe to the people and of entrenching the concept of subsidiarity instead discussed ways of taking Europe further from the people through further European integration and the removal of decision making from the national level.
As the chairman of that summit noted, the meeting had
True to form, the Prime Minister was reported to have signed up in principle to an unprecedented package of European integration, including a huge spending programme, measures to harmonise taxes and the first steps towards a European army, not because he thought that it was right for Britain but because he did not want to be isolated. He went with the flow.
The latest example of the Government's desire to go with the flow came last weekend, when they signed up to the manifesto to which my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow) referred, drawn up by the Party of European Socialists, including a loosening of spending limits, greater tax harmonisation and a new culture of regulation. We witnessed the spectacle of a Downing Street spokesman greeting the package enthusiastically as "a new Labour agenda". Well, if we did not know it before, we know it now: higher taxes, more burdens on business and fewer jobs in Britain and Europe are the new Labour agenda.
A Government who promised leadership in Europe are content to be carried by the tide.
"a test for Britain to show that we can and do offer strong leadership in Europe."
By the end of the presidency, the Members of the European Parliament had delivered their verdict on that leadership. In an unprecedented move, they defeated a motion which sought to congratulate the United Kingdom's presidency on its achievements. The vote came the day after the Foreign Secretary addressed the Parliament--so no one should have been surprised.
"My Government will play a leading role in preparing the European Union for the historic challenge of enlargement."
This promise, along with the promise to promote economic reform and job creation in Europe could have been made a year ago--indeed, such promises were made a year ago. The failure of the intervening months has not deterred the Government one jot from merely repeating them, as if the British presidency had never taken place.
"made clear the directions and set out the paths for Europe's future development . . . The single market and currency do not mark the end of European integration. That is the signal to be sent out from Poertschach."
It is little wonder that the Government had neither the courage nor the courtesy to tell the House what had been agreed.
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