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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. The hon. Gentleman may not have heard Madam Speaker's rulings on the case of General Pinochet, but he is starting to infringe them. He must not mention anything which could have any bearing on the court proceedings relating to General Pinochet. That is sub judice and may not be discussed on the Floor of the House.
Mr. Leigh: I am grateful to you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.
I wish to deal with the situation in Chile, which I had the opportunity to visit recently. Some people believe that Allende, with the help of Cuban troops, was about to impose a Marxist dictatorship, and that Pinochet saved his country from a fate worse than death that would have ruled out democracy not for 17 but for 70 years, and I happen to share that view. When my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin) and I visited Chile two years ago, it was clear to us that society there was united on the surface but deeply and bitterly divided underneath. Chile has deliberately decided to close the door and move on.
I am reminded of a John Steinbeck book, "The Pastures of Heaven", in which the hero is unable to cope with the death of his parents. He seals off the room in the farmhouse where they used to sit and does not visit it for 15 years. An outside event causes him to open the door, and although he tidies it up and tries to reorder it, the trauma of going back into the room and into the past destroys him.
Chile is making a successful return to democracy. It is for the Chileans, not us, to deal with their past and present. European politicians who, in a colonial spirit of superior wisdom, are seeking to open the door into the dreadful past, are playing a game that might prove fatal to the very Chilean democracy to which they pay lip service. The Home Secretary should act as the grown-up politician that he is, take a political decision and return the general to Chile.
In the same way as the Government are trying to hide behind the law over the general, they are trying to shelter behind United Nations law over Saddam Hussein. The fact that he is a deranged and murderous tyrant is irrelevant. Many such still enjoy power or peaceful retirement. The truth is that he is a dangerous man who has the ability to destroy his neighbours and harm us, so we should have the courage to proclaim that his removal is our aim.
Whether that is attainable in practice or worth the blood that would be involved is another question. In any event, we should not pretend that bombing with cruise missiles--a modern form of war without pain to oneself--will solve anything. I suspect that the chemical stocks are so widely dispersed and hidden that no amount of bombing would destroy them.
Politicians often seem to envelop themselves in stealth and radar cloaking devices to avoid having to make a clear decision and to allow them to pass the buck. Whether this country abandons its own currency and taxation is not a narrow economic issue. Oskar Lafontaine would agree that once a currency is abolished one is inevitably moving down the path to a single European state.
Only this week, there have been some interesting quotations. Mr. Lafontaine said:
The Government maintain that the decision is primarily an economic one, although they cloak their attitude in the spurious guise of having made up their mind that we should join at some time in an undefined future. However, politics is about clear choices, and the public should be given a clear choice at the next general election.
I agree that we should respect the decisions made by continental nations. As it happens, I am reading a history of Luxembourg, which is surprisingly interesting. The book is also surprisingly hefty, although it contains a lot of pictures. If I were a Luxembourgeois, and my country did not have a separate language, was dependent economically on its neighbours--Luxembourg's currency was subsumed into that of Belgium in 1919--and had been invaded twice in its 150-year history, I would be in favour of the European Union and monetary union. However, our history is very different and we are entitled to take a different attitude while at the same time respecting the decisions of others.
Politics should be about choices. The Conservative party should present the people at the next general election with a clear choice based on principle. I am happy with the present policy of presenting the decision in terms of what we should or should not do in the next Parliament, but we should be clear that we oppose sacrificing our currency on the principled grounds that the sacrifice of currency and taxation rights is incompatible with any meaningful degree of sovereignty. That should be our clear and decisive policy at the next general election.
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex):
I agree strongly with the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh), especially his recollections of our visit to Chile. We were accompanied by several Labour Members and I would be surprised if they would disagree with my hon. Friend's comments.
The Foreign Secretary made only the most glancing reference to the enlargement of the European Union as he gloated over the extra jobs that he has created in his Department. We succeeded in achieving the enlargement of NATO, and the Foreign Secretary's attempts to create a spat with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) about spending in the Foreign Office are no substitute for a policy that will achieve the objective of enlargement of the European Union.
Many former communist-bloc nations in eastern Europe long to be fully reunited with western civilisation. They saw how western Europe's democracy and stability were cemented by the European Community and NATO in the post-war period. It is a priority to incorporate those nations into those organisations, so that the east can be accepted and the west can extend political and economic security to unstable areas now threatened by economic collapse in nearby Russia. The Balkans are a lesson in the fragility of post-communist societies. They cry out for access and inclusion as a means of obtaining internal as well as external security. They know no other way to gain stability. The history of eastern and central Europe has always been about the desire to forge alliances to create stability.
The slow response of the European Union to the enlargement agenda is a matter of shame for its members. The pace could hardly be slower. The iron curtain fell in 1989 and, nine years later, only four of the 20 or 30 states that aspire to EU membership are fully in the accession process. The agreements signed with some applicant states are a poor substitute for genuine free trade. The process has been arrested principally by those who regard economic and monetary union and the continuing integration of the existing membership as the overriding priority. That is demonstrated by the chronology of recent events. The Maastricht treaty in 1991 was the Franco-German response to the collapse of communism. Its focus was on preserving western Europe, and on consolidating it through economic and monetary union. Only in 1995 did the Madrid summit request that the Commission should make preparations for enlargement. Agenda 2000, the Commission's response, was delayed until after the Amsterdam summit in 1997. It was envisaged that Amsterdam would resolve all the institutional questions related to enlargement, but it failed to do so.
The Commission is now using enlargement as a lever with which to achieve the integration for which there was no consensus at Amsterdam. Introducing Agenda 2000, Commission President Jacques Santer wrote that the Union
The larger the EU becomes, the less realistic all that is likely to be. Enlargement, rather than ever-closer uniformity, is the real test of the EU's credibility. To achieve it, existing member states must be prepared to make compromises, or else large-scale enlargement simply will not occur. That is why not a single date has been set for the accession of a single former communist-bloc state. Applicant states must, of course, reform their agriculture, stabilise their public finances and prepare for the rigours of the free market. They are all seeking to do so, but in many cases those are impossible preconditions, except in the extreme long term.
A real question arises: is the EU to be a rich, exclusive club, or a generous haven for fellow Europeans who are emerging from poverty and misrule? Enlargement means change for the EU. Everyone pays lip service to the original dream of peace and prosperity from the Atlantic to the Urals, but few people will face the consequences of enlargement. The rigid accession terms set out in Agenda 2000 are by no means the only, or even the quickest, way to achieve that.
The 10 aspirant states identified in Agenda 2000 will increase the EU's surface area by a third, encompassing a population of 475 million people, and a rise in population of just under a third. However, at the same time, their accession will add only 5 per cent. to EU gross domestic product. The EU must be in a position to assist the economic and political development of the aspirant states, to extend free trade and to promote political stability.
It is widely accepted that the existing policies and decision-making structures are already too cumbersome. The club designed for six members with limited powers now accommodates 15 members with ever-wider powers. The democratic deficit was an issue before the current round of enlargement. Representing the interests of the new democracies and their peoples alongside those of the existing member states in the European Parliament, the European Council and the European Court of Justice, will exacerbate that democratic deficit.
Enlargement makes reform of EU institutions unavoidable. Increasing the number of participants will slow down meetings and render policy even more
unintelligible and consensus more impossible. Streamlining the decision-making process, however, would make the EU less accountable and would reduce the voice of individual member states. The Commission's emphasis on increased majority voting in place of genuine consensus to push along ever-closer union will worsen the democratic deficit. There is no constitutional separation of powers. In the Council of Ministers, the Executives of the member states legislate and the national, elected Parliaments become innocent bystanders.
The European Parliament will have 700 members by 2015, if enlargement goes ahead, and each of them will represent 678,500 constituents on average. The multi-site nature of the Parliament is a fact that reflects how member states' national interests will always override communautaire decisions in practice. The European Parliament is not a plausible answer to the democratic deficit.
If enlargement does not stimulate fresh thinking about the future of the European Union, it will become characterised by its political inertia, which will promote corruption, disillusion and, ultimately, dissolution. Whatever were the intentions of the original Six, the world has changed dramatically. The cold war divided our continent and defined the struggle between capitalism and socialism in our domestic politics. High tariff barriers protected domestic markets. Western Europe huddled together for mutual protection and security, without the need for much in the way of integration.
Today, Europe comprises nations whose interests have diverged dramatically. To give three examples: the United Kingdom is ever-happier with freer world trade and strong United States involvement, as the recent British presidency showed; France lives with three fears, which are world free trade, the unchallengeable ascendancy of the US in world affairs and the consequences of German reunification; and Germany wants to use her new size and influence for the benefit of her neighbours, but is now most preoccupied with the economic opportunities and threats of instability to the east. Every nation has its own sensitivities and motivations. Attempts to bind them all into one straitjacket--the acquis communautaire--will cause strains that are set to become intolerable.
Some nations may be prepared to forfeit their sovereign independence to join a new international state of some sort, but the problem will always be the democratic deficit. The most accountable institutions are national, rather than international, or regional--except where particularly strong regional identities exist. Therefore, the building block for a united and democratic Europe, which is meaningful to people throughout Europe, should be the nation state. Clearly, the answer for practical accountability does not lie at supranational level.
Flexibility with the acquis would greatly facilitate enlargement. The objective should be for the EU to do less, but more effectively. It cannot achieve that unless it rolls back the acquis communautaire at the same time. That does not preclude some member states from proceeding with further economic and political union, but not all member states should be obliged to do so. That not only recognises the reality of opt-outs that have already been granted, but reflects the intergovernmental character of the second and third pillars of the EU, dealing with a common foreign and security policy and justice and home affairs--or, at least, the thinking that they should be intergovernmental. It also creates opportunities for more
rational decision making. Why, for example, should states that do not have fishing interests be involved in fisheries policy? Applicant states would then be able to negotiate accession terms that better suited their circumstances and those of existing member states. It may take decades to achieve real reform of the common agricultural policy.
Equally, the agricultural systems of many applicant states are decades behind those of the EU. EU membership could be offered, excluding CAP membership. The same could apply to social policy or to economic and monetary union.
The vast economic differences between the present EU and the potential members makes some sort of variable geometry inevitable. It is clear that the drivers of the EU see flexibility as a means of strengthening the acquis and the institutions. They see variable geometry as no more than a transitional stage to the ever closer union. However, variable geometry in the context of enlargement should not be confused with Union a la carte. It is a means of democratising the EU, as well as speeding up access to EU membership. Member states should not be forced to adopt policies that they do not want.
The recently published report of the Treasury Committee quoted the European Commissioner, Yves-Thibault de Silguy, applying the words of Mikhail Gorbachev to the situation of the United Kingdom vis-a-vis monetary union. He said:
A successful European Union will include members far beyond the current five accession candidates, and will be a union of diversity, mutual co-operation and consent. There must be an end to the language of coercion and intolerance, which is based on supposedly irreversible undertakings that, once made, are irrevocable. The language of inevitability and of irreversible progress carries echoes of past European tyrannies that Europe can do without.
The Queen's Speech committed the Government to
"A unified currency area needs a fair and equal tax framework."
Mr. Fischer, the German Foreign Secretary, said:
"We ought to work on a common constitution to turn the European Union into an entity under international law."
Jean-Jacques Viseur, the Belgian Finance Minister, said:
"Direct tax co-ordination has to be on the agenda in order to avoid harmful tax competition."
Yves-Thibault de Silguy, the EU Finance Commissioner, uttered what will perhaps become the most famous "why not?" quotation. An interviewer said:
"There is a logic that says that although you may start with corporate taxes and taxes on savings, there ought to be closer harmonisation of sales output taxes, VAT for instance, and indeed eventually perhaps personal taxation too."
Without hesitation, Mr. de Silguy said, "Why not?" I am sure that those words will come to haunt all those who argue that the decision is not a fundamental constitutional and political issue on which politicians must provide a clear lead.
"must set about adapting, developing and reforming itself."
27 Nov 1998 : Column 499
Agenda 2000 proposes reform of the weighting of votes in the Council and a reduction in the number of members of the Commission. It requires a fresh intergovernmental conference as soon as possible after 2000, which could introduce far-reaching reforms including the generalised introduction of qualified majority voting and a fully operational foreign policy.
Amsterdam was a stalemate because there is less and less consensus about the direction that institutional reform should take. An attempt to force reforms last year would have jeopardised the stability of EMU. A further constraint on enlargement is the Commission's insistence that applicant states must commit to the acquis communautaire in its entirety,
"including the aims of political and monetary union",
without opt-outs. Applicants dare not speak out in those circumstances. The EU is treating applicant states more harshly than existing members such as Denmark and the United Kingdom. It is consistent with the Commission dogma that opt-outs are merely a transitional part of the inexorable process of economic and political union.
"He who arrives late must be punished."
Why enlarge if there are no benefits for the late arrivals?
"a leading role in preparing the European Union for the historic challenge of enlargement."
Sadly, however, there is precious little evidence that the Government of the United Kingdom have the least idea of the real nature of that historic challenge.
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