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9.15 pm
Is that the case? Have we been debating the inevitability of privatisation and are we moving down the road to full-scale privatisation? The technology that we have been told will come on stream at Swanwick and, I assume, Prestwick, could not be used abroad under the auspices of shareholdings still maintained by the public sector and the Government. I would be obliged if my hon. Friend the Minister would reply to that in his summing up.
Mr. Cash: We are debating a transport Bill, but at the heart of this evening's debate is new clause 5, which deals with the defence of the United Kingdom.
Let us imagine going back to, say, 9 May 1940. Tomorrow happens to be my birthday, and it is also the anniversary of the day that Churchill became Prime Minister and, unfortunately, the day on which the Germans invaded the Lowlands. The RAF obtained its first Victoria Cross when Maastricht was invaded on 10 May 1940. [Interruption.] If the Minister would be good enough to listen to my speech for a couple of minutes, which he is obviously incapable of doing--
Mr. Raynsford: The hon. Gentleman has been a Member of Parliament for a long time, so he will know that it is perfectly possible for Ministers to pay attention to the debate and, at the same time, have brief discussions with Whips on matters relating to complex procedures such as those being followed tonight. I hope that he will be less offensive in future.
Mr. Cash: I have no intention of being any less offensive.
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord): Order. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman would return to the subject that we are debating.
Mr. Cash: Would the Minister be good enough to tell me what I have just said?
Mr. Raynsford indicated dissent.
Mr. Cash: Obviously he was not listening, as it seems that he has not the faintest idea of what I was talking about. I have therefore made my point.
The new clause concerns the inherent contradictions between the defence of the realm and the Bill's provisions. The Minister referred to our obligations. Subsection (4) of the new clause, which I mentioned earlier, refers to the duty imposed by the Secretary of State. However, if the Minister refers to the European Communities Act 1972, he will see that section 2 clearly states:
- in the exercise of any statutory power or duty, including any power to give directions, or to legislate by means of orders--
- rules, regulations or other subordinate instrument, the person entrusted--
- with the power or duty may have regard to the objects of the Communities and to any such obligation or rights as aforesaid.
The fact is that there is no absolute requirement with respect to duties, but there is a reference to powers. That is why, in an intervention, I asked the Minister, who obviously could not answer, why the Government chose to refer to duties rather than functions. The Minister may not understand the provisions that he is introducing, but the fact is that the word "duty" is carefully chosen, because the word "functions" would include "powers". With that, we enter the arena of the provisions of title V of the Amsterdam treaty. The Minister can shake his head, but he cannot avoid the reality that everything I am saying will happen in due course.
I do not need to go into the details, because they are as clear as daylight. The interaction between the provisions of the Amsterdam treaty, of clauses 38 and 81 and of new clause 5 will reveal that they are inherently contradictory. There is no possibility that anyone will be able, in the defence of the realm, to know exactly what is going on. As my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) said, there is no way, in the event of imminent hostilities or a great national emergency, that anyone will have the opportunity to plough through all the case law and the requirements that have been laid down.
The Minister did not listen when I spoke about incidents that occurred 60 years ago, almost to the day. In those days, we were able to send Spitfires and Hurricanes to defeat an enemy. If new clause 5 is to have any credibility, it must be able to deal with situations of the sort that I described--if it cannot, why bother to introduce it? If there is no reason for concern about national security or the defence of the realm, there is no need to bother with new clause 5--it is irrelevant.
The fact that the Government have introduced the new clause, albeit at the end of our proceedings on the Bill, is an admission that the defence of the realm does matter. It follows that all the provisions must be workable. The Minister shakes his head and in so doing tells the House and the nation that he is not perturbed in the slightest by the fact that there might be contradictions between various provisions of the Bill. However, I believe that the time will come when those deficiencies and contradictions emerge. If they do not become obvious, it will only be owing to the Minister's good luck.
The bottom line is that there are huge contradictions. It would take far more time than is available to me tonight to go through them all. I only hope that the Minister and his advisers are prepared to look again at the provisions to establish whether or not they are right. The question of whether I am right or they are right is secondary to that of the national interest. We are dealing with defence of the realm. The Bill's many other important provisions relating to transport will pale into insignificance if the clauses that we are dealing with now go wrong.
The Government's new clause states:
- This section applies in any time of actual or imminent hostilities or of severe international tension or of great national emergency.
Mr. James Gray (North Wiltshire): Do not get carried away.
Mr. Cash: I shall not. While I do not want to be offensive, I want to be direct. That the Minister is not a Defence Minister is not his fault, but I have to tell him that, if the new clause was drafted in consultation with the Ministry of Defence, he has not done the job properly.
If the Minister looked--it would take far too long to go through it--at the research paper published by the House of Commons Library international affairs and defence section on 21 February this year, "European Defence: From Portschach to Helsinki", he would note that there is now a new EU military structure. That structure clearly identifies the roles of the commander-in-chief and the extent to which--this might come as a surprise to the Minister, who is not in the MOD--it is anticipated that our potential adversaries have weapons of mass destruction.
Therefore, under the confines of title V of the Amsterdam treaty, which was passed by this Government, there is a defence dimension. [Interruption.] If the Minister thinks that that is funny, the matter will haunt him if and when things go wrong. I am amazed by the Minister's reaction to the proposal because his new clause does not stand up. Has he consulted the MOD?
Mr. Cash: Has the Minister read or understood title V of the Amsterdam treaty? Can he reconcile the provisions of new clause 5, and clauses 81 and 38 to the extent that the people of this country will be satisfied that, if the lights go out, they will be properly defended and not simply left at risk as a result of this confused, vague, contradictory Bill?
Mr. Wilkinson: I am most grateful--I think that the whole House will have been--to my hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith) for taking part in the debate on new clauses 5 and 27 and relevant amendments that deal with national security. I will not follow all the detailed arguments that he adumbrated, but I stress that the Government have done well, even at this late stage, to introduce, under new clause 5, powers of requisition in time of national emergency or war of aerodromes, aircraft and relevant equipment. That is entirely appropriate but insufficient without the provisions of new clause 27.
The acquis communautaire is viewed as something in the past and static, but we are legislating for many years to come. The acquis communautaire is always growing; to my knowledge, there are no examples of it receding. The competence of the European Union in matters relating to civil air transport and aviation are clearly growing. The evidence is plain. Let us consider recent examples.
There is the question of bilateral air service agreements. Previously, they were always a matter entirely of national competence--and rightly so. Let us consider questions of capacity on routes, frequencies of service and gateways to or from which those services are operated. Let us consider the matter of slots. The issue of frequency of operation at airports and the facility for airlines to operate from an airport at certain intervals have been jealously guarded, and in this country normally regulated by voluntary mechanisms at individual airports. The European Commission now wishes to take that over, and that has great significance.
My hon. Friend the shadow spokesman and, obliquely, the Minister, spoke about the EU's ambition to take over Eurocontrol. Eurocontrol would in essence become an agency of the European Union, rather than, as hitherto, a mechanism for mutual co-operation between sovereign, independent nation states in the whole of Europe, to facilitate the efficient management of air transport through the crowded and congested airspace of our continent.
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