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Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Alan Haselhurst): Order. I appeal to hon. Members who are still seeking to catch my eye. There will be much disappointment if the remaining speeches each take up the full 15-minute allocation. I ask hon. Members to bear that in mind.
5.30 pm
Sir Richard Body (Boston and Skegness): I always try to be nice to the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell), because every time he makes forays into my constituency people agree with him. I must say to his hon. Friends that members of the Labour party seem to regard him as a hero, and echo his sentiments. I do not think that the hon. Gentleman need despair about his party. I think that he is expressing the authentic voice of the rank and file of the Labour party. Some years ago, just a few people were trying to express the views of the rank and file of the Conservative party and eventually won the day, so I like to think that he, too, will win if he sticks at it--that is what he must do. He must keep at it and not worry about Boston and Skegness.
The Order Paper gives a list of documents that are relevant to the debate. It is disgraceful that so little time has been allocated to the debate, and therefore little has been said about those important documents, all of which have a bearing on the lives of the British people. I would like to touch on one of them, Cm 4762, which is the Government's half-yearly report on developments in the European Community in the latter part of last year. There is only one thing about it that cheers me up: I like looking at the photograph of the Minister with responsibility for Europe, the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz)--it shows his usual kindly nature. Apart from that, the report is pretty awful and rather frightening.
According to the report, 22 areas of Government policy have been transferred, either wholly or partly, to Brussels, every one of them as a result of legislation passed by the House. In addition, 62 judgments of the European Court of Justice have a bearing on how we must behave in this country. Not one of those judgments would have been possible a quarter of a century ago, yet every one of them was decided according to procedures and principles that had been alien to our system of law over almost a millennium.
The report also lists 15 treaties that have been entered into on behalf of this country within that six-month period. In the past, no treaty was binding on this country unless it was ratified by the House. None of those 15 treaties was ratified by the House. That statistically supports what the hon. Member for Great Grimsby said. Power is rapidly moving away, and we are nearing the end of the stepping stones that take us to a state far different from what we were a quarter of a century ago.
It is understandable that Governments--I regret to say successive Governments--like this procedure. It is only too easy for a Minister or his civil servants to slip across to Brussels with some pet notion of how the British people ought to be regulated, and to meet some official who would gladly extend his role. The proposal would go before a Council of Ministers or would be made in secret, with no member of the public entitled to overhear the discussion and no member of the media allowed to be present. We then find that it has been added to the law of this country.
We now have 80,000 pages of law that we must comply with, none of which has been passed by the House. That should shame those who have gone into the Lobbies to vote on matters about which they know hardly anything.
One can understand the Government's wish to act in such a way. It is irritating to have to come here and persuade the House, Committees and then the other place of the need for a change in the law. It is sometimes very frustrating. The procedures that we are discussing, however, are intended to work in the way I described just now.
Those of us who read law years ago may remember the words of a great English jurist, perhaps the greatest of all. Blackstone said--although he said it long ago, it is still true--that freedom lies hid in the interstices of procedure. When we streamline procedure as we have in this instance, by enabling legislation to be passed in Brussels rather than here, we should remember that we are talking about people's freedom.
Governments can do nothing unless they first take away our freedom or our money. They have two weapons: legislation and taxation. Both are powers of coercion which, in a democracy, can be justified only if they are approved by a majority of those who will be coerced. They must be approved directly, or approved by elected representatives in an assembly such as ours, answerable to those who will be coerced.
We are moving--have already moved, over the past quarter of a century--very far from that fundamental principle of democracy. If the hon. Member for Great Grimsby continues to say what he has been saying, his party will doubtless be forced by its rank and file to appreciate that what is being done was provided for by the Amsterdam, Maastricht and Rome treaties, and the Single European Act. All those measures were steps against democracy. The damage that has been done can never be rectified by any European Parliament, however it is elected.
Much of the debate has been about the enlargement of the Community. We speak as though the centre of Europe were Brussels or Strasbourg, although I believe that, geographically speaking, it is somewhere in Lithuania. This is the tragedy of what has happened in the past half century, or indeed the past decade. We had an opportunity to end a thousand years of history during which Europe has been divided. When I say "Europe", I do not mean just western Europe; I mean Europe truly. I mean the Europe of Tchaikovsky and Chekhov. That is Europe just as much as our part of Europe.
Any major war that has taken place in the past half century, or is likely to take place in the future of our continent, will have been, or will be, a war between eastern and western Europe. We should therefore lose no opportunity to unite all Europeans within an institutional
framework of some sort. Obviously that cannot involve an acquis communautaire leading to every candidate's being required to sign up to everything that has already been agreed to; such a position would be intolerable. We must have a looser, more flexible arrangement, enabling us to co-operate in groups when it is in our interests to be in such groups. We need to co-operate on many issues that are now crossing the frontiers of the individual nation states of Europe.The proposals that will be considered in Nice and thereafter in negotiations will not face up to the possibility that I have described. That is a tragedy. It is sad that many Labour Members, with some notable exceptions, fail to recognise what Europe really is and how important it is to bring some sensible unity to our continent, which it has lacked for too many centuries.
5.40 pm
Ms Jenny Jones (Wolverhampton, South-West): I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. May I pick up on the final words of the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Sir R. Body), who talked about the importance of uniting what I call the greater Europe? That is the issue that I want to address.
Great interest has been shown, in Parliament and outside, in the charter of fundamental rights. The relevant documents to the debate include the report by the Select Committee on European Scrutiny on the forthcoming intergovernmental conference. If Members read it, they will see that the Committee has done a lot of work in examining the need for the charter.
The House of Lords Select Committee on European Union has produced a report completely on the charter, and I understand that the other place will debate it soon. In February, we had an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall on the topic. Naturally, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly debated the charter in January and it will do so again at the end of the month.
I wish to make it clear from the outset that I am an enthusiastic supporter and advocate of human rights protections. I have the privilege to be part of the United Kingdom delegation to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly. I am extremely happy with our Human Rights Act 1998 because it means that, at long last, we have incorporated the European convention on human rights in our legislation. I look forward with interest to its being implemented later in the year. It is because I am so keen on human rights that I am extremely wary and uncomfortable about the charter. It will present us with an awful lot of difficulties.
If the European Union wishes to demonstrate its commitment to human rights, I have no problem with that. Apparently, one of the reasons why it wanted to embark on the charter was to have something that demonstrated to the citizens of the EU that it was serious about human rights. If it wishes to do that, it can take the relatively easy step of acceding to the European convention on human rights, which it has considered doing several times. Before someone reminds me, I know that the 1996 European Court of Justice ruling put a bit of a dampener on that, but I gather that the EU is revisiting the possibility of acceding. The reports of both the European Scrutiny Committee and the European Union Committee recommend that. In January, the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly formally invited the EU to accede to its own convention on human rights.
The process of drafting the charter is well under way. As is the nature of these things, it will no doubt grind on inexorably towards a conclusion, but one of my fears is: what will we get when drafting is concluded? It seems rather odd to embark on drawing up a charter when we do not know whether it will be just a declaration, or legally binding.
My hon. Friend the Minister for Europe has made the Government's position clear: they just want a declaration. If that were the only option available, that would be fine, but he knows as well as I do that other EU members want a legally binding charter. They want it to be justiciable. He knows that representatives of those member states and our representatives sit on the drafting body. They have had some heated discussions centring around whether the charter will end up as a declaration or be legally binding. It is a little unfortunate to have embarked on the thing without resolving from the outset exactly what the EU wanted to achieve.
I have reservations about making the document only a declaration. If the declaration is meant to show European Union residents that the Union is serious about rights--be they human, fundamental or other rights--residents should reasonably expect the declaration to have some teeth. If they feel that the declaration does not ensure their just rights, they may expect to be able to do something about that. I think that, when they realise that they can do nothing about it, disillusionment will quickly set in.
I should, however, like to explain why a legally binding charter would be not only bad news, but dangerous for human rights protection in greater Europe. I assure the Minister that I am trying to assist him and to strengthen his arm in the wrestling match which I suspect will await him when the drafting body has finished writing the charter.
I am not a lawyer, and I have never had legal training. Although I have been to three universities, they were definitely very non-elitist. Nevertheless, it does not take a lawyer to work out very quickly what would happen if Europe had two systems of legal rights protection and two courts trying to judge on human rights matters--we would end up with a complete mess.
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