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ROYAL ASSENT
Madam Deputy Speaker: I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified her Royal Assent to the following Acts:
Health Service Commissioners (Amendment) Act 2000
Licensing (Young Persons) Act 2000
Warm Homes and Energy Conservation Act 2000
Police (Northern Ireland) Act 2000
Fur Farming (Prohibition) Act 2000
European Affairs
Question again proposed, That this House do now adjourn.
3.4 pm
Madam Deputy Speaker: I remind hon. Members that Mr. Speaker has imposed a time limit of 15 minutes on Back-Benchers' speeches.
Dr. Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test): On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) may have inadvertently misled the House in his comments about Baroness Thatcher's support for German reunification. Her memoirs make her views clear. She wrote:
- I sent a message to President Bush reiterating my view that the priority should be to see genuine democracy established in East Germany and that German reunification was not something to be addressed at present.
- If there was any hope now of stopping or slowing down reunification it would only come from an Anglo-French initiative.
Madam Deputy Speaker: That is actually not a point of order, but a point for debate.
3.5 pm
Mr. Denzil Davies (Llanelli): Reference has been made to the Prime Minister's speech in Warsaw on 6 October, when he made bold and clear statements as to the British Government's attitude and his attitude towards the European Union. I shall devote some time to a discussion of parts of his speech, as they are relevant to the debate and to the deliberations on the treaty of Nice.
The Prime Minister made clear his vision of the EU; it is a bold one--that of a super-power. A super-power needs some of the basic characteristics of statehood; it must have central institutions that are powerful enough to take economic and military decisions quickly and effectively. Within its jurisdiction, there must be no seriously competing centres of power. It must have a currency, an army, a navy and an air force. Probably, it should have a flag and an anthem. It needs a fairly harmonised system of justice. And it needs law enforcement and perhaps a constitution.
If we apply some of those characteristics to the EU over the past 50 years, the EU is not doing too badly. It is moving along nicely towards the super-power of the Prime Minister's ambition. The EU has central institutions; it has a Commission, which acts as the imperial civil service. Indeed, the Prime Minister paid tribute to the Commission and extolled its virtues in his speech; he said that
- it allows Europe to overcome purely sectional interests.
The EU has a Parliament. We tend to scoff at it and to be scornful of it, but as I have watched treaty negotiations over the past 30 years, I have noticed that the Parliament usually comes out of each negotiation with slightly enhanced powers.
The EU has a central bank. In effect, it has a supreme court. The only central institution that is a bit suspect is the Council of Ministers itself--a point to which I may return. The EU has a flag and an anthem. It has citizens--we are all EU citizens. It does not yet have a common system of justice or law enforcement, but there is an organisation called Europol and there will even be one called Eurojust--which will have not just one grand prosecutor, but a number of prosecutors.
Mr. Wilkinson: Will not the development of a super-power be profoundly dangerous for Europe? Do not super-powers tend to throw their weight around? Do they not normally have a preponderant military might? In the European context, is it not true that, from Bonaparte to the central powers, the third reich and the USSR, all super-powers have been extremely dangerous and aggressive?
Mr. Davies: There is much in what the hon. Gentleman says. I approach the subject simply as a Welsh constitutional lawyer, however, so I shall carry on.
There is something rather pompously called a European area of justice. I understand that it is designed to deal with cross-border crimes--the type of crimes that are referred to in the United States as federal.
As we know, the EU has a single currency and a centralised monetary system. In fiscal policy, it has considerable jurisdiction over the expenditure side; on taxation--the revenue side--it is a little weaker. However, as we were reminded, it covers VAT, which is one of the two taxes that raise the most revenue in Britain. I could not go to the electorate of Llanelli and promise them that, as a Member of the House, I would want to repeal or substantially change VAT.
Of course, the EU is not there yet in relation to taxation; I do not expect that the vetoes will be given up at Nice. However, the pressures of a single market and a single
economy and the need to prop up the euro and make it more respectable on the foreign exchanges will, no doubt, lead to pressure to harmonise and co-ordinate direct taxation--as VAT is co-ordinated.Then, of course, we have the European army. I use that term only as shorthand; there is no ideological reason why I call it an army. Basically, the French have won. I have sat on these Benches for years, admiring the way in which the French negotiate in the European Union. I have admired their intellectual power and their civil servants' ability. With a combination of charm and considerable intellectual ability, they have achieved their objective in the end, as they did with the single currency.
The question of the European army started when de Gaulle pulled out of the military committee of NATO and the French decided that they wanted an alternative. They worked and worked at their policy. They pretended that they wanted to go back into NATO, but of course they never did--they did not want to. They have won in the end because of a British Prime Minister. I do not know whether it was the heady Celtic winds at St. Malo, but the Prime Minister did what previous ones had refused to do: he went along with the French. There could be no European army without the British Prime Minister's agreement.
Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was extremely enthusiastic about the military capabilities. In his very interesting speech, he said:
- Whatever its origins, Europe today is not just about peace--it is about projecting power.
The Prime Minister is quite clear that he wants a European army, navy and air force to project power. We are not just talking about blue helmets and peacekeeping; we are using the expressions of a super-power with considerable military capabilities. I do not know where that power will be projected--we can leave that for another debate--but, no doubt, enemies can be found all over the place if need be. However, I know where the power comes from--the accumulated power of nation states. The power comes from the Parliaments and peoples of those nation states, because the centre will have to be strengthened to create the super-power. In effect, the nation state will have to become provinces.
Romano Prodi said that one could not have competing centres of power. Well, he knows all about provinces. I should imagine that he learned about them at his mother's knee. He was quite right because, if the centre is to have more power, the competing centres of power--the nation states--will have to give up their power to enable the super-power to be created. That returns me to the Council of Ministers, the draft treaty of Nice and the veto.
Once upon a time, far more policy matters were covered by vetoes, but the number has gradually reduced. The veto is the main weapon to protect the democracy of
the nation states--certainly in international organisations. Security Council members have a veto, as do those of the World Trade Organisation. The veto exists to protect their democracy in those international organisations, but the European Union is not an international organisation in that way; it has gone way beyond that.The veto is no longer consonant with a move towards the central decision making that is needed to create the sort of super-power that the Prime Minister wants, so the veto will gradually have to go. Not all the vetoes will go at the treaty of Nice. The treaty lists 47 matters covered by the veto, and no doubt 15 or 20 will go, but most of them will disappear next time or the time after that.
A few weeks ago, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary railed against the Euro-sceptics. I do not criticise him for not being present now--no doubt he will read the report of the debate. [Interruption.] The Whip is certainly present. I understand that the Foreign Secretary was a Euro-sceptic at one time, although he has, as they say, moved on since then. I remind him that Euro- scepticism has a long tradition in Britain. The House will not be surprised to hear that the first Euro-sceptics were Welshmen--going back as far as the Welsh bishops of the fifth and sixth centuries, who were a pretty stroppy lot. If I were so bold as to coin a phrase, I would say that they were of Rome, but not run by Rome.
My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister is not, and has never been, a Euro-sceptic. I commend him on the speech that he gave in Warsaw; it was a clear expression of his purpose and objective. In that speech, he went further along the road of European integration than any other British Prime Minister since the days of the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath).
I apologise for all this history, but I shall make one more historical allusion. In Warsaw, the Prime Minister crossed his own rubicon--that of European integration. It seems that he took the Government with him; perhaps he took the Army with him as well, but whether he will ever be able to take the British public with him across that fateful stream only time will tell.
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