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Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood): I wish, Mr. Deputy Speaker, that you had assumed the Chair in time to hear the brave speeches the right hon. Member for Llanelli (Mr. Davies) and of the hon. Members for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) and for Luton, North (Mr. Hopkins). They demonstrated that the best traditions of British parliamentary democracy endure. They were fighting against established orthodoxies. The right hon. Gentleman pointed out the dangers of a super-power for the security of Europe and for the maintenance of democracy. The hon. Member for Great Grimsby observed how the use of Euro terminology has debased the political debate so that politics as such is no longer trusted by the British people. The hon. Member for Luton, North talked about the failure of the euro and the implications for British politics of that debacle.
I shall talk about the European defence initiative. First, I challenge the Foreign Secretary. He said that the Euro force would be deployed only if NATO were not engaged. Is that not in itself a recipe for the alienation of the United States? Presumably, if an operation does not have the approbation of the United States, it would go ahead on a European basis. We did so over Suez, and it was disastrous.
Secondly, the right hon. Gentleman said that there would be no question of deployment of British troops without "the approval of this Chamber". Does that mean that the royal prerogative, in terms of the deployment of British troops on a Euro operation, is suspended? If approval is required, will we have votes in the House--not just a ministerial statement--before British troops can be deployed, or is it merely another example of Euro terminology, which is confusing and not to be trusted?
The exercise and deployment of troops on peace- keeping operations is not to be lightly undertaken. As my gallant hon. Friend the Member for Blaby (Mr. Robathan) knows above all, in Northern Ireland we have lost more than 2,000 members of the security forces. The poor Spanish people are undergoing the horrors of a terrorist campaign at the hands of ETA. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, many allied troops lost their lives. In Kosovo, we sustained an air campaign of great intensity. Royal Air Force air crews did not suffer casualties, but they gained more awards for gallantry than in any military operation since the second world war.
In other words, the 60,000 men, the six squadrons of aircraft and the 72 naval vessels that are to be deployed for up to a year and up to a range of 2,000 miles--or 2,000 km; I cannot remember which--from Brussels will be engaged in operations that will often be dangerous, difficult, hazardous and life threatening. People are prepared to make sacrifices to defend their country, their way of life and the values that they hold dear, but I doubt whether they will be prepared to risk their lives for the common fisheries policy, which has decimated communities around our coast, or the common agricultural policy, which, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr. Leigh) made absolutely plain, has been disastrous for British agriculture and the housewife.
People will not lay down their lives for the supremacy of European law over our own or for continuing the British net contribution to the European Union, but they will note how different an organisation is the EU compared with other collaborative and free-trading bodies
such as the Association of South East Asian Nations and Mercosur and arrangements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. None of those has a centralised bureaucracy; none aspires to super-power status; none wants to throw its military weight around.The great difference between NATO and the new European rapid reaction force organisation is that NATO was always a voluntary association of sovereign independent states. That was its strength, and the strength of Western European Union as well. WEU and NATO had at their foundation--at their heart--a mutual security guarantee. The EU has forsworn that, and the Brussels treaty commitment will not be a prerequisite to participation in the Euro intervention force. As a consequence, the force will not be effective. Indeed, the neutrals will be involved.
Yesterday, I put it to the Secretary of State for Defence that it was important that the neutrals sign the Brussels treaty. They will not do so. As a consequence, the organisation will be weak and divisive. We all know how alienated the non-EU members of NATO feel. They may not be fully involved in the decision-making process--indeed, that is perfectly plain. Otherwise, why would their leading politicians and leading diplomats express their reservations in public?
My anxiety is simple: the aspiration to create a super-power by means of the European security and defence initiative will polarise and divide our continent. Over time, it will make it much harder to achieve accommodation with the Russians, who have always been anxious that the EU may acquire a military dimension--especially if that dimension involves nuclear power. I presume that the French nuclear deterrent will, over time, become an instrument available to the EU. We should consider such a development with the greatest caution.
Some say that Conservative Members have no vision, are xenophobic and mistrust fundamentally those who have for so long been our allies and partners on the continent. That is utterly false--it is typical election sloganising. We have a vision of a genuine community--the European Community as it set out--of free-trading, democratic and sovereign states and nations working together on the basis of mutual respect and for their common good. The vision is wholly worthy and wholly compatible with today's economic realities, which were so well described by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood).
Why is it that, alone among the world's free trade organisations, the EU has such an added bureaucratic dimension? Because it has ambitions for aggrandisement and for an accretion of power. Were it a democratic institution, one would be less anxious, but we should consider its manifestations--not least its abuses, its fraud and its corruption as well as the life style of the Eurocrats, which is so removed from and utterly alien to that of our working people, who lead hard but decent ordinary lives far away from the photo opportunities, the Euro lunches and the Mercedes that glide to and from meetings in agreeable locations. That is why the forces of our country will have misgivings about laying down their lives for the Euro force and the European Union. I ask the Government to think again.
A further point must be made. If there is a crisis, there will be two military staffs, will there not--those under Javier Solana of the European Union, the high chief
representative or whatever he is called, and those under Lord Robertson of NATO? They may have quite different interpretations of an emerging crisis, how it should be dealt with, which forces should be deployed and how. It is a recipe for indecision and delay. I urge the Government to think long and hard before they go too far down the road.If there is no parliamentary dimension and proper oversight, it will perpetuate the democratic deficit that is endemic in all European institutions. I urge the Government to continue with the Assembly of the Western European Union, which has the great merit of bringing in parliamentarians from all over Europe, not just European Union parliamentarians. Those representatives sit in their own parliaments, take part in their own national debates, vote the funds, scrutinise the policies and question their defence Ministers.
Those are the people who should be involved, not the MEPs who just go to Brussels and Strasbourg with huge majorities on the list, who are removed from their electorate and have no role in the decision making on defence policy in their national Parliaments.
The Government are, in the words of Lady Thatcher, capable of committing a "monumental folly". Whether they will or not is up to them. I believe in European co-operation. I have worked for it in the defence field all my working life. But it does not mean that the way in which it is being undertaken by the present Administration is wise or that it will have a happy outcome.
6.11 pm
Mr. John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon): I agree with much that my hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip-Northwood (Mr. Wilkinson) said about European defence, but first I shall deal with some of the other issues that will face us at Nice.
I am perfectly happy with the various proposals for dealing with the blocking minority and the size of the Commission. We must deal with those if enlargement is to take place. One of the scandals of the European Union over the past 11 years is that we have been so slow in admitting the countries of central and eastern Europe. All of us want the process speeded up. There are far more substantive and fundamental issues than numbers of Commissioners and blocking minorities to settle, but I hope that those will get settled too.
On qualified majority voting, the list in the draft treaty produced by the French presidency contains 50 proposals for substituting qualified majority voting for the veto. With some of those, I have no problem--for example, the rules for the Court of Auditors or including intellectual property in trade negotiations. Those are clearly matters on which there ought to be qualified majority voting.
However, our interest in QMV is not some narrow obsession about national sovereignty. There are two fundamental reasons for it, and I hope that the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Mr. Vaz), will address them in his reply.
One reason is that if the Government want to introduce legislation in the House, they can do so. They can get it passed. If they lose the next election, we can repeal the
legislation, just as they can repeal legislation that we passed in the 18 years that we were in power. However, once European directives or regulations have been passed, we cannot do that. There is no longer a democratically accountable way of changing those regulations.In cases in which it is important to us what that consequence may be, it is vital that there remains a national veto. Some of the legislation that has been passed under the social chapter, for instance, falls absolutely into that category. I can see the argument for it. I can see that the Government may well want to pass such legislation, but they should not do so through European Union directives which, if they lose an election, cannot be repealed.
The second point about QMV is that there is a fundamental view shared by many of my right hon. and hon. Friends that some matters, such as trade negotiations and the single market, are quite properly the business of the European Union, and qualified majority voting should apply to those if we are ever to get anywhere. There are other matters in which the European Union should never be involved and which should not even be within the competence of the treaty.
There is a third category, in which there is clearly some European Community interest and ought to be some competence, but where the issue is so serious to us as a nation state that the veto must remain.
Many of the 50 items that are proposed for qualified majority voting fall slap bang into the six areas on which the Government do not want it. The first is the appointment of the representative for common foreign and security policy, which comes under defence. Another is the Commission's ability to take action to combat discrimination based on, for example, sex or race. The European Union should have nothing to do with that. We all have different problems with that subject, and we should all be free to approach them in our different ways.
It is proposed that we should move from unanimity to qualified majority voting on social security, and insert in article 42 of the treaty the following words:
- for the coordination of national laws in the field of social security.
Another example is the free movement of persons, and immigration and border controls. It is proposed to subject a raft of measures in articles 62 and 63--for example, visas, border controls and treatment of asylum seekers--to qualified majority voting.
Perhaps the most important example is tax. Article 93 allows the Community to make rules by unanimity for the approximation of indirect taxes. It is now proposed not only to subject that to qualified majority voting--a dangerous move--but to introduce for the first time competence in direct taxation. I appreciate that that will remain subject to unanimity for the time being. However, we know how such matters proceed. First, they become a vague proposal about which nothing will happen, then they are subject to veto. The next time a treaty is drawn up, they are subject to qualified majority voting. I hope
that the Government will not allow the inclusion of competence in direct taxation in the treaty of Nice because pressure will be applied eventually to subject it to qualified majority voting.All those issues are important. The Government will be in difficulties because they oppose many of the proposals. They will find themselves in the same position as the Administrations of Lady Thatcher and of my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Major). Most of our partners in the European Union have an agenda to integrate much further than we want to integrate. Lady Thatcher and my right hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon found that, and I believe that the Government are also finding it. One gets dragged down a road, and one has to make concessions in order to exclude the little bits that the Government do not like.
Earlier, I mentioned six article amendments. It falls slap bang into the area over which the Foreign Secretary wants to retain a veto, as he told the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and Parliament. To do that, the Government will have to make concessions. They are making the biggest concessions in defence policy. I believe that we are witnessing a series of pre-emptive concessions on defence. That is a negotiating mistake in the European Union, which banks pre-emptive concessions. We then have to start with a blank sheet of paper because there is no credit for good actions in the past. Thus concessions will not give the Government much mileage at Nice. Such concessions are dangerous.
In the discussion on yesterday's statement on defence, I said what I thought of European defence identity. However, I want to make a couple of further points. There has been much misquoting of foreign opinion. I listened to the American ambassador on the radio this morning. The Americans use language that is extremely carefully constructed. Labour Members keep quoting their words on supporting goals. However, the goals that they identify are the enhancement of European military capability and its co-ordination. They do not support, and they are extremely worried about the establishment of a military structure, with staff, command control and intelligence communications arrangements outside NATO. I keep asking Ministers why we cannot do that within NATO, but I never receive a satisfactory answer.
The 1996 Berlin summit agreed a European security and defence identity. The phrase comes from NATO, not the European Union. The arrangements can achieve nothing that could not be achieved within NATO. I wholly agree that we need to enhance European military capability and better co-ordination. Our planes should be able to land on French carriers and vice versa. However, making those arrangements outside NATO presents some potentially serious dangers.
We must recognise what the French agenda is. The French are perfectly entitled to their own agenda, but on this, their foreign policy is very different from ours and the Americans. On the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall last year, President Chirac made a major speech. He resented US global dominance and called for the European Union to work for a multipolar world that contained US military power. He said that the European Union could flourish by seeking to supplant the United States. The French Foreign Minister, Mr. Vedrine, said that he held up the EU as an example of international co-operation to compete with the United States on international issues.
That is the French agenda. It is all very well for the Government to say that the Americans are perfectly happy, that the force cannot operate without NATO being offered a veto and that it will undertake only peacekeeping. They talk about peacekeeping, but then use Kosovo, which involved high-intensity warfare, as an example of the sort of thing that we should be able to do. Which is it to be? The Germans want to the force to be able to travel 4,000 km, which would take it to Baghdad, Cairo or Libya. Do we really want to go there or is this about peacekeeping in the Balkans after peace has been established?
Those issues have been muddied. The Government have made concessions so that the Prime Minister appears to be a good European, whereas in fact he does not want to go along with the EU on a series of issues. He has chosen to make concessions in this particular area, which is a dangerous route to take.
I shall briefly address enhanced co-operation, which is another aspect of the proposals. Enhanced co-operation procedures are set out in the Amsterdam treaty, although they have never been used. As far as I know, no one has ever tried to use them, so once again we are trying to run before we can walk, which is typical of the EU. There are two provisions in the treaty which the Government, including the Minister, thought important when it was made. First, it should be possible to have a national veto on enhanced co-operation between a group of states. Article 40 of the treaty--or its equivalent in the revised treaty--says that if any nation feels that its vital interests are at stake, it can stop enhanced co-operation between other states going ahead. Secondly, any state that was not part of the original group would be free to join afterwards.
Those provisions have been changed. There is no longer a proposal for a national veto, which is being removed, even--as I understand it--in the area of common foreign and security policy. There is no automatic right to join NATO, although there is a right to ask the Commission to look into the matter. The objectives for enhanced co-operation now include something completely new, as the treaty is aimed
- at furthering the objectives of the Union . . . and at reinforcing its process of integration.
We should trade that only for something extremely big in the other direction. If the EU wants enhanced co-operation without a veto so that some groups of states can go ahead faster than others, that is fine. Europe should be flexible but, in return, countries such as ours should be allowed the flexibility to say that we do not want the same trade union regulations, rules on racial discrimination and arrangements on pensions as other states because we want to settle our own. The EU should coalesce around a hard core of free trade, the single market and the free movement of people and goods. We love all that, and want it to be properly developed, although the single market has not yet been completed. However, we do not want to be compelled to go into those other areas. We should have two-way flexibility and be prepared to concede enhanced co-operation in exchange for flexibility in the other direction.
For the sake of being good Europeans, the Government seem to be prepared to go along with almost anything proposed by our partners, some of whom clearly want a much more integrated Europe. To parody Mr. Prodi, one can call it a federal Europe, a super-state or even Mary Ann.
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