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3.22 pm
Mr. Francis Maude (Horsham): This has properly been a broad debate. The Bill is narrow—it is a slim volume—but its implications are wide. You, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and Mr. Speaker, have properly allowed the debate to range widely, because we can only consider the Bill in a wide context. The background and the implications are of great importance. The debate has
been fascinating, and nothing has been more compelling than the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory), who spoke with passion and deep authority about the implications of much of what is happening. I want to return later to one of the issues that he raised, but the House would do well to heed what he said.I support the Bill, and I am delighted that we are debating it. I confess to some mild surprise that enlargement seems to be coming to a conclusion so quickly, as it seemed that it would be protracted forever. I have some history in this matter—the Berlin wall came down and the liberation of east and central Europe from the Warsaw pact took place while I was the Minister with responsibility for Europe. I do not claim all the credit for it—I concede that there were other factors at work, too—[Interruption.] The praise of my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Mr. Spring) from a sedentary position is too kind, but I want to share the credit as widely as possible.
The fact is that this issue has been under debate for a long time, and I recollect a Foreign Ministers meeting in June or July of 1990 in which the accession of the new countries of eastern and central Europe as early as 1995 was discussed. For much of the period since then, it has always been five years away. Until recently, it still seemed five years away. The Government—I do not want to do more than give them credit—deserve some credit for the effort that they have put in to compress the final stages so that we can look to enlargement taking place next year. It is really important that this House give warm support to that, because whatever the implications—there are negative as well as positive ones, on which I want to reflect in a moment—enlargement was a historical imperative.
We had a broad duty to abandon the idea that the European Union could be some kind of cosy club of prosperous western European countries and to expand it to embrace the whole European family. That is not yet complete—more is to come, as has been said; I am not sure about extending it as far as the Urals, but there is certainly scope for further enlargement. That was an imperative, it was necessary that it happened, and it is a scandal that it has taken so long to get to this point. I glory in the fact that it has at last happened, however, and I hope that the signal that the House sends in support of the Bill resounds with clarity outside.
Let me reflect a little on the implications. There are financial implications, institutional implications, and implications for the broad foreign policy outlook of the new European Union that will emerge. First, I want to deal with the financial implications, about which my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells has spoken clearly. What exists is too much a relic of the old cosy western European club looking after its own. I would not contest the fact that the financial transfers—much of which originate from this country, the second largest contributor to the European Union—to Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland have made a significant contribution to the relative prosperity, compared with their previous position, that those countries now enjoy. It is indefensible, however, that those countries, which have advanced themselves considerably in economic terms, should continue to gain that scale of benefit from the EU budget while the accession countries, most of which are way behind economically, are fighting for the
scraps that are left over after the club has had its full rations. There is scope in that injustice and inequity for a great deal of tension and division in what should be a united family of European nations emerging.
Mr. MacShane: The right hon. Gentleman is making a thoughtful speech, and I do not disagree at all with his points. Will he reflect on the fact, however, that the amount of money that is to be transferred to the accession countries is huge: about 3 per cent. of GDP—$26 billion—over the next two years? Were a lot more transferred, those countries might not have the capacity to absorb it. It is a technical point, but an important one. I am not saying that the arrangement is perfect, but throwing a lot more money at them now may not be the most sensible way of advancing.
Mr. Maude: That is a fair point. As the hon. Gentleman's Government are discovering in relation to the health service, pouring in money in huge quantities does not necessarily do the trick. I am grateful to him for making that point. I fancy, however, that the Governments of the accession countries could make good use of a lot of those transfers if they were available earlier than is envisaged.
It is the inequity, however, that will cause problems. Those financial implications, particularly in relation to the common agricultural policy, have not been grasped properly, or, to the extent that they have been grasped, they have not been dealt with. The common agricultural policy is an outrage. It is institutionalised folly, economically, financially, ecologically, socially and in every way that one can think of it. It has outlived any usefulness that it might originally have had. It should be demolished, or at least massively reformed. The process provided an opportunity to address that, but sadly it was not done. I have no doubt that there will be intense financial pressures in the enlarged Union that will lead to the issue being addressed again, and I fully expect it to be fudged again. Scope for huge division and tension is built in to the Union's failure to address that issue now.
The institutional implications are formidable and have properly concerned many hon. Members who have spoken. I am not one of those who believe that the European Union can be endlessly enlarged without reform of institutional arrangements. That would be absurd, because what worked for the six original members—it has gradually creaked more and more as there has been enlargement—cannot possibly work for 25 or 30 members. There are two ways of addressing that problem, but sadly the wrong choice has been made through both the Nice treaty and the Convention.
The centralising approach says that the decision-making machinery could not process efficiently the quantity of decisions required in a Union with 25 members. The solution under that approach would be to apply a more powerful engine to the mincing machine so that the mincing could be done more quickly. That is not the answer to the problem; it is an old-fashioned answer drawn from a world gone by. The right approach is to try to put less into the mincing machine so that fewer things are subject to EU decision taking. That would
give countries more scope to make decisions for themselves and would allow the EU's arrangements to have more variability, flexibility and diversity.I have no rooted objection to the Council of Ministers having a permanent presidency rather than a revolving presidency—it does not cause me intrinsic offence. There might be something in the Foreign Secretary's comments about strengthening the Council of Ministers, which I would welcome. Effective rebalancing of the institutions requires a definitive shift of power away from the Commission to the Council of Ministers, which would require more than simply giving the Council a full-time President.
There was an opportunity to use the process of enlargement to decentralise the European Union. Every other international institution in the world is doing that. International businesses, international voluntary organisations and all international institutions are decentralising to become multi-centred entities and network organisations rather than being centralised at head offices. The EU is the last relic of head office culture. The opportunity to respond to the institutional requirements of enlargement by creating a genuinely modern organisation for the future rather than by entrenching centralism has been lost.
Mr. Hendrick: Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if the EU had 25 member states and we continued to have a rotating presidency, the European Commission would indeed be able to run rings round the Council of Ministers and the Council's governance would be less effective? Surely a team presidency in which several member states could form a more cohesive presidency for two and a half years, for example, would limit the European Commission's powers much more effectively?
Mr. Maude: I do not reject that argument out of hand—there might be something to it—although we would want to think about its implications. However, it does not alter my key point that the right approach is to move power definitively to the Council of Ministers, which requires more than tweaking existing powers or strengthening its ability in what the Foreign Secretary described as rather prosaic ways. I want something more interesting, radical and in tune with the modern age.
The output of the Convention, after it has been institutionalised through the intergovernmental conference, will have constitutional implications. I take issue with only one point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells. We do not know for certain how large the implications will be because we all know that IGCs tend to water things down as time goes on and I have no doubt that Governments will exclude several measures that appear in the current draft and about which there has been speculation. I am sure that the British Government will want to exclude many measures, and they will have the power to do that. The Convention will not be as scary as its current draft looks. However, the fact that it will have significant constitutional implications for the United Kingdom is absolutely incontestable, and that is why it is absolutely right for my party to say that a referendum should be held on it.
I know that a few hours of searching through Hansard would allow one to find speeches that I made in days gone by in which I turned down the idea of holding a
referendum on the Maastricht treaty, to which, as the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) thoughtfully pointed out, I was a signatory. However, time has moved on. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wells said that the most important part of the Maastricht treaty was the single currency and, if the Government get round to it, a referendum will be held on that. The aspects of Maastricht that would have made the most difference to this country were the single currency and the social chapter, but the treaty as it stood implemented neither. The Single European Act was arguably more important than anything that happened subsequently, but there was much public sympathy with what it did. The worry is that current proposals are out of tune with public sympathy.I urge the Government to think again. If they are confident that they can present the ultimate output of the IGC as mere tidying up, housekeeping and a bit of administration, they should have the courage to tell the public that and invite them to endorse that view. If the institutional changes that I advocate—decentralisation and reducing the quantity of governance that occurs through the EU machinery—were made, and my party were in government, I would be completely confident in submitting such changes to a referendum, because the public would be amenable to the changes and would welcome them greatly. I urge the Government to think again, because the public are already alienated from political processes. If the Government had the courage to hold a referendum, it would represent a way of bridging that gap.
My final reflection is on the broad issue of foreign policy. Something rather important happened over the past six months, and in a way it was the first dividend of enlargement, even before enlargement had taken place. During the latter part of last year and the first few months of this year, there was a sense of the tectonic plates in Europe shifting somewhat. Oddly, it was almost triggered by the rather over-flamboyant celebrations of the French and German ruling classes of the Franco-German reconciliation in the 1960s. There were all those great celebrations in the Champs Elysées, in the sense of, "Here is the Franco-German axis, the motor of the European Union." Yet within almost days of that taking place, there was a division within NATO—admittedly not the European Union—where France and Germany found themselves leading a contingent that consisted of themselves and Belgium. The rest of the EU and all the accession countries that are part of NATO—
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