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Keith Vaz: No, they are not. As the right hon. Gentleman knows, after the proposals are put forward,
as the Foreign Secretary said, there will have to be a discussion at the IGC, of which the applicant states—the new members, as they will become on 1 May—may well be a part. If the IGC is concluded when they are members, they will have an opportunity of participating in those important decisions, as they have been observers to the Convention. I have met a number of people from applicant countries, and I have heard nobody say to me that they are unhappy about the position taken by the United Kingdom.As a former Minister, the right hon. Gentleman will know that when he went to the Council of Ministers, as did other former Ministers on the Opposition Benches, he went there to fight for the interests of Britain. He did nothing that was not in the national interests of Britain. That is exactly what my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe and my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary do when they go to European Union Councils of Ministers. They go to represent our country and to do what is best for us.
What has been set out is a simple process. The Convention will put forward its proposals. As backing for that assertion, I can quote Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on the "Today" programme on 16 April, when he made it clear that those were proposals. They will eventually have to go to an IGC and be agreed by the Heads of Government, which means by our Prime Minister. That will be the opportunity for us to block anything that is not acceptable.
I respect the views of the right hon. Member for Devizes on a number of issues, and I am saddened that he is not prepared to be more specific as to why he supported parliamentary scrutiny of the Maastricht treaty, but suddenly, because there is a referendum in Hartlepool, he has changed his mind and decided that we must have a referendum on every single aspect of European policy.
The right hon. Gentleman knows, as does his hon. Friend the hon. Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), the huge implications of the Maastricht treaty. That is why the hon. Member for Stone has been so consistent, and I respect him for his consistency. He called for a referendum on Maastricht because of the huge significance of its proposals for the common foreign and security policy, qualified majority voting and all the other issues. But that was not the opportunity, in his mind, for a referendum on the Maastricht treaty, and there is no need for a referendum on the Convention. The work of the Convention is still not over.
Mr. Shepherd: As the mover of an amendment in the debates on a referendum on Maastricht, I am conscious that many hon. Members across the House appreciated that it was a major constitutional issue. The gathering together of such major constitutional issues without any endorsement, validation or action of consent by the people has diminished the effectiveness of the European Community in this country. That is a matter of principle. Nothwithstanding the minor amendments to the treaty that the Government postulate—although I do not think that that will happen—ought not the Government to give the people an opportunity to take a view? They have had many years' experience of the ever increasing powers of the institutional arrangements.
Keith Vaz: I understand the hon. Gentleman's point, but what diminishes Europe in the eyes of our people is
not the failure to hold a referendum, but the hysteria that surrounds every discussion of a European issue. Right hon. and hon. Members on the Opposition Front Bench will jump on any passing European bandwagon in order to do down Europe. It is the intention of Members such as the hon. Member for Stone to get Britain out of the European Union. That is the purpose that they are trying to achieve.The failure is our failure as a Parliament, and the failure of our press properly to reflect the views of the country, as expressed in a general election. I should like us to campaign much more as a Parliament and as individual Members of Parliament about the benefits of Europe. I know that the Minister for Europe is doing exactly that, with his excellent campaign to go to 100 towns and cities in the United Kingdom to tell the people about enlargement. That is what the Prime Minister spoke about on Monday and Tuesday, when he spoke about the need for us to talk about the euro in a positive and constructive way.
We will have a referendum on that, but if we start screaming and shouting every time the word "Europe" is mentioned, and we have referendums conducted by the Daily Mail, why bother about Parliament? We can get the Daily Mail to conduct the next general election. People can cut out tokens from the Daily Mail to vote for their local MP. The point of Parliament is that it should scrutinise major constitutional issues.
Angus Robertson: Why does the hon. Gentleman refuse to view the option of a referendum as a tremendous opportunity to put the case for a European Union that is a confederation of sovereign states, not a Eurosceptic vision? There are many in the House and elsewhere, including the principal opposition party in Scotland, who are committed to a referendum so that we can make the case for a reformed European Union. Why not jump at the opportunity and make the case?
Keith Vaz: There would then be no point in having a Parliament. What is the point of Members of Parliament? What is the point of the right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) going to represent Parliament? I do not agree with what the right hon. Gentleman has done and said, but I pay tribute to him for his hard work. What is the point of having Members of Parliament and Ministers? Let us have a referendum on everything. I know that that is the policy of the Scottish national party.
We are to have a referendum on the euro—in the lifetime of this Parliament, I hope—if the conditions are met, but I do not believe it is necessary to have a referendum on every single aspect of European policy. If it was not good enough for Maastricht, which massively increased QMV, then it is not good enough for the Convention. We are dealing with the first stage of the proposals. The House need not take that from me—take it from the President of the Convention. The Heads of Government have not even considered it. Ministers in our Government have not done what all Ministers have done for the past 20 years, which is to look at the final proposals and act in the interests of the United Kingdom.
My final point is about the necessity for the proposals described by the Foreign Secretary to come before Parliament at the earliest opportunity. I hope that the
Minister for Europe will tell us more about those when he winds up the debate. I valued the fact that the right hon. Member for Wells and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston have come before the House in Committee on a number of occasions to tell us about the work that they are doing. Those proceedings have been chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, North (Mr. Cook) in a Room on the Committee Corridor. There has not been enough time to go through all the various issues that have been raised and I hope that the Committee will have more sittings before the Convention completes its work. But it would be good if that Committee had an opportunity to go round the country to our major cities and listen to what people have to say about Europe. It would provide us with the opportunity to listen to local people on the issue. The final decision must be made by Parliament, but we should listen to local people, and that is one way in which we can take Europe to the people. Making Europe more accessible to ordinary people is exactly what the Convention intended to do, and perhaps we can achieve that by using our Standing Committee procedure.I shall support the Government amendment today. This is not the kind of matter that should be put to a referendum. It is quite different from the deliberations on the euro. I hope that the process of going out to the country will embrace all hon. Members, not just the so-called pro-Europeans. We all—including the shadow Foreign Secretary, the deputy leader of the Conservative party—have an interest in going out and selling the benefits of Europe. If the right hon. Member for Devizes does not do it, it will mean that he backs the hon. Member for Stone in his desire to take Britain out of the European Union.
3.21 pm
Mr. John Maples (Stratford-on-Avon): The hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) seems to inhabit, as do so many other enthusiasts for the ever-advancing European Union, an Alice in Wonderland world in which they consistently pretend that things are otherwise than they are. If one listens to what people say, talks to a German Christian Democrat in the European Parliament, listens to Mr. Prodi or most of the Commission, or reads what is in the Convention's output, it is pretty clear that we are on an inexorable road towards a federal Europe, or whatever one wants to call it. To deny that seems to be to deny reality.
There is a perfectly respectable argument for a united states of Europe. It is a position held by some Liberal Democrats, some Labour Members and some Conservative Members. One can argue that the only way that Europe can be successful in the modern world is to group its resources, power and influence, and that the price of sacrificing a great deal, if not all, of one's national sovereignty is worth paying. Or one can argue the case that I and a great many of my colleagues argue. But what one cannot do is pretend that what is happening is what I want to see happen, because it is not. It is radically different.
Last week, a team of Members of the House of Commons competed in a sort of "University Challenge" against members of a team from The Times. I will not
mention who was on the team, but they did not do very well. I want to ask the Minister—if the Foreign Secretary were here, I would ask him too—to imagine that we were on that team and that the following question was posed to us. I think that it is one that my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) would have answered correctly, but I think that I know what the Minister would have said. The question is this: what does one call an organisation that has a constitution, a president, a foreign minister, a parliament, a Bill of individual rights, a supreme court, a currency, a central bank, citizenship, the power to accede to international treaties, a police force, a public prosecutor, a common foreign and security policy, military capability and common criminal law and procedure, and where federal law overrides state law?Apparently, the Minister and his boss the Foreign Secretary would answer that question by saying, "That sounds to me like a grouping of individual sovereign states that have pooled limited amounts of sovereignty to achieve specific objectives." I suggest that they would have done no better than my hon. Friend and his team. My hon. Friend would have answered, "It sounds to me like a state." The fact is that it does sound like a state. Those are the characteristics of a state. I suggest to the Minister and the House that that is where we are heading. I do not think that we are there yet, but in a series of inexorable steps, over the past 20 years and during the next five or ten years, that is where we are going.
There will come a point down that road at which most of us will want to call a halt and at least examine some of the things that are being done. Let us stop pretending that we are not heading there. Let us stop pretending that that is not what the great engines of the European Union—the French and particularly the German Governments, the Benelux countries, the German parliamentarians in the Commission itself—want, because it is. It is even where most Italian and Spanish centre-right politicians of the European Parliament want to go too. It may be that we are in a small minority, but the fact is that they are at least honest about it, which is more than the Government are, and more than most of the proponents are.
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