---

Mr. Bacon: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way—

Mr. Deputy Speaker: Order. I am afraid that the hon. Member for Clydesdale (Mr. Hood) has had his time allocation.

4.25 pm

Mr. William Hague (Richmond, Yorks): I am grateful for the chance to take part in the debate. Never let it be said that debates in the House of Commons do not produce useful and constructive ideas. It is obvious from the speeches that have been made so far that it would be advisable to remove Thucydides from the preamble to the document. The reference means a slave state to the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), and it reminds the right hon. Member for Llanelli (Denzil Davies) and I that Athenian democracy was a direct democracy in which every citizen had a vote. Any document that cites Thucydides in its preamble naturally requires a referendum. If the Government want to avoid that implication, they should remove the reference.

The debate has produced some good ideas. The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife will be surprised that I agreed with many aspects of his speech. He suggested that the Government should fight for the inclusion of a two-thirds blocking power for Parliaments of the European Union. I note that the Minister for Europe said, "Good idea" sotto voce at that point. I hope that the suggestion will be added to the list of matters that the Government will negotiate.

Mr. MacShane indicated assent.

Mr. Hague: The Minister nods, so it is clearly on the record.

Mr. MacShane indicated dissent.

Mr. Hague: Now he is dissenting. We have had a U-turn in a matter not of days, but seconds. However, he said that it was a good idea and we shall hold the Government to that. The right hon. and learned Gentleman's suggestion is excellent.

Another example of common ground among the speakers is the realisation that there is a decline in faith in politics, political institutions and politicians in this country. I know that especially well after the last general election, when there was a turnout of 59 per cent. At the last European elections, the turnout was less than 25 per cent. The Government agreed with the analysis that we have to give people faith in politics and political institutions. Their first annual report in 1997, in the days when they published annual reports with a great fanfare rather than smuggling them out in written answers, as they do nowadays, states:

"The Government wants to . . . make government more . . . responsive and accountable . . . to bring politics closer to the people . . . to restore the public's faith in the political process."

9 Jul 2003 : Column 1233

When we are presented with a proposal such as the constitution—it is a constitution—which conflicts with that, we should be ready to criticise it, if necessary to say no, and to give the people of the country a vote on it.

The Convention takes decision making further away from the people of this country. The compromise that has been reached gives all the institutions of the European Union more power. It will widen the ambit of the Commission, extend the authority of the Council of Ministers by providing an executive president and more qualified majority voting, and give greater co-decision powers to the European Parliament. However, politics is a zero-sum game, as Conservative Members well know. Holding power is a zero-sum game. If we give more power to institutions, national Parliaments lose power and the citizens of each nation will be increasingly divorced from the political decisions that are made in their name.

The Government mention bottom lines, red lines and negotiating positions, but they are soon surrendered. The Foreign Secretary set a few today. However, it is not long since the hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz), when he was in the Foreign Office, said that there was no way that the fundamental charter of rights would ever be incorporated in law. He said that it would be like the Beano:

"People will be able to bring it up in the European Court of Justice just as if it was the Beano."

If that is the case, Dennis the Menace and Roger the Dodger will be starring in the European Court of Justice very soon, because the fundamental charter of rights will be there in the treaty, in the constitution. The Foreign Secretary is reduced to talking about safeguards against it now, rather than never having it there, which was the position only three years ago.

The case for the people to have their say on such dramatic change is a strong one. It is extraordinary to watch the Government's contortions in trying to deny the case for a referendum. The first position was: this is not important enough for a referendum. The right hon. Member for Neath (Peter Hain), now the Leader of the House, said that it would be more of a tidying-up exercise.

The Leader of the House of Commons (Peter Hain) indicated dissent.

Mr. Hague: The right hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but he then went on the "Jeremy Vine Show" to say that it was three quarters a tidying-up exercise.

Peter Hain indicated assent.

Mr. Hague: So he did say that most of it was a tidying up exercise. Therefore, it was not really important enough to have a referendum on it. That, of course, was blown out of the water by the huge excitement with which the document was greeted in many of the other countries of Europe. The German Foreign Minister said that it was

"the most important treaty since the foundation of the European Economic Community".

The French Foreign Minister said that it was "a new political age". The Spanish Foreign Minister said that it was

9 Jul 2003 : Column 1234

"a legal revolution, with no precedent".

The Danish Prime Minister said that it was

"so new and large a document that it would be right to hold a referendum on it."

Mr. MacShane: Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Mr. Hague: I will give way to the Minister so that he can confirm the point that I asked him about earlier.

Mr. MacShane: Does the right hon. Gentleman recall that the President of the Commission, Mr. Prodi, said that when he read the document he burst into tears, so anti-communautaire was it?

Mr. Hague: Despite that cheering news, it nevertheless remains the case that the vast majority of the Governments of Europe think that it is a dramatic advance for the integration of the EU, which is something that they support, honestly and openly. It is our Government who are prepared to sign up to that without admitting their intellectual inconsistency. But that inconsistency is truly on display.

Sir Patrick Cormack: My right hon. Friend has been deceived, albeit unwittingly. Prodi burst into tears because he thought that Berlusconi could become President of the EU.

Mr. Hague: Well he is the President of the EU, so, yes, lots of tears have been shed.

Nevertheless, let us return to the consistency or otherwise of the Government's arguments against a referendum. Shortly after it was all a tidying-up exercise, just last week the Prime Minister made a speech in which he said:

"I am urged to say that Britain should have a referendum on the European Convention"

but

"it would be a gross and irresponsible betrayal of the true British national interest."

The language of "tidying-up exercise" and

"gross and irresponsible betrayal of...national interest"

do not easily sit together. When I was a teenager, my mother often told me that I had to tidy up, but she never said that it was a gross and irresponsible betrayal of our family's interests if I did not do so. One smells an inconsistency in the use of language that betrays the Government's uncertainty about how to deal with this point. We understand that Alastair Campbell has been too busy to think up the proper argument with which to deal with the referendum case, but the Government do need to do better.

Much attention was given to the Prime Minister's appearance at the Liaison Committee yesterday on many other subjects, but it is worth looking at all the arguments at which he clutched on the referendum issue when he was asked about it. First of all he stuck to the new notion, not that it is unimportant but that it is too important to have a referendum on it. He said:

"its very complexity means that parliamentary scrutiny is the right way to debate this."

9 Jul 2003 : Column 1235

The idea that the Prime Minister believes that parliamentary scrutiny is the right way to examine anything, strikes many of us in the House as a little short of hilarious. Here we are sitting through July passing large quantities of legislation with dozens of clauses that are not debated at all, and the Prime Minister says that complexity requires parliamentary scrutiny of the matter.

In any case, since when has complexity been an argument against allowing people a democratic decision? The Good Friday agreement was complex. My right hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Mr. Trimble) knows that full well. Yet we had a referendum on it for the people of Northern Ireland. The Irish and the Danes are to have a referendum. Is there something about this that they can get their minds around that the British voter cannot because it is so complex? This is a patronising attitude.

Then the Prime Minister adopted a different approach. Ceasing to argue that it was unimportant or that it was too important, he fell back on the argument that it has the wrong sort of importance. He said that we should—[Interruption.] I will not give way again, because I now know how the timing works for Back-Bench speeches.

The Prime Minister said that we should follow the traditions of this country. When this Prime Minister advocates following the traditions of this country, we should be alarmed. I must have debated with him a couple of hundred times across the Dispatch Box, and I cannot recall—although I have not checked—his ever defending any proposition on the ground that it was in line with the traditions of this country; that does not normally enter his head. We have a Prime Minister who is happy to cast aside the post of Lord Chancellor—a post that has existed for 1,400 years—without even thinking about what would happen the next day. He emasculated the House of Lords without having the faintest clue what he would put in its place.

On taking office, the Prime Minister switched around the House's timings and procedures like a child playing with a train set—and now he talks about defending the traditions of this country. This cannot be taken seriously. He also said:

"The proper time to have a referendum . . . is when the basic constitutional method of governance is being changed."

Is the basic constitutional method of governance at stake here? I would say that it is, because many more decisions will be taken without consulting this Parliament or the people of this country. How can the Prime Minister and the Government argue that the creation of a President of the European Union and of a Foreign Minister, the extension of qualified majority voting even into criminal justice, the change in the Commission's role and the expansion of its ambit do not amount to a change in constitutional governance? How can they argue that, given that the right of people in Hartlepool to vote for someone dressed up as a monkey to be their mayor apparently does constitute such a change, and that they had a referendum on that issue?

The Government's intellectual inconsistency on this issue has now been exposed. The fact that members of all parties in this House have signed up to amendments

9 Jul 2003 : Column 1236

to today's motion that call for a referendum shows the extent to which the Government have lost that argument. It is time for them to acknowledge the fact; otherwise, their use of referendums in recent years will be exposed as a political device, rather than a constitutional innovation. And it will be absolutely clear that they are happy to have a referendum when they think that they can win, but not happy to have one when they think that they cannot win.

I therefore believe it very important to have that referendum, but I also believe it very important for us to take the opportunity to criticise, or if necessary to say no to, the proposed treaty. There is no need for the extension of the EU's powers into criminal justice. I have never met a constituent who said that the one thing wrong with criminal justice in this country is that it is not like the Belgian criminal justice system. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) has made a similar point before. There is no need to change that system, or for the European Union to take over those powers; yet that is what is being proposed.

At the moment, people can tell their Member of Parliament that because they voted for a particular measure, or because they did not, they can vote them out, or in. They can say that because they approve of what the Home Secretary has done in criminal justice, or because they do not, they can vote him out, or in. However, they will increasingly find that decisions have been taken in their name that were proposed by commissioners whom they had no role in appointing, that were approved by a Council of Ministers in which their country was simply outvoted, and were approved in a European Parliament by parties of which those electors have never even heard. That represents a divorce between the voter—the participant in democracy—and the democratic process and our political institutions. That matters so much to this country, which has evolved such an effective parliamentary democracy over time, that we should have the confidence to say no, if necessary. And we should have a Government with the courage and consistency to give people the chance to do so.

---