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Mr. Hopkins: I am following the hon. Gentleman's comments with interest. Is it not rather strange that after 47 years of the European Union's existence we are still trying to decide what it is for?
Mr. Walter: I thank the hon. Gentleman. The European Union is a continually evolving structure. We
have been a member for only 30 of those 47 years. We have reached the point where we need such a reassessment: we need to sit down and put on to one sheet of paper exactly what we are about in this relationship with our partners and neighbours on the continent.We also said that we wanted the Convention to ensure that the Commission acts more effectively in those areas that are within its competence and is held more openly to account; to provide an institutional mechanism for giving the European Parliament a more coherent role alongside perhaps greater powers of scrutiny; and to enhance the rule of law.
I feel that the Convention has lost its way—that it is a bit of fudge, with some ideas going in one direction and some going in another. Although I am in favour of a referendum on the constitution, explaining the detail to the British people would be very difficult.
I want to pick up on one aspect of the constitution that I feel very strongly about. On first reading, a charter of fundamental rights for the citizens of the Union, which is outlined in the proposals, seems an entirely reasonable concept, given the fundamental principles of the founding treaties. However, membership of the European Union already requires accession to the earlier European convention on human rights. The Council of Europe—I sit in its Parliamentary Assembly—pre-dates the European Union. The convention, which it established in 1950, has some 44 European member state signatories and a long-established judicial process that leads up to the European Court of Human Rights. Most member states have incorporated the convention in their domestic law, as did the United Kingdom in 1998.
Given the number of existing national, European and international human rights instruments that have been ratified by EU member states, another human rights instrument will present a situation of duplication and rights saturation. Should the European Court of Justice gain jurisdiction over the new charter, and thus move extensively into the field of human rights, it will be faced with an unnecessary increase in litigation. That will be of little benefit, given the already large backlog of cases that it has to deal with. For the European Union, human rights protection might well be further improved, but for Europe as a whole the process could lead to a considerable loss. Europe would be split on human rights. Non-members of the EU would suffer enormously if the EU were to go its own way with its own charter of fundamental rights.
If the Union believes that the existing convention is deficient, surely the way forward is to improve it. The European Union should itself become a signatory to the convention, as is proposed in the document, then seek a new protocol to the convention that includes those vital new aspects contained in the proposed charter of fundamental rights that differ from those in the existing convention. It is unnecessary to create a duplicate human rights structure in the soon to be 25 member states of the European Union. It will inevitably lead to testing by litigants of both the convention and the charter.
I want to end by considering a referendum, which other hon. Members have raised. I do not know what the Government have to hide. I said in an intervention
that when we last held a referendum, the turnout was more than 70 per cent. The British people appreciated having the basis of our membership of the then European Community explained to them and the opportunity to vote on it. The result was an overwhelming 2:1 majority in favour.After 30 years of membership of the European Union, for those of us who believe that Britain's role is at the heart of that Union, that Britain has a contribution to make and that the European Union is about the future, the Convention or constitution will give us the opportunity to rehearse the arguments. I hope that we shall have a European constitution that we can defend. We may end up with a constitution that we find difficult to defend because it contains aspects with which we would not agree, given our fundamental belief—it is mine—in a Europe of nation states. I believe that we should act together on what we best do together and reserve for member states what should rightly remain with them. We should sell that message to the British people. If the Government shy away from that, they hide the fact that the document contains something that they do not want to expose to the people.
5.47 pm
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon): I commend the hon. Member for North Dorset (Mr. Walter) for his constructive speech. It was the first speech from the Conservative Benches that was made in that spirit. None of the other contributions from Conservative Members gave the impression that they believed that anything in the draft constitution was good. The hon. Gentleman adopted a more constructive approach.
A constitution that is drawn up by a process of consensus and involves 15 member states and 10 applicants is inevitably a compromise. We cannot write our own constitution. Those who claim that we can be an associate member or that we can somehow pick and choose fail to understand the dynamics of the organisation of which we form part. As the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. David) said, the Convention brings together, for the first time in a coherent and intelligible form, the basic mechanism for the operation of European Union.
I well remember when the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke), who played a substantial role in ratifying parts of the Maastricht treaty, admitted in his inimitable way that he found the treaty totally incomprehensible, not least because it was full of references to previous committees and amendments, which rendered understanding impossible without a massive amount of research.
The value of bringing everything together in a single document, which any citizen can read and understand and take advice on is surely commendable and desirable. There is a danger of becoming fixated on whether we have a referendum. We have argued consistently that a referendum is desirable for major constitutional changes, but there is a danger of the matter becoming such an obsession that we lose sight of what we are trying to debate and discuss.
Mrs. Browning: At what point will the Liberal Democrats decide whether there are constitutional implications and whether they support a referendum?
Malcolm Bruce: I am not sure whether the hon. Lady was present for the speech of my right hon. and learned
Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell), in which he made it abundantly clear that there are sufficient constitutional changes to justify a referendum. We could not say that until we had a text that could be analysed, but we would do a disservice to the document and its implications if we focused our attention entirely on that and lost sight of the fact that we are supposed to be trying to shape a document that will become a reference for Europe for a long time to come. Given the role that the United Kingdom has already played under the table and above the table—if I may put it that way—it is substantially shaped by British input, about which we have every reason to be satisfied.I suspect that the right hon. Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) is already on the Eurostar to Brussels to join the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart). I noticed that he was happy to accept the accolades of the House about his role in negotiating substantial chunks of the constitution on behalf of the British people, British Parliament, British Government—however one wants to put it—and the United Kingdom, yet he turned up in Estonia and told people that it is a constitutional issue of which they should be wary, and that perhaps they should not join the organisation that would bind them into a constitution. There is a little inconsistency in his advocacy.
One of the problems is that it is becoming fashionable in the drawing rooms of the United Kingdom to be anti-EU, in a way that it used to just as fashionable to be pro-EU. A decision such as this is should be determined not by drawing-room fashion but by a fundamental assessment of what we are trying to achieve. There are people—I receive letters from them myself—who believe that there are cellars in Brussels full of gnomes, who are mostly French and German, who do nothing else from morning until night, and through the night and at weekends, but draw up measures, articles and amendments to treaties that will destroy a thousand years of British history. People should back off a little and recognise that every country has special interests for which it will want to argue, but that we all have a huge interest in the net sum added value that a successful EU can and should deliver.
I am probably the only Member so far who has introduced this aspect of the debate, but it is relevant that we are now in a world that is dominated by a superpower, which, to be frank, does not share our European values on matters such as human rights, international co-operation, the respect of law and international treaties. It is important that Europe stands for those values and finds the ability to produce common policies. There will be occasions—we have just witnessed one—where that will not be achieved, and there is nothing in the document that forces people to do anything. It is not about having a single foreign policy or defence policy, but about having a common policy wherever we can seek it. That is not just in the interests of Europe, but in the interests of the wider world.
I played a small part in the sustainable development summit in Johannesburg, where the EU negotiated as a single entity and where the British Government were only part of the EU team. We were outmanoeuvred by the United States because we did not have sufficient flexibility or ability to adapt policies at short notice,
whereas the Americans did. We should learn from that. I never think that it is easy, but it is important and desirable for us to achieve such objectives.The idea of the veto being waved around as a virility symbol is to fail to recognise, as has been said, that one country's veto is everybody else's obstacle. There are certain areas over which we do not agree that the EU should have power, either jointly or collectively. In reality, probably a majority of countries—certainly more than enough—do not believe that the right to deploy one's troops or set one's taxes is something that the EU should decide. [Interruption.] There is room for constructive harmonisation, particularly of indirect taxes, in the interests of a single market, but if we were to have a single currency, losing that flexibility makes it almost impossible to adjust to domestic circumstances.
The document represents the credibility of a sensible discussion, and people must focus on what it is we want out of the EU, recognising that it is, by definition, a compromise among 25 countries, in which we have to give to get, but the art of negotiation is to give as little and get as much as we can. What we must not do is become so introvert, so introspective and so obsessive about what we see as the plots and the wickedness underneath that we lose sight of our real national interest. It matters that Europe works together, it matters for the world, and it matters that Britain plays a full part in that.
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