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Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, I am obliged to the Minister for giving way. There is a report in a newspaper today which states that, under this system, when appointments are made to Commission jobs, British officials are likely to lose out and will not be treated as well as they are treated now. Can the Minister comment on that?
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I have no reason whatever to believe that British officials will lose out. The noble Lord knows as well as I do that, frankly, it is very hard in this country to have a reasoned debate through the media about what are likely to be the effects of any development in Europe. I do not know in which newspaper the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, read that, but one of the pitfalls into which many of our journalists fall very quickly is to assume that all changes away from qualified majority voting will be against this country's interest.
I was endeavouring to explain to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and others, that that is not the position of Her Majesty's Government. If we had thought that
it would be detrimental to the interests of this country, it would have been included in the list of things that we were not prepared to do. That list was put into the public domain before we began the negotiations and, despite all the efforts to move around, we stuck to it and delivered what we said we would.We should not make these appointments on the basis of "Buggins' turn", on the basis of nationality or, indeed, as may have been the case sometimes in the past, on the basis of cross-border rivalry. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, and I agree that we need the best people for the job. I believe that QMV will deliver that far more efficiently and allow such people to get on with their duties. I hope that, on reconsideration, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, will recognise that what he is trying to defend has not delivered for him what he said it could.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her reply. At the beginning of her response, she made some remarks about qualified majority voting generally. I said at an earlier stage of our proceedings that if I were pressed for a view on where we on these Benches stand on this matter, I would have to resort to Evelyn Waugh and say that we liked QMV "up to a point, Lord Copper". In other words, the case for majority voting where certain powers and competencies are in the hands of the Council of Ministers and European institutions is perfectly valid, particularly in relation to the commendable goal we have sought over the years—often with more support from this side of the House than the other—of a great single market opening out with low tariffs all around it. That would make a major contribution to the greater liberalisation of world trade and a major contribution to the prosperity of the European peoples by opening out free trade. That was something for which we were quite happy to see qualified majority voting.
If one tries to draw lines—this is notoriously difficult—as to where one begins to have proper caution and proper doubts, it is when one sees the qualified majority voting device beginning to be used and insisted on not for maintaining and developing a gigantic common market—which, as we have always recognised, requires some political machinery at the centre—but for building something else; namely, a political union. This is where one begins to wonder whether the QMV device is the right one.
Clearly, this is one of the many examples which have slipped through in the later generation of treaties—to some extent at Amsterdam and also at Nice—and no doubt there are more on the tapis for the next treaty occasion, the next IGC and so on.
Some will say that it is a very good thing that the QMV device should be used to build a political union. It was always the cry of the former German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, that there had to be political union. He said that there had to be political union otherwise the euro would not work; that you could not run a single currency without a single government authority and, therefore, political union
there had to be. There might have to be temporary transitional arrangements in the mean time, a stability pact which might or might not hold together—it looks a little ropy at the moment—but political union was the ultimate aim and every energy should be strained to achieve it.That is not, as I understand it, the policy of the United Kingdom Government. The Prime Minister has used a number of interesting phrases, particularly in later days. He began with the "heart of Europe" and all that. We have now moved away from that to being a "pivotal player" instead, which seems a rather different concept. We have also moved away from the commitment to political union. Instead, the Prime Minister has spoken about a "union of nation states", which is not all that different from the Europe des patries concept uttered by General de Gaulle two or three decades ago.
A political union is not what we want. There should be considerable additional caution when it comes to ticking the box and okaying the extension of qualified majority voting—not for bona fide regulations and rules or the removal of tariffs and barriers which open up the prosperity of the European people, but for a different project; namely, the political union aim.
Some will of course say that it was all in the original treaties and that we should not have signed up to ever closer union if we did not believe in it—but sign up we did. There are now those on all sides, including some who are quite close to the leaders of the governing party, the Labour Party, who are saying that a sensible and confident British Government should now say that the preamble to the Rome treaty should be opened up and that the phrase "ever closer union" belongs to a world of integration, hierarchies and pyramid building which is no longer consistent with the network arrangements and the looser interfaces between European nation states, which are now much more comfortable and will suit much better the proudly independent states applying to join the European Union and which will raise its total membership from 15 to 25.
It may be much wiser if we abandon the insistence on ever closer union; abandon—or reinterpret at the very least—the concept of political union; and avoid the accelerating processes which reinforce political union by majority vote. The noble Baroness said that the aim was to allow decisions to be made quickly. Perhaps this is one area where, in the name of democracy and getting it right—she is quite correct, things have not always turned out right in the past—the word "quickly" should not be in the vocabulary. Perhaps we should think about slower, more ponderous, more considered and more cautious methods for arriving at the right personnel for staffing this very important mechanism at the heart of the European Union; namely, the Commission.
The Minister teased me a little by pointing out that the unanimity system has not always produced candidates who have acquired universal acclaim. Some of the remarks circulating about previous presidents of the Commission and the present
president indicate that it is not only on these Benches but rather more widely through Europe that people feel we can do better in the future.However, I refute the Minister's proposition that the way to do better is to reinvent another system by questioning whether any system can automatically produce good candidates. The weight is against me in that the past arrangements have produced bad candidates and bad results. We have no pudding to eat by which to discover the proof of the noble Baroness's proposals, the proposals of the Nice treaty and the proposals of the Bill that QMV will miraculously produce better presidents in the future. Frankly, I am not sure whether that is where the matter of good or bad presidents lies. I believe that it lies in a better understanding by Ministers, and by those who elect them, of what we want out of Europe—which is not a central government in Brussels intervening in, to use the phrase of my noble friend Lord Hurd, the nooks and crannies of national life. If it does so, it ends up not uniting Europe, but dividing Europe.
That is where I stand, and that is my reason for proposing the amendment. Nevertheless, we have "knocked this issue around" to a considerable extent in earlier debates as well as in this one. I do not think that there will be any agreement between us, but the matter has had a good airing. In the light of that, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
[Amendments Nos. 10 to 12 not moved.]
3.30 p.m.
Lord Howell of Guildford moved Amendment No. 13:
- Page 1, line 12, at end insert "and the Declarations adopted by the Conference (other than Declaration 23(5))"
The noble Lord said: My Lords, this amendment is grouped with Amendment No. 14, the logic being that both concern the same crucial declaration attached to the treaties. Both are concerned with the future shape and nature of the European Union. Therefore, they relate to fundamental matters concerning our relationship with the Union and what contribution we wish to make in the future to its changing pattern.
The European Union now faces the obvious upheaval of enlargement. It also faces many other enormous changes and forces at work. We touched on these matters in Committee. However, we did not test the feeling of your Lordships. For that reason alone, they merit further discussion. In addition, since the Committee stage an enormous amount has happened which is relevant to the future of the Union and to the proposals in Declaration 23. We certainly need to discuss these matters. There are one or two areas where this House badly needs some positive clarification of the way in which matters are going.
Looking at the overall scene, Declaration 23 is concerned with the way in which the processes of discussion of the future of the Union should now be carried through. The amendment would cut a big swathe into that declaration. It would remove from the agenda of processes four specific areas which those
who drafted the Nice treaty were anxious should be discussed and analysed. The fact that I have moved the amendment does not mean that I do not want them to be discussed. It indicates our belief that, given the way in which the discussion is going, it could lead to a flawed and unsatisfactory result.In particular, the declaration points towards further discussions on the delimitation of powers. That is a kind of jargon or code for a bigger issue which is looming. It is the question of whether there should be a constitution, possibly based on an amalgamated single treaty for the whole of the European Union, embracing—this is far from being decided—not only matters under pillar one, but those under pillar two and pillar three as well.
Behind that is the thought that, somehow, competences or responsibilities can be nicely layered, like some beautiful cake or ice cream, with certain competences sealed up for ever at supra-national (European institutional) level, and that certain competences can be permanently allotted to lower levels; namely, to nation states and even to regions. As I shall explain, I believe this to be a wholly unrealistic view of the way in which the world works. The idea that these matters are static and can be sealed for ever, locked in some constitution, is an absurdity. Nevertheless, it is a widely held aspiration.
The second item to which the declaration urges that attention should be turned is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which I shall also discuss. The third is the simplification of treaties—which sounds excellent on the surface, but I believe that there is a great deal more behind the idea than is revealed at first glance. The fourth is a slightly condescending reference in the declaration to the role of national parliaments. Again, it is a central matter which should and does concern your Lordships very much and to which we need to give close and detailed attention even at this stage of the Bill.
The idea then expressed in the declaration, on which our amendments are focused, is that all these matters should be handled and wrapped into a process which should then come before a convention. That is to begin very soon—on 1st March, I believe, although I may have the date wrong—under a chairman who, rather to everyone's surprise, turned out to be, on the French nomination, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, a very distinguished former President of France. The work of the convention should, in turn, lead to an intergovernmental conference in 2004 which will bless a constitution and various solutions to the items that I have outlined.
My first question to the Minister is: what part are we in this Parliament—both in this House and in the other place—to be allowed to play in the convention? In my view it is unthinkable that it should not include as a delegate a Member of this House. The plan, as I understand it, is that the parliament of each member state should send two members to M. Valery Giscard d'Estaing's convention and, in addition, the European Parliament should send some 16 members.
I confess that I find the whole project extremely worrying. First, there is the obvious point of how much "say" two members from each parliament will have in the convention. There is also the question of who will write the agenda, control the minutes and all the rest. Secondly, this seems to be an upside-down process. If the future of Europe is to be discussed—and Europe's democratic existence derives from the democratic parliaments and legislatures of the member states of which it is composed—it is the European institutions that should be sending delegates, possibly two from each major European institution and two from the European Parliament and so on, to the national parliaments to involve them in our discussions on how we see the future of Europe and the relations of each member state with the European Union as a whole.
To return to my specific question, when are we to know about the arrangements for the convention? Will it include only Members of another place, or are Peers to be involved? Who will choose them? When they have been chosen, and off they go to the convention, how will they re-connect with the two Houses and tell us what is happening? Could we have a specific answer to a mild request; namely, would it be possible for the two MPs—assuming that there will be only two—to report to the European Union Select Committee of this House? That seems to be one practical way in which we could have some access to what is happening as these very important issues about the future structure and constitution of Europe are discussed at the convention.
It seems to me that if the task—I merely repeat what the endless treaties and presidency conclusions assert—is to involve national parliaments in the processes and decisions of the Union, the involvement must be a two-way matter. We must see regular and continuous reports from whomsoever "represents" our two Houses at the convention. I have to put the word "represents" in quotation marks, because no single member of a parliament can represent the whole parliament. It is essential that we have strong reassurances and clear undertakings on the way in which the events and unfolding debates at the convention are reported back, so that both Houses can be properly and genuinely involved.
That involvement must be more than just a grand seigneur concession from the centre, allowing the various parliaments humbly to send a couple of members who will be lucky if they get much of a say. We do not want any of that. We want a clear undertaking that your Lordships will be properly and continuously informed. I suspect that that is not just a party matter. The process will presumably have to be conducted through our excellent European Union Committee structure, which is widely praised and applauded for its work. That would be a good platform through which your Lordships could be kept in touch. I hope that those important questions will be specifically addressed and answered. The matter is becoming urgent, because there are only a few weeks to go before this particular show gets on the road.
Behind the whole idea of the convention are the two bigger questions of the legitimacy of the European Union—a matter that is now of great concern to the Commission, as its European governance White Paper shows—and the aim of creating the great new architecture of a constitution. The Laeken declaration, which came out a few days after the summit, recognises the point about legitimacy. It repeats what is in danger of becoming a mantra—although it should be treated as a serious set of undertakings—that it is essential that,
- "the European institutions must be brought closer to its citizens".
The declaration then eventually comes to a paragraph that says, in a slightly throwaway tone, that the question of democratic legitimacy also—that should read "only", but the declaration says "also"—involves the role of national parliaments. It asks, somewhat casually:
- "Should they be represented in a new institution, alongside the Council and the European Parliament?"
- "Should they have a role in areas of European action in which the European Parliament has no competence?"
- "Should they focus on the division of competence between Union and Member States, for example through preliminary checking of compliance with the principle of subsidiarity?"
I do not like the tone of that section of the Laeken declaration. It seems very condescending and sounds as though it was written by people who do not understand that their democracy, their existence and certainly their finance and their salaries come from national parliaments, not from the higher ether.
At some stage, the authors of the declaration—which I suppose was endorsed by Ministers—assert that the democracy of the European Union springs not from voting, political systems and democracy in the nation states, but,
- "from the democratic values it projects, the aims it pursues and the powers and instruments it possesses".
I should like the opposite of what is proposed. It is archaic and anachronistic that we do not find ways of involving the hard-working Members of the European Parliament in our affairs by bringing them into the machinery of our two Houses. Maybe the MEPs
should be involved in some of our committees. I agree with one of the more authoritative members of the new Italian Government, Mr Tremonti, who says:
- "More decisions should originate in national Parliaments".
The implications of that are very large and they will not be particularly welcomed in the Commission, because they lead us to the question whether the Commission's monopoly in the initiation of decisions should remain. In practice, it is being eroded somewhat already, as I said earlier, but it is a big question. If more decision-making originated in national parliaments, the process would be much slower. We could forget the word "quickly" that the noble Baroness used. It would probably be less efficient and there would probably be more arguments.
3.45 p.m.
Lord Grenfell: My Lords, I was struck by the noble Lord's remark about the Commission initiating decisions. Will he clarify that? The Commission initiates proposals, but the decisions are still left to the Council.
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