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A noble Lord: My Lords, it was Sir Bernard Ingham.
Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that information. I am a Lancastrian and so I can only attempt the correct pronunciation. I should say that Hebden Bridge is on the wrong side of the Pennines and ought to be in Lancashire.
Parliamentary democracy experiences a deficit only if people think that they are being taken for a ride. In what sense do people think that they are being taken for a ride about Europe? I am a heretic in the sense that I think that the euro will bring us much closer to the idea of Europe than any other change we can make in this country. So it is not the fact that things take place a long way away in Brussels or Frankfurt that creates the democratic deficit. Perhaps it is the fact that we are very poor at communication. For that reason, among others, I support the Prime Minister's initiative.
Even more recently than in the debates on Nice, we had an interesting discussion in this Chamber when we agreed the appointments to the convention. It brought out an interesting point which I believe that the Front Benches on all sides got away with by not quite answering; that is, is it Parliament that is appointing these people, or is it the Government? I think that I have this right: because only the member states are the component parts of the European Union then it must be the governments appointing the Parliament's representatives. However, it is a bit bizarre.
The question has not gone away forever. Without it being that the "Chief Whip" equals "Parliament"—I refer to the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats; there is an argument about the Cross-Benchers—how can it be that we make a big thing about parliamentary accountability and Europe being a deficit, that everything is done by the Council of Ministers, when we do not mind eliding the two when it comes to appointments at Westminster?
We have enough blue sky thinking to be going on with. If we want some more, we shall have to give the job to my noble friend Lord Birt. That might complete the picture.
A new element referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson—it is a new one on me—is that half of the business transacted is now under pillars two and three. I do not know how he calculated that, but if half the business is under pillars two and three, then, prima facie, we need a new way of looking at it. That makes a strong case for a new development of the convention, if only because of the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, about what that has got to do with the price of tomatoes. We do not yet know how this body would look at pillars two and three if they are not to be looked at in a parliamentary sense. That is a very good question for the convention.
Another very good question for the convention is which parts of the Council of Ministers need to be more transparent. I strongly support the idea of all papers being published, provided that they are published and circulated a week in advance, including the minutes of the meetings of the Council of
Ministers. Some may be driven into the corridors, but it would be an enormous step forward for transparency.There is a connection between this debate and the debate about civil society. For many years I was doing this kind of work in the TUC. There is no doubt that many bodies—from architects through to the BMA, industry federations and so on all round Europe—now provide the secure underpinning of Europe at industrial and social levels. Many hundreds of thousands of people now know a lot about Europe and they should have a proper relationship with these debates in the convention. ECOSOC, the Economic and Social Committee, for example, has observer rights and a speaking role in the convention.
Parliamentarians should try to avoid a dichotomy between the primacy of parliamentary democracy and any other kind of involvement. After all, industry has to implement and live with the famous working time directive. We could have told them—we did tell them—that it would have been much better in Brussels if it had been done through the social dialogue procedure. This produces shorter, simpler documents such as those for part-time workers, fixed-term contracts, maternity rights, parental leave and the European works councils, which were all produced through negotiation. They are much simpler documents and easier for employers to understand because they sign agreements in the same way as everyone else. These are relevant in order to understand the variety of processes involved.
The report from the Committee is a good stimulus for debate. Looking back in 10 years' time, people will say that, far from damning the Warsaw speech with faint praise, we saw it as an opportunity and we seized it with both hands.
5.44 p.m.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, when this aspect of scrutiny was first proposed, I was a little sceptical. I felt that if we had asked the then Clerk to the House of Lords European Union Committee and his counterpart in the scrutiny committee in another place to go away for a weekend and write something, the two of them would know so much about the matter that they could have produced a first-class report not entirely different from the one we are now debating.
However, what we would have lacked—which I appreciate as a member of the working group which produced the report—was the learning process through which many of us went. I was not of a settled mind as to what I thought about the second chamber proposal when we started; by the time we had ended, like the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, I had decided that clearly it was, at the very best, a bad good idea. I was persuaded, in part, by the discussions we heard on the whole question of a dual mandate and how difficult it is to manage different heavy commitments at once.
I remind the noble Lord, Lord Desai, who rejected this, that there is a very strong sentiment in France at the present moment to get rid of the doctrine of the dual mandate on the grounds that it leads to
corruption, inadequate attention to business and a whole host of other issues. It was possible, to some extent, before 1979 to manage a European parliament on that basis because, pre-1979, the European Community's agenda was very limited. Since 1992—certainly since the second and third pillars got under way—the sheer weight of EU business is such that, without question, being involved at that level is now a full-time job. So the dual mandate argument seems to be conclusive.Let me raise one or two wider questions about the outcome of this debate: first, the wider context of Her Majesty's Government's approach to the 2004 Intergovernmental Conference and the preparatory convention. A very strong lesson is fairly heavily stated in paragraph 33. Although it does not say that the onus is on the Prime Minister, it does say:
- "The onus is on those who are proposing a second chamber to prove its practicability, as well as its desirability, before the proposal goes forward".
With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, that means, "Do not start floating visions if there is nothing substantive behind them".
I prefer plans to visions. It is part of the French style in the European Union to love to float visions without having thought through what they mean. They then often get very irritated with the British and the Germans two or three years later when they have worked out what it might mean in practice—whereupon the French discover that they do not like the practice.
There are many temptations for local leaders to launch initiatives because they then become the "Blair proposals", the "Schro der plan", or whatever. I recall well the preparations for the Warsaw speech as I know some of the officials who were consulted. Some of us said at the time that the Prime Minister should not be allowed to float a proposal without knowing what it might mean if people took it up. I remember particularly the Labour MP who enthusiastically told me, "The Prime Minister is determined to say something about reconnecting Europe to the citizen". So he did—but it did not mean anything. As the report shows, the kite has been flown, leaving a handful of officials within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to hold the rope.
During the session in which we took evidence, we saw how difficult it was for these Foreign Office officials to continue to hold on to the rope when the wind blew against them very strongly. There are a number of lessons there for the Government. Please can Ministers attempt to hold down those in the Government who get enthusiastic about floating off half-thought-through grand ideas? There are also lessons for managing the convention.
This is a useful report which, I have no doubt, will be read by other governments in other parliaments. I suggest, with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon of Tara, that there may well be other topics and other issues at which it will be useful for the EU Committee also to look. For instance, what is the
substance behind some of the proposals for the reform of the Council, on which again some half-thought-through ideas are floating around? There is the whole problem of the rotating presidency, which clearly does not work any longer but which is extremely delicate because the smaller countries cling to its importance. A range of ideas are being put forward on that but no one has really pinned them down. As to the question of the reform of the Commission, so far the Commission has got about half-way through what needs to be done. It has not addressed the most difficult question of all, which is that it would be helpful to have a smaller college of commissioners. It would be helpful for the EU Committee to consider whether or not it wishes to tackle some of these issues.It would certainly be helpful for the Government themselves to produce an early Green Paper to help focus our national debate and to connect that to the progress of the convention. It is vital not to leave the convention to hold its intricate discussions elsewhere, largely unnoticed in Westminster or the British press. This Parliament needs to play an active role, and this Government need to assist this Parliament in playing an active role.
There is of course the problem of how we do connect the European citizen to this remote process in Brussels and occasionally in Strasbourg: European policy-making seems obscure and remote, and most national parliaments are only partially involved. That tends to be labelled as part of the problem of "the democratic deficit", which is very ill-defined. We should recognise that it is probably not possible to solve that problem entirely. All politics is local but, increasingly, much government has to be multinational. It is extremely difficult to bridge that gap. The gap is not very well bridged even in the United States, a highly federal state in which turn-out for national, federal elections—particularly at mid-term, when there is not a presidential candidate to vote for—is, sadly, remarkably low. So there is no magic formula for resolving all this.
There are ways of narrowing the gap, such as by providing greater authority for the European Parliament, and certainly by means of a European Parliament that is settled in Brussels. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will work extremely hard not only to get rid of the nonsense about Strasbourg which some other noble Lords have mentioned, but also to ensure greater openness for Council decision-taking, which has also been mentioned, and greater involvement of national parliaments, to which I shall return. We also need to pay greater attention to the issues of subsidiarity and proportionality. Those have to be issues with which national parliaments are primarily concerned, because it is national parliaments that are concerned to resist this drift towards the centre, which is unavoidable in the way in which the European Union operates.
The question is how best do we involve national parliaments more closely? These proposals for a second chamber carry within them several mistaken ideas. One is that what we need is more bodies at the EU level. It seems to me that that is the last thing that
we need. I am half persuaded that the Committee of the Regions is a useful idea, and I pay tribute to the excellent work that several Members of this Chamber have put in on that committee. I am much less convinced that the Economic and Social Committee still does any useful activity. I apologise to any Members of this House who happen to be active members of that committee. We do not need more bodies. We need, if possible, a less obscure and clearer policy-making process at the EU level.Another argument is that we need senior politicians to get together on a regular basis. Again with apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Desai, that argument does not fit with the fact that senior politicians have to be provided with an incentive to get together. If we want to have a second chamber, how shall we persuade leaders of the opposition to go on a regular basis to wherever it may be held?
There is also the Gaullist idea which is very clearly behind many of the French proposals in this direction that only national assemblies can represent the nations and peoples of Europe. The idea comes from all that old republican and French revolutionary rhetoric in which—as I have heard on occasion when attending COSAC—the European Parliament is artificial and a congress of national parliaments would be real. As the United Kingdom is itself a multinational state, we have some difficulty in saying that the UK Parliament is the only body that can represent the nations of the United Kingdom. COSAC itself, as an expression of the French desire in this regard, works extremely badly. From my own experience, I have to say that the quality of the food and the surroundings was superb, but that the quality of the debate was in inverse proportion to that.
Our objective of better, fuller and more effective scrutiny is a highly desirable one, but it is not entirely easy. One of the things that I learned while chairing one of the sub-committees of your Lordships' EU Committee was that different parliaments behave entirely differently about scrutiny but still think that they are doing it. The House of Commons scrutiny committee looks at absolutely everything and sometimes spends 10 minutes on each. We select and deal in depth with a small number of things and leave the others behind. The Danish and Finnish Parliaments think that scrutiny entails getting the Minister in for an hour on the Friday before the Council meeting and throwing questions at him. They are different sorts of scrutiny—beforehand, afterwards—but none of them is perfect.
As we have learned in this House, there are many difficulties with scrutiny: governments change their minds, proposals evolve, and Ministers think it advantageous to decide quickly. Twice while I was chair of Sub-Committee F the Government co-operated in over-riding the scrutiny reserve because Ministers thought that it was useful to have a decision, particularly on anti-discrimination in the European Union. Ministers like to propose new initiatives at all levels of government, and British Ministers are certainly no better than any others in their longing to have an initiative of which they can speak.
I therefore agree in particular with the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, and the noble Baroness, Lady Harris of Richmond, that the proper focus should be on how best to improve the engagement of national parliaments. The report clearly sets out a number of proposals. It stresses that we should make better use of offices of national parliaments in Brussels, establish better links among national committees, and establish better links between the national parliaments and the European Parliament both in Brussels and in national capitals. We all need to explore that a great deal further.
This Parliament has not yet quite got over the initial disdain for the European Parliament. We should involve Members of the European Parliament much more in our activities. I like the idea that my noble colleague Lord Goodhart suggested of a tripartite committee. That would clearly require more funding. I suggest that more funding be made available for greater party links between national parliamentarians and their equivalent in other countries.
Yes, we can reform COSAC. Perhaps reforming COSAC is the way forward. I wish that this Parliament would take a more active role in that. The French Senate's report on a second chamber effectively presented the idea that COSAC should meet four times annually rather than twice. Perhaps we should say that it should meet at least twice in Brussels rather than in national capitals and that it should focus more explicitly on how we conduct scrutiny and also outline some of the problems of scrutiny. I could be much more sceptical about an annual congress of parliaments, but I shall leave that issue to the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, who went through the assizes and came out scarred from the experience.
There is a particular problem about the scrutiny of the common foreign and security policy and the third pillar of justice and home affairs. That also needs to be a matter of co-operation between national parliaments and the European Parliament and should not prompt a move towards the creation of further ad hoc assemblies or whatever.
This should all feed into the stumbling debate about British constitutional reform as well as about European constitutional change. There is a Scottish dimension to much of this—on fisheries, for example, in which Scottish interests are much stronger than English ones, and on oil. The Scottish Parliament is already beginning to develop its own forms of European scrutiny, about which we ourselves should be rather more informed.
The links between the two chambers here ought to be improved. Ministers might usefully agree regularly to meet a Joint Committee, perhaps before Council meetings, as a way of improving scrutiny. All of that needs also to feed into the Laeken convention, which this Parliament needs to follow, and to do so throughout the life of that convention.
Meanwhile, this report and debate is a first, very useful and constructive contribution to the convention. I hope that this Chamber will provide many others.
5.58 p.m.
Lord Howell of Guildford: My Lords, although I too was not a member of this very distinguished committee, I have to say that—unlike the noble Lord, Lord Desai—I think that it has produced a most excellent report. I agree with nearly all of it, with the possible exception of one or two conclusions, to which I shall return. I know that it is the custom to praise all such reports as they are published, and that your Lordships are always very polite to each other, but in this case I really think that this is one of the highest-class efforts that we have debated in recent times. I think that the title alone will qualify it for report of the year or report of the month, if there are such competitions. For a start—this does not apply to every report—it begins, in part one, sentence one and paragraph one, with precisely the right question, which is,
- "Why would the European Union need another parliamentary Chamber?"
A flood of answers are unleashed by that—I do not talk just of the committee but of the general view. At the head of those answers is the phrase "democratic deficit", to which the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and the noble Baroness, Lady Harris, referred, or, as it is put in the report much better and more accurately, the disconnection that makes so much of the institutional activity of the European Union seem alien, obscure, remote and distant—all words that have been used this afternoon. From that there flows another set of answers in the conventional line of argument: that it is a matter of subsidiarity not working and we must make it work in some way, or that it is a matter of more scrutiny of second and third pillar decisions, which are not scrutinised enough, and we must somehow crank up the scrutiny machine to be more effective in dealing with them.
It is sometimes assumed that when we have tackled those two matters we have solved the repair problems and everything will be all right. I do not believe that. That is a wrong analysis of the problem of disconnection, which is rightly identified. It comes about only—and one gets into that way of thinking only—if one starts from a certain mindset based on a flawed perception of the way that Europe and the world now work. If one assumes that the European Union institutions are somehow the top of the tree, on high, above the nation states and nearer the sun as it were, and one is told that they are out of touch, one worries about how to rearrange the furniture at those lofty levels. That results in talk about strengthening the authority of the European Parliament, as the recent Laeken declaration did, or worries about adding a new chamber—the idea that the report rightly shoots down—or about how all the power that is said to have accumulated in those higher authorities should be delegated and decentralised or tested by the process of subsidiarity. Even the people I respect most profoundly can easily assume that up there are the institutions and down here are the nation states, with the grassroots below them and so on.
Commissioner Patten speaks beautifully on many of these matters and I admire a great deal of what he says. However, he is quoted in the report as saying that the problem is deciding what is "left to the nations", as if it is a matter of crumbs and leftovers for the nations after it has been decided what should be done by the EU institutions. I am closer to the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, on that matter. I believe that first of all the nation states and the national parliaments should decide how they will organise their own affairs, working together or separately, and then we should decide what would have its value added to by being left to the European Union institutions. That is the right way to go about it. If one does not understand that, of course one comes out in favour of some kind of second chamber at the centre. That is why Commissioner Patten is in favour, along with many other people whom I also respect, including my noble friends Lord Heseltine and Lord Brittan, Joschka Fischer, M Jospin and Mr Danny Cohn-Bendit, as the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, mentioned. They are all listed in the report as people who say that the answer is to do something at the centre. I believe that all those viewpoints are flawed. The report helps to penetrate and illuminate that flaw effectively.
Making the centre of the European Union stronger does not make it less remote or less alien. I believe strongly that at this stage in their search for greater connection people do not want grander bodies, diets and lofty senates to be constructed, nor do they want people to talk about the need for destiny—a dreadful word—and other visions. Nor do they want—I noted the remarks of Mr Prodi at the weekend in this regard—the creation of a supra-national democracy. People want something much more down to earth—that there should be a much closer involvement in the decisions of Europe by the elected national parliaments. That point has rightly been made by many noble Lords this afternoon. I repeat that the European Union is not above the nation states. The nation states gave birth to the treaties that created the Union and the servants of those institutions should watch their language and be careful. The other day Mr Solbes worried about the German stability pact and the Portuguese budget. Perhaps he is right to worry and to advise. However, it is not appropriate for him to warn. He is a servant, not a master, of the nation states and that fact should be reflected in what these people say.
The report successfully shoots down the second chamber idea conclusively. It is obviously not practical. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, mentioned that I was scarred by the attempt some years ago to have an assize of all national parliaments in Rome. That was a complete failure for all kinds of obvious reasons. The scheme is constitutionally inept because, as the report argues, as have many others, if the new body was powerless it would be useless and would not attract the best minds, but if it was powerful it would be thoroughly confusing and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, said, would merely compete in a most damaging way with the existing structures. The constitutional aspect seems to rest not just on the
reasonable belief that the principles on which it is decided who should do what can be clarified—as paragraph 48 of the report states—but on the idea that the actual competences can also be clarified. I may disagree slightly with the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, here. It seems to me that the report is much more cautious as regards trying to define actual competences and freeze them, let alone building some great constitutional structure thereafter which enshrines them for ever. One has to be extremely careful to proceed along those lines. Certainly, to set up a second chamber that would adjudicate on those competences seems to be a nightmare proposition. Finally, as the report states, it does not solve the democracy and disconnection problem. In short, to borrow a word from Mr Robin Cook, it is frankly a "shallow" idea. I share the surprise of others that it was ever seriously even floated.As your Lordships have rightly divined, and as my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth indicated in his evidence to the committee, the problem is not to do with rearranging institutional structures; it is, of course, to do with the exclusion of elected parliaments from decision-making and the way in which we can overcome that. I believe that COSAC might help a little in that regard. I hope that it has improved since the days when I served on it. It was never a very cutting edge body. All this debate really means is that we have to find ways of strengthening our national parliaments—not strengthening the centre; that is too strong already—so that they are in the accountability loop in a way that sometimes we feel we are not.
Then one comes to the practical issues of what we do about it all. The consensus on what is wrong has been wide indeed in this excellent debate. Can we strengthen the scrutiny process? I believe that the answer is "yes". In a moment I shall trot out a list of proposals for how we can do that, some of which overlap with what has already been said by the noble Lords, Lord Tomlinson, Lord Williamson, Lord Barnett, Lord Desai, Lord Inglewood, and many others. There is a deeper question behind that: even in improving scrutiny, are we really thinking creatively or are we merely rearranging the furniture and dancing to the tune of an outmoded structure and system, which may have done well for Europe in the 20th century but which is utterly inappropriate for the modalities of Europe in the 21st century? Are we really just going to go along the kind of line that I suspect will come out of the convention, which already seems to be causing a good deal of grumbling? I wish the noble Lords, Lord Tomlinson and Lord Maclennan, well but it seems that even in Germany people are pointing out that it does not sound a very democratic body if it has a 12-person presidium that meets 10 times a month and a plenary group of 105 members that meets once a month. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, who I know is agile, will have to do a lot of running to catch up with what is going on in the top 12.
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