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Likewise, it is very naughty to pretend that Lisbon makes it easier for us to leave the EU. It would subject us to a two-year period of negotiation controlled by Brussels, whereas, at present, we could repeal the
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To all this the Europhiles reply that our membership of the EU is justified because it makes us more useful in standing up to international terrorism and combating climate change—which is a waste of time anyway—and dealing with immigration and so on. I predict that the idea of the EU doing any good in any of these areas will prove to be the triumph of hope over experience. How can an organisation responsible for the common agricultural and fisheries policies—the first killing untold numbers of people in the developing world and the second dumping 30,000 articulated lorries-worth of dead fish into the sea every year—be trusted to improve the planet’s environment? What hypocrisy.
On immigration, surely our membership of the EU has produced millions of immigrants about whom we can do nothing and the usefulness of whom your Lordships’ Economic Affairs Committee has now rightly queried. I remind the Government and your Europhile Lordships that we are an island. We should control our own borders to suit our own needs, while continuing our long-standing tradition of compassion towards those who really need it. We do not need our asylum policy to be controlled by Brussels of all places.
However, our political classes love the EU gravy train, the nubile translators, the endless committees and conferences, the travel to Bali and other agreeable places, the feeling that they are maintaining peace in the world—rather unsuccessfully, I submit—and generally doing good, while being very well paid by the rest of us for that luxury. The prospects for all that are greatly enhanced by the Lisbon treaty. That is why they like it and real people hate it. Real people are already very frustrated, to the extent that many of them no longer see the point of voting in general elections. They want our democracy back so that they can sack the people who make their laws. Real people will get more and more angry until they get it.
4.26 pm
Lord Goodlad: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my very old friend, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, and to listen to his lectures on the practice of democracy. I am sure that what he said will, as always, be taken extremely seriously by noble Lords and by those in another place who have put themselves to the inconvenience of being elected. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House referred to the report of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution, as did my noble and learned friend Lord Howe and others. We heard contributions from the noble Lord, Lord Rodgers, who is a member of the committee, and the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. I shall not repeat what they said. However, I shall share with your Lordships some of the conclusions that were reached in the report published last week and I shall highlight some of them. Even the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, may find some comfort in them.
The report is complementary to that of the European Union Committee, which is chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and we are greatly indebted to the Government, all those who gave evidence and the
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We have also welcomed the provisions in the Bill that establish parliamentary control over government decisions under the passerelle mechanisms but we believe that there are two ways in which the procedure should be strengthened to ensure proper scrutiny. We recommend that the Government should lay an Explanatory Memorandum or a Written Statement when tabling a Motion seeking approval for support of a specified draft decision and we also recommend that the Bill be amended to ensure that Parliament is given enough time to scrutinise the proposals in respect of passerelles. Some passerelle mechanisms existed in earlier EU treaties but we are not convinced that that alone provides justification for the Bill’s omission of a comprehensive list of passerelle and similar enabling provisions in the Lisbon treaty and in previous treaties. We therefore ask the Government to provide a list enumerating all those provisions in order to allow Parliament to consider during the passage of the Bill whether each one should such be subject to parliamentary control under Clause 6.
Constitutional stability is a desirable objective. The Government view the reforms that will be brought about by the treaty as providing a lasting settlement. Your Lordships’ committee therefore hopes that, if ratified, the treaty will provide a period of stability in which the Government can use their influence to ensure that such is the case.
On the European Union’s competences, questions of distribution of power are complex. In the UK, devolution and membership of the European Union have the combined consequence that the UK Government and Parliament operate under a system of multi-level governance. For practical purposes, they have such powers as have not been conferred on the devolved Administrations and legislatures or the European Union. The committee therefore welcomes the treaty's attempt to set out with greater clarity the demarcations of responsibility between member states and the European Union. Those demarcations will continue to be open to interpretation by the European Court of Justice.
Your Lordships' committee therefore welcomes the enhanced role of national Parliaments proposed by the Lisbon treaty. We have proposed that both Houses
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On nations and regions, it is obviously necessary to develop enhanced co-operation between the Government and the devolved Administrations on those aspects of European Union policy that are devolved or have implications for the devolutionary settlement. To that end, meetings of the Joint Ministerial Committee should be more frequent and more open to public scrutiny. We also believe that there is a need for co-operation between the UK Parliament and the devolved legislatures on European Union matters, particularly the yellow card procedure for policing the principle of subsidiarity. We therefore suggest that the respective legislatures give further consideration to a formal mechanism for improved co-operation on those issues.
Perhaps most important is the area of freedom, security and justice. Your Lordships’ committee concluded that the importance of how the opt-ins and opt-outs are used is such that Parliament must be fully involved in their use. We have therefore recommended that the Bill be amended so as to require that the Government obtain approval from both Houses of Parliament before using opt-ins or opt-outs in any policy area. That would be consistent with the Bill’s policy, so declared, of requiring parliamentary approval for the use of the simplified revision procedure and the passarellles.
Finally, many of the issues examined in our report, including the competencies of the EU, the interpretation and application of the charter and the detailed working out of the consequences of the UK's opt-outs and opt-ins, particularly in relation to the area of freedom, security and justice, will be shaped by the European Court of Justice’s adjudications in future years. For Parliament and the people we serve to be fully informed of the European Court of Justice's interpretation and application of the Lisbon treaty's provisions, your Lordships’ committee recommends that the Government lay before Parliament an annual report on their assessment of the impact of the court’s rulings on the United Kingdom. In interpreting and applying the charter, the European Court of Justice will increasingly refer to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and so the relevant rulings of that court ought also to be covered in the Government's annual report.
The provision of such an annual report would complement Parliament’s efforts in recent years to seek greater information about the operation of the United Kingdom’s courts through, for example, the requirement of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 for the Supreme Court to make an annual report and the Lord Chief Justice’s proposed regular reports on the courts system in England and Wales.
I hope that these proposals, which in some ways are more pedestrian than some of the more high-flown proposals that have been part of our debate this afternoon but are none the less fairly radical, will commend themselves to your Lordships’ House in the subsequent proceedings on the Bill. Your Lordships’ committee, like that chaired by the noble Lord, Lord
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4.35 pm
Lord Roper: My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Goodlad. I much appreciated his committee’s report when I had an opportunity to read it over the weekend, and I am sure that we will come back to a number of the points that he covered and which were also covered in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, on parliamentary control of the opt-ins in the areas of freedom, justice and home affairs. Like my noble friends on these Benches who have already spoken, I believe that the Lisbon treaty contains useful improvements to the machinery of government of the European Union, and I will therefore support the Bill. Having been opposed to the use of referenda on European matters since 1972, I shall not change my mind on this occasion.
As the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, mentioned in his very useful introduction to the report and to our debate, I serve as chairman of Sub-Committee C of your Lordships’ European Union Committee. Two members of the sub-committee, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, have already dealt with a certain number of the things that came out of our committee and which appear as chapter 7 of the European Union Committee’s report. Indeed, I much appreciated the remarks by the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Brittan, on this.
The treaty does not change the basis on which the Union carries out its external actions, but maintains the intergovernmental nature of the development of foreign and defence policy. It does however, as we have heard, introduce a number of institutional innovations designed to improve the effectiveness and coherence of the external actions of the European Union. The present treaties do not provide arrangements for co-ordination, because the external policies developed and implemented by the Commission—including international trade policy, development and other economic assistance and the policy of enlargement on the one hand, and the foreign and defence policies developed by member states and High Representative Javier Solana under the CFSP arrangements of the present Second Pillar on the other—are quite separate.
One manifestation of this division is the external representation of the European Union. The Commission has 128 missions, with about 4,000 staff, dealing with trade and development matters, but the CFSP matters—the Second Pillar matters—are formally dealt with by the embassies of the member state holding the rotating presidency of the Council, together, where they are, with the special representatives of the high representatives. This, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, leads to a dysfunctional arrangement, which means that the various instruments that the Union has to deal with foreign countries cannot be used as effectively as they should be.
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We have reached this situation because, until the end of the Cold War, the European Union did not have a significant foreign policy, let alone a defence policy. It did, of course, from its outset as the European Economic Community have trade and development policies. Indeed, the Community’s successes in GATT and the World Trade Organisation have often been cited as examples of the effectiveness of operating as part of a larger group.
From 1970, there was a very slow development of European political co-operation, but it was only lightly organised by the member state holding the presidency. The Community’s relative lack of success in the Balkans in the early 1990s led to the formalisation of a Second Pillar in the Maastricht treaty of 1992, with the so-called common foreign and security policy. I find the title misleading. At first sight, the use of the word “common” gives the impression that it is a replacement for the foreign policies of the member states as “common” is used in the case of the common commercial policy and the common agriculture policy.
It is not a total policy. It is a series of policies on specific items which are reached by member states when they feel that they can usefully do something together within the European Union. The Amsterdam Treaty 1997 made the important institutional change of making the Secretary-General of the European Council the high representative for the common foreign and security policy. The Nice treaty created a committee of senior diplomats, known as the political and security community. Although the appointment of Javier Solana as high representative in 1999 has somewhat helped the development of the CFSP, the fact is that too often in foreign policy matters, such as meetings of the Middle East quartet, the Union is represented by three people and not one; that is, the country holding the rotating presidency, the high representative and the Commission. That shows why the provisions in the Lisbon treaty to bring these three together make a great deal of sense.
The most important innovation is to separate the post of high representative from that of Secretary-General, to allow him to take over the six-monthly rotating presidency of the Foreign Affairs Council, and, importantly, to represent the Union on foreign and security policy, including speaking on behalf of the Union in international organisations, to which I shall return. In addition, the same person will be appointed a vice-president of the Commission with responsibility for external relations to ensure the consistency of the Union’s external action. This unprecedented link between the two players was widely welcomed by those who came to give us evidence.
The second innovation is the creation of a European external action service to support the high representative in his expanded role and to represent the EU in the rest of the world. Bringing together the bureaucracies of the Commission and the Council in Brussels, and having a single representation in dealing with other countries and international organisations, will increase the coherence of the Union’s external actions. While these innovations have the potential to deal with some of the problems faced by the Union, another development, to which the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, has already
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Some of our witnesses told us of potential problems of co-ordination. For instance, when the European Union has a summit with a partner country, there are likely to be three people present—the President of the European Council, the President of the Commission and the high representative. The treaty probably inevitably does not spell out the relationship between the three. If possible, after ratification and before the appointment, it would be useful to draw up job descriptions, but that would be difficult. This is an important institutional innovation, but the new high representative will be accountable in various directions and it will be a challenging job to get right.
The noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, referred to the obligation on member states serving on the Security Council to request that, when the European Union has defined a position which is on the agenda of the UN Security Council, the high representative should be invited to present the European Union’s position. We were told in the sub-committee—it appears in our report—that that is true for the presentation before the full Security Council. But, of course, a great deal of the negotiation in the Security Council takes place before that among the permanent members, of which the European Union is not part. Therefore, it is merely to ensure that the Union has an opportunity, as it does from time to time, to present its position that there is this innovation. As the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, rightly said, this does not displace in any way the UK’s right to speak and vote.
On a final point, the Lisbon treaty contains a mutual assistance clause. Some people have suggested that this turns the European Union into a form of collective defence organisation. That is not the case because it does not provide for collective defence, but is an obligation comparable to that in Article 51 of the United Nations treaty on individual member states. The article recognises that NATO remains the foundation of the collective defence of those member states which are members of it and the forum for its implementation. It makes clear that commitments under the European Union’s common security and defence policy shall be consistent with commitments under NATO. This new language makes explicit the fact that the European Union is in no way a competitor with NATO. Perhaps in the light of developments in France and Cyprus, we may soon be able to improve relations between those two organisations. They ought to be working together better.
In foreign affairs and defence, the treaty removes some of the obstacles to the Union developing and implementing effective policy. It does not, as the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, has said, guarantee that member states will use it, but the arrangements are an improvement on the present situation and deserve our support.
4.46 pm
Lord Waddington: My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Roper, but he will forgive me if I do not follow his argument. There are a
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Of course, she was as good as her word.
Our Prime Minister says that other countries may have signed up to what is the constitutional treaty in a new wrapping but that we have not done so because of all the opt-ins, opt-outs, red lines and so forth. That will not wash for a moment. Not only, says the Commons European Scrutiny Committee, do the opt-outs “leak like a sieve”, but they are substantially the same opt-outs as those negotiated at the time of the constitutional treaty. Contrary to what the noble Baroness, Lady Symons of Vernham Dean, said, the opt-outs were negotiated before the referendum promise was made. There is no doubt of that at all. Respect for Parliament will continue to decline so long as our leaders do not play straight with the British public. I cannot match the eloquence of my noble friend Lord Forsyth, but I agree with him that it is our plain duty to hold the Government to their promise. If we are not prepared to do that, quite frankly we might as well pack up and go home. What is the point of this House if we are not prepared to do that?
The Government like to say that the Conservatives are almost alone in disagreeing with the terms of the treaty, but my right honourable friend William Hague pointed out on 21 January in the other place that that is far from correct. Why is that? It is because the Government themselves, at one time or another, have expressed their opposition to almost all its contents. Eventually, they gave way, conceded or surrendered—use whichever word you want—but when we go through the history of this matter from the time of the convention we find that the Government themselves objected to 90 per cent of the proposals in this treaty.
The European Council is to be chaired by a full-time President and will become a formal EU institution subject to the jurisdiction of the ECJ. It is absurd to describe that as only a modest step to ensure more efficient working, which seems to be the line taken by my noble friend Lord Brittan. At the moment, meetings of the Council are chaired by a head of government, who, quite obviously, has a vested interest in protecting the rights of member states. Instead of that, we are to have a new-style Council presided over by someone barred from holding a national office, an unelected paid official like the President of the Commission. Surely this unelected official, like the President of the Commission, will consider it his prime duty to drive
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We have not heard much about it now being possible to merge the posts of Council President and Commission President. Tony Blair opposed it, but it is in the treaty. On 4 February, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, pooh-poohed the idea of any such merger coming about—he took me up on the point—but I invite your Lordships to turn to page 46 of the EU Committee report. There we find that the Commission, far from ruling it out, said that while it was not a current issue it could well return. We should all heed that warning of another constitutional change of immense importance in the offing.
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