European Union Subsidiarity Assessment: Electoral Law of the EU (EUC Report)

Debate between Lord Davies of Stamford and Lord Boswell of Aynho

Thursday 4th February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I am a member of the European Union Select Committee. Unfortunately, I was not present at the Select Committee’s discussion of this proposal; if I had been, I would have said some of the things I am going to say now.

I, of course, do not in any way apologise for, accept, or try to defend what appear to have been administrative mistakes in not sending documents in time to this Parliament or to the Tweede Kamer in the Netherlands; I know nothing about that. Clearly, if people have been remiss in not meeting deadlines, they should be held to account. I totally agree with my noble friend’s comments on that point. However, I am much more concerned with the substantive point she makes, and particularly with the second resolution, which I oppose in principle. I hope that I will have a chance to vote against it but I do not suppose that I will. However, I certainly do not want it said that it went through this House without any voice of dissent at all.

In the Motion before your Lordships, the second resolution says that this proposal of the European Parliament should be set aside on the ground of subsidiarity. It seems to me that any democratic parliament worthy of its name is accountable to its own electorate. Any democratic parliament worthy of its name is responsible, and should be responsible, for its own rules and procedures. It should not be beholden to any organisation outside. It should not be under the command of any outside authority or it is not a democratic parliament. In this case, of course, the European Parliament was set up by the member states through the treaty—we all know that. All parliaments, by definition, have to be set up by somebody other than themselves. This Parliament, which we have the honour to serve, was set up by kings of England—Edward I and subsequent monarchs—who summoned it. That does not mean to say that we expect the monarch or, indeed, the politically elected Executive branch—the Prime Minister or the Cabinet—to fix our rules of procedure or our methods of operation. It would be scandalous for anybody to suggest that and everybody would quite rightly think that that was a threat to the democratic independence of this House. No one has, of course, ever suggested that.

On that basis, it is perfectly reasonable that the European Parliament should make its own proposals for its own future procedures, including for its own electoral system. That is totally right, and it is right that it should do it. Above all, the application of the subsidiarity principle against its doing so seems to me entirely absurd. Of course, only the European Parliament is in a position to judge the functionality of any set of rules or procedures in relation to itself. To ask 28 different national parliaments to make their judgment is crazy. It would probably take 1,000 years for them all to agree on the rules to be adopted and they would not be in a position to assess the functionality and merits of any proposals of that kind in the way that people sitting in the European Parliament would be able to do. Therefore, on both pragmatic grounds and grounds of principle, I oppose this resolution. The principle of subsidiarity—indeed, my noble friend has just cited that principle—deems that matters should be decided at the European Union level only when they cannot be better decided at the level of the member states. I think I have said enough to indicate that this matter certainly could not be effectively decided at the level of the member states—that would be an absurdity. It must be decided at the centre by the European Parliament itself. On that basis, I oppose the second resolution.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for the report which her sub-committee prepared for my EU Select Committee. I echo her words of thanks to members of that committee and to the excellent staff in drawing this together. It will already be clear from the exchanges that this is an interesting and, to some extent, unprecedented, coincidence in matters connected with process and substance. What we have heard so far has clearly shown deficiencies in a procedure in which, in fairness to the European Parliament—to which I will return in a moment—it has relatively new experience as a co-legislator. Therefore, we can perhaps condone the explanation relating to fault for this matter, although we should not allow it to go unchallenged.

I was not minded to speak in this debate—and will do so only briefly—had it not been for the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford. He and I have known each other for quite a long time. I have huge respect for him and very much enjoy and value his contributions to our Select Committee. As he rightly said, he was not available on the relevant occasion. However, it would have been more helpful had he shared his concerns and dissent with the chairman of the sub-committee and/or myself. With pre-notification, I am sure that we would have done our best not to warn him off but at least to have seen whether we could accommodate those concerns or reflect them in our report. As noble Lords present who have had experience of negotiation will know, we are in the position where in effect a late card has been played and it is a little difficult to handle it at this stage.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I apologise for any discourtesy but, as soon as I saw this resolution on the Order Paper, I mentioned to my noble friend my opposition to it and invited her to make any comments that she wished to make. She made no comments to me on that occasion and I therefore assumed that she did not wish to have a discussion with me on the subject, but I would have been delighted to do so.

[Lord Boswell of Aynho]

My Lords, we are now, as it were, in the Chamber and we need to take the argument as it goes. However, for the avoidance of doubt—I hope this reassures the chair of the sub-committee—if any noble Lord is minded to take the temperature of the House, I am very much inclined to defend the sub-committee’s recommendation. I put that on the record.

However, let us take that as past. I add two other points. We have a Motion for a reasoned opinion. We have good reasons for asking for that. Indeed, we made it clear in the report we prepared some years ago for your Lordships’ House on the role of national parliaments—that has already been touched on in relation to the current European negotiations—that a reasoned opinion deserves a reasoned response. In entering a reasoned opinion we seek to enter a dialogue with, and gain an explanation from, the European Parliament, not with the purpose of subverting this move but of getting it into the right order with the right conclusion—no more and no less than that.

That leads me to my final point. When we debated this matter in the Select Committee, I was concerned to make it clear to its members that I would not like it to be seen as an oblique or indirect attack on the European Parliament itself. Some people in these Chambers seek to downplay the role of the European Parliament and even, occasionally, to question its legitimacy. I do not share that view. My view of parliamentary sovereignty is that it is better to have two levels of application and scrutiny than only one. I think that we have a joint and complementary role. I would not claim any great virtue in it but I have laboured long and hard to try to dispel any illusion that we are in any sense at war with Members of the European Parliament and its leadership. This is, I hope, a friendly discussion about procedure and a slightly more substantive one about the levels at which we take this argument forward. It is not a declaration of war or an attempt to create difficulty. I very much commend our report to the House.