European Union: Justice and Home Affairs

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dykes (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the chairman of Sub-Committee E, of which I am a member, and thank her for her work and leadership of that committee. I very much agree with the individual points that she made in the latter part of her remarks.

It is also appropriate to echo the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, as chairman of the European Union Committee, and express our thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, as chairman of Sub-Committee F, for the work that he has done with the members of that sub-committee in dealing with the origins of this matter and the apparent muddle that has unfortunately arisen over time, which needs clarification from the Government on a continuing basis. Many more questions will come up later on. With extraordinary forensic ability, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, has led the way in how to be a deep, delving chairman of a scrutiny sub-committee. That is to the benefit of this House and the country.

In fact, we are rightly proud in this House of the elements of our scrutiny system, particularly on European matters, which are in many ways deeper for obvious technical and operational reasons. I make no criticism of our Commons colleagues, but theirs is a different kind of exercise, which is more or less like sifting through a large catalogue of different measures as quickly as possible and trying to get agreement in a hurry. We sometimes have more time to consider, but on this occasion the timetables are determining the discipline needed by the Government to respond in good time to make sure that we get this right. There are still considerable doubts about the whole origins of this policy formation and the policy stance taken by the coalition Government on these complicated and complex issues. This needs to be clarified in the future very much on a basis that will reassure Members of all parts of this House and Members of Parliament in general that the Government are going to be on the right track.

The origin of these proposals in the previous Administration was something of a failsafe or reserve position—that is how I saw it, although perhaps I misinterpreted it—to reassure colleagues in this House and particularly in the Commons that mistakes would not be made in terms of the disappearance of the third pillar and our ability to reach proper decisions on complicated legal and judicial matters that would be made, in the oft-quoted phrase, in the national interest. If only, as my noble friend Lord Teverson said, we could work out what that phrase actually means. The definition of the policy framework put in place by the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, on behalf of the previous Government when they were going through the procedures for the enactment of the Lisbon treaty legislation was that it was something which would not be used all that frequently. It would be a reserve position, like some aspects of the European Union Act 2011. Some colleagues, including myself, were not very enthusiastic about that legislation; none the less, it set out a reserve position to be used occasionally, not frequently.

I suppose that the political pressure coming from the Eurosceptic portion of the main party in the coalition when the contents were being developed—important policy items that were driven by the Commission’s proposals and the responses from the Council of Ministers—meant that inevitably it looked as though an extra Eurosceptic atmospheric element was being implanted into some of those areas which really would not serve the nation properly. We had proof of that in the responses made by the technical practitioners and officers in the judiciary and the police forces of this country, who, with only one or two minor exceptions, disagreed with the Government on their original proposals. That was the telling reality which the European Union Committee and its sub-committees had to face.

I do not want to go on for too long, so I shall conclude my remarks with some general points that illustrate the background to this matter. The muddle continues, which means that at the end of this debate the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, who is an extremely popular Minister, will have to give some searching answers in order to reassure the House that this is moving along on the right lines. Some of us want to increase the number of opt-ins. I believe I am right in saying that many of us feel that some of the original decisions were hasty and foolhardy, having been made without proper consideration—two prime examples are the European arrest warrant and Eurojust.

It all comes back to the background to this. Many of us wish to see our continuing membership of the European Union armed, as we are now, with the Lisbon treaty, which is an exceptionally satisfactory treaty. Noble Lords will recall that we as the Liberal Democrat party in opposition, alongside the Conservative Party, did not wish to propose any amendments to the legislation that was to back up the content of the Lisbon treaty. That, I think, was the right position to take. It underscored the general feeling among most Members of this House, including the Cross-Benchers, that our commitment to membership of the European Union and our commitment to the future development of the European Court of Justice need not cause the anxieties that some Ministers in the bigger party of the coalition still feel about these European matters.

There is no fundamental attack on our sovereignty because no one is quite clear about the definition of “sovereignty”, let alone “national interest”—a term for which it is very difficult to give a satisfactory definition. I bet that it will not be given during this debate. “Sovereignty” is even more difficult. The definition given by some Eurosceptic MPs in the Conservative Party in the House of Commons and UKIP is probably for the kind of sovereignty that last existed in this country in 1912, before the First World War. Apart from perhaps the exception of countries in the world with very large populations such as India, the United States, Brazil, China and Indonesia—a very interesting developing country—there is no real intrinsic definition of what sovereignty means. The idea therefore that we are damaging our national interest or losing sovereignty by agreeing with judicial, police and anti-crime measures—which should just be common sense—and by working together with other colleagues is really of no interest whatever. This country already has more derogations, opt-outs, exceptions, exclusions and objections regarding individual policy areas of the developing European Union than any other single country. I notice that the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, did not—quite rightly—mention any of the member states that support our position apart from, once, Holland. Of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said, in the context of the negotiations, it would not be right to reveal those as negotiations proceed.

None the less, there are statements by Ministers in other member states’ Governments about these matters. I live in France as well and occasionally have a chance to look at the press there and in other countries such as Germany to see what they say. I think I am right in saying, without being foolhardy, that, of the 28 member states, no other one really supports our position on these matters at all. There may be individual items where there would be hesitation. I think the EPPO, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, is a very good example: it is probably premature and needs further thought and so on, and there is a logical reserve there about subsidiarity. That is perfectly respectable—most legislation in this country is still national rather than European. The latter is the minority. The layer of legislation, rules and disciplines for us in the treaties and European law obliges us to be a hard-working member of a united European collective of sovereign member states, agreeing by treaties between each other to do things together. That of course does not reduce individual national sovereignty but increases it automatically, while also increasing the collective sovereignty of the whole European Union.

In thanking Ministers for their responses, including the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, for his upcoming response to the debate today, I say to the Conservative part of the Government that it needs more self-confidence in the UK as a European member state, rather than the hesitations, withdrawals and drawing back, which seem to be so old-fashioned and immature. That is unusual for a country which has a remarkable history of a self- standing and self-confident parliamentary democracy.