Commonwealth Countries and Overseas Territories: European Union
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Anelay of St Johns
As is so often the case—perhaps every single time—my noble friend is absolutely right.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
If the Government were to have a meeting in London of representatives from the overseas territories, how would the delegates from St Helena get here?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I am always impressed by the ingenuity of those who wish to attend meetings. However, the noble Lord makes a very important point. It is important that the Government continue to look very carefully at securing communications with St Helena, partly because of the implications it has for the St Helenians who live on Ascension Island. He is absolutely right.
European Council
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, the European Union Select Committee of this House has made excellent proposals on that, which this Government have endorsed.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said, is it not a bit embarrassing for the Minister that this matter is being reported to the House only as a PNQ and not being volunteered by the Government, particularly since one of the four things the Prime Minister is supposed to be arguing is greater powers to national parliaments? Will she remind the Prime Minister, and the Leader of this House, that the Government are responsible to Parliament, and not the other way round?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I have no embarrassment because this Government are responsible to Parliament, and my right honourable friend the Prime Minister is making it clear that he will make a Statement in another place. Both Houses will then obviously have an opportunity to comment on it. Perhaps the history books will show that I am wrong but I would be surprised if this House made a Prime Ministerial Statement in recent years when the Prime Minister was not a Member of this House. That would be an unusual step, and one that the Labour Party never took when it was in office. Perhaps the noble Lord will add that to the reforms that the Labour Party proposes for this House—that the Prime Minister can be here, too.
European Union Referendum Bill
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
When the noble Lord is talking about democracy, what does he think of the democracy where a party—the UK Independence Party, say—gets a large percentage of the vote but only one seat in the Parliament? Is that the vibrant democracy that he believes in?
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, no, of course not. If the noble Lord would care to read my peroration on this subject on 15 September, he will see that I opined that our first past the post system no longer produces a vibrant democracy in this country. The system which sends Members of Parliament to the House of Commons should be changed. Then one might find that the UK Independence Party would get one or two more seats.
As I was saying, Europhiles still try to frighten us that jobs would be lost if we left the EU. However, we would keep our free trade with the single market because we are its largest client. We have some 3 million jobs selling things to clients there, but it has 4.5 million jobs selling things to its clients here. Our Europhile friends then conveniently forget that only about 9% of our economy goes in trade with the single market, declining and in deficit; some 11% goes to the rest of the world, expanding and in surplus; but 80% stays in our domestic economy. Yet Brussels overregulation strangles all 100% of our economy.
Another Europhile silly one is to point out that we would still have to obey single market rules if we left the EU.
Lord Lea of Crondall
I have the highest respect for my noble friend but I am afraid that on this one he is wrong. In international trade, employers will claim we are at a competitive disadvantage if we do not do things together. This is what Europe is about. That is what Delors pointed out in Bournemouth in 1988.
If we were to say to an employer in Holland, Italy or Spain, “You can lead the race to the bottom”, all the employers, one by one, would scream that they had to go in that direction. I will be calling for a European identity card the way I am going, but if we had a floor for all European workers in all these areas, the comparison with the minimum wage—although we do not have a European minimum wage—would be valid in that all workers and employers would be protected. If noble Lords will allow me to conceptualise, we will have a European ring-fence—let us not start getting into the argument about competition with China or Japan; it is a good argument but quite different from the one we are considering at the moment. This is for the parties in the referendum debate to discuss, and they are valid points to discuss.
Another factor that will determine how Brexit would work would be, no doubt, the majority in the country and the state of agitation on how best to progress matters on the Back Benches of the Conservative Party—and indeed, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and everybody else in the House of Commons. To get to the nub of the point for this debate, and maybe to add some value to what I am about to say, we have a difficulty which would have been avoided if we had followed what we called in an earlier debate the OBR-type of authorship because all these amendments look to HMG to produce these studies. How will Ministers avoid the charge of cherry picking, as and when they deal with what are, with good will all round—and there will not be an oversupply of that—difficult analytical distinctions between things that we know and things that are going to be debated?
In conclusion, I will try to answer my own question.
EU and Russia (EUC Report)
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Tugendhat (Con)
My Lords, I thank my colleagues on the committee for their perseverance and very considerable help. We have had a long journey, which has required a great deal of hard work, mutual understanding and attention to each other’s views, and I am extremely grateful for their support. My only regret is that, under the rotation rule, so many of them will be leaving the committee at the end of this Session. I should also like to offer profound thanks to our two outstanding assistants, the committee clerk, Sarah Jones, and our policy analyst, Roshani Palamakumbura. I speak for all my colleagues in expressing our admiration, as well as our gratitude, for the exceptionally high quality of their contributions. Finally, I thank the usual channels for enabling this report to be debated so soon after its publication and before Parliament winds up for the election. I quite understand that, as a result of the speed with which it is being debated, there cannot be a formal government response, but I hope that the Minister will be able to reply to points made during the debate.
Before turning to my speech, I should say how very much we all look forward to the maiden speech of the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith. He will speak with great authority as a former diplomat in Moscow and Kiev. Having looked him up on Wikipedia, although it is not always accurate, I believe that he has charitable and business interests in Ukraine. An additional reason for me to listen very carefully to what he has to say is that he was educated at Ampleforth, though a great many years after I was at that school.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
I am not able to speak for other reasons, but I think that all of us who were on the committee would say that the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, chaired it with great skill. He was an exemplary chairman and we should thank him very much indeed.
Lord Tugendhat
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Lord—or I think I can say my noble friend—Lord Foulkes, after that accolade. It certainly gets my speech off to a good start. I thank him very much.
As the title of our report indicates, our focus is on the events leading up to the current Ukraine crisis and looking beyond it to the future. I should make it clear, as does the report, where we stand on the present situation. Russia has to understand that taking over other people’s territory, whether in eastern Ukraine or Crimea, is unacceptable. Such actions cannot be allowed to stand. For as long as the present conflict lasts, the European Union should maintain sanctions and be ready, if required, to step them up. Therefore, I welcome last week’s European Council decision, which is in line with our approach. Sanctions cannot be an end in themselves; they must be a means to an end. Do Her Majesty’s Government believe that there should be a process whereby progress in resolving the underlying dispute and its causes is linked to a ratcheting down of sanctions? In short, should there be a carrot as well as a stick?
I have another question. In our report, we argued that, while the dispute lasts, other avenues of communication should be kept open, such as cultural links in commemoration of our shared history in World War II. Do the Government agree, and have they and other EU Governments yet taken a decision about wreath-laying in Moscow on 9 May, which is of course a particularly difficult day for British Ministers?
I turn to how the EU should proceed in future in relation to Ukraine and other ex-Soviet republics. The committee believes that, while Russia has no right to dictate to sovereign states on its borders, those states and the European Union need to take account of Russian interests and sensitivities. The historic, geographical and current economic links between those states and Russia are such that, if the EU is to play a constructive role in helping them to develop their economies and societies, that cannot be done in the teeth of Russian opposition, as the present crisis shows. This will require big changes of attitude on the part of Russia, and I will say a word about that in a few moments. However, as a committee of the British Parliament, our policy recommendations are directed to the British Government and the European Union.
The first step, I believe, must be to set goals for the EU’s relationship with those countries that take account of how far short of meeting the criteria for EU membership they currently fall and how long it will take them to catch up. We should be prepared to help them close the gap but this will require tough love. In Ukraine and elsewhere, financial, technical, social and expert aid must all be subject to strict political and financial conditionality and accountability. Inevitably, this will create resentment against the donors, but these countries have indicated that they want to draw closer to us and our values, with a view to perhaps one day joining the European Union. We must therefore make it clear that the aid is to help them to do that, not to evade or defer difficult reforms, and certainly not to garner support against Russia.
With Russia, the challenge is of a different order: it is about how two large powers with different political and social systems can work constructively together as equals on common problems in a shared space. This will require sensitivity, mutual respect and an understanding on both sides of different historical perspectives. We on the EU side must try to understand why Russia feels as it does about EU enlargement and NATO. On the evidence that we took, I think we all agreed that President Putin’s views are to a large extent shared by most of the Russian population, and that any foreseeable successor to President Putin would most likely hold the same views. On their side, the Russians must try to grasp the impact that the USSR’s post-World War II expansionism has had on Europe’s collective psyche, and why so many countries on its borders feel as they do about drawing closer to the European Union. It is in this context that the committee believes that co-operation between the European Union and the Eurasian Economic Union might provide a way forward. Let us together explore how far and in what manner the rules and requirements of these two organisations might be aligned. This could provide a useful framework within which to develop closer EU-Russia economic relations and to develop the countries that border on both the European Union and Russia.
Much as we should like to see better EU-Russia relations, there is nothing starry eyed about the committee’s approach. We attach importance to holding Russia to the obligations it has freely entered into in respect of the World Trade Organization and the European Convention on Human Rights. We also believe that even if Russia is willing to tolerate corruption and lax business practices, to put it kindly, within its own borders, these must not be allowed to contaminate its dealings with this country or the rest of the EU.
I end with an exhortation. The committee believes that since the end of the Cold War there has been a decline in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s analytical and language skills in relation to Russia. Indeed, only last week we were surprised to learn at a seminar that we held that, in recent years, the head of the Russian desk has sometimes turned over on an almost annual basis, and that at least one recent holder of that office did not speak Russian. I do not know whether the Minister will be able to cast light on that. Whether or not she can do that, I hope that she will assure the House that if there is a Conservative Government after the election, they will devote sufficient diplomatic resources to the vital Russian relationship.
Ukraine
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(9 years, 9 months ago)
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Lord Campbell-Savours
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what discussions are taking place with the governments of other European Union member states regarding the handling of conflict in Ukraine.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours, and at his request, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in his name on the Order Paper.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Anelay of St Johns) (Con)
My Lords, on 9 February, the European Union Foreign Affairs Council discussed Ukraine and reconfirmed its decision to apply additional sanctions on a number of Russian individuals. The informal European Council on 12 February also discussed Ukraine and welcomed cautiously the implementation agreement reached in Minsk. The Foreign Secretary has travelled extensively around the EU in recent months. He has raised Russia and Ukraine consistently with his EU counterparts.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
My Lords, does the Minister recall that on 10 February she told the House that it was up to each individual NATO country to decide whether to supply lethal aid and that it was not the UK’s intention to do so? Is she aware that three days later, 20 armoured vehicles arrived in Ukraine, which President Poroshenko said would be armed and sent to the front to fight? This sale was organised by the Disposal Services Authority of the Ministry of Defence. How does she reconcile that?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I am able to reconcile it, but it is still a matter of concern and the noble Lord is absolutely right to raise it. Export licences were agreed in December for the sale of 75 Saxon light-armoured personnel carriers. However, they were not carrying weaponry when we sent them. The exports were assessed fully against the consolidated EU and national arms export licensing criteria. I am aware of the report to which the noble Lord has accurately referred. Twenty vehicles have so far been delivered to the Ukrainian MoD. We are reviewing the licence against the consolidated criteria under the circumstances. The circumstances appear to be that an off-the-cuff record was made by one person to the effect that this non-lethal equipment would be retro-fitted and used. The circumstances in which we supplied it fully kept to the commitment I gave to this House. Our subsequent action is, again, fully in accord with the commitment I gave to this House.
Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Livingston of Parkhead
The President of the EU, President Barroso, has made it very clear that TTIP is not about lowering standards. It was much the same with the single market which did not, I believe, create lower standards. EU laws and fundamental rights are going to be protected as part of these discussions and in discussions with the US. The US is not seeking to change that, although it regards some of the EU regulations as being too low and it also worries about similar matters.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister accept that there is genuine concern that if there is private investment from overseas in our health service and then an incoming Labour Government want to restore it into public financial control, there could be seriously high claims against us which would cause great difficulties? What is being done to ensure that that kind of claim does not cause great difficulties for the NHS in future?
Lord Livingston of Parkhead
I can assure the noble Lord that such claims would not arise because of TTIP, although there may be contractual claims which are a matter of domestic law. CETA, which was mentioned earlier, states:
“The EU reserves the right to adopt or maintain any measure with regard to the provision of all health services which receive public funding or State support in any form”.
It is quite clear that the decision about how these services are provided is a matter for national and, in the case of the UK, commissioning authorities. It is not going to be decided by TTIP or, indeed, any other trade agreement.
European Commission: President
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Warsi
My Lords, the view of the Government is that Europe needs reform. The next Commission and Commissioner must therefore focus on making Europe more competitive and democratically accountable so that it delivers the jobs and growth that matter to citizens. Of course, the European elections were a reflection of the fact that people do want reform in the European Union.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, does the Minister agree that equally important as who is appointed President of the Commission is who is nominated as the UK Commissioner? Will she give an assurance that whomever the Government propose to nominate, he or she will be subject to scrutiny by this Parliament?
Baroness Warsi
It is important that these incredibly important jobs in Europe are filled by the right candidates, and it is important that those candidates reflect the views of Europe in terms of the reform agenda, which were obvious during the European elections. It is also important that there is gender and geographical diversity in those candidates.
Climate Change
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Warsi
One of the great successes in the United States has been the development of shale gas. It is, of course, a policy of which the Government are hugely supportive. Diversifying our energy consumption and investing in green energy, as this Government have clearly done, will both help ensure that we meet our targets.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, is the Minister aware that if she is asked a quiz question, “What do the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, the noble Lord, Lord Bell, and the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, have in common?”, the answer is that we are all trustees of the Climate Parliament? In the Climate Parliament, Members of Parliament from all around the world agree with her and not with the noble Lord, Lord Lawson.
Baroness Warsi
I pay tribute to the Members of the Climate Parliament, which is clearly a noble group of people.
Sri Lanka
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
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Baroness Warsi
The noble Lord’s question goes slightly beyond the remit of this Question. I spent an hour and a half with the noble Lord and members of the community yesterday discussing exactly this issue and what follow-up work could be done post that report. I will, of course, write to him in due course as a follow-up to that discussion.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
I welcome what the Minister has said about the appalling human rights record in Sri Lanka. Is it not therefore rather strange that the President of Sri Lanka has been invited to participate in the ceremony in Glasgow Cathedral at the end of the Commonwealth Games to commemorate the start of the First World War? Would it not be wise to reconsider this invitation, as many organisations in Scotland are already asking?
Baroness Warsi
I am of the view that it is important for us maintain constructive engagement with the Government of Sri Lanka. I acknowledge that there has been some progress in relation to demining and resettlement, and that there has been some economic progress. I do not feel that completely disengaging from the Government is the right way in which to move them forward. I was not aware of that particular invitation but, at this stage, constructive engagement is the right way forward.
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock Excerpts(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Warsi
I am not aware of the specific amount of funding which has gone into DDR. Of course, we have a very large aid programme, as well as work around the preventing sexual violence initiative. I know that the Minister will be going to a DDR camp to look at how much further we can assist and encourage other donors to be supportive as well. Once the Minister returns, perhaps I may formally write to the noble Lord and give him an update.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, what discussions did the Prime Minister have with President Hollande about Franco-British co-operation at their recent meeting?
Baroness Warsi
My Lords, this clearly shows that I did not get through all my boxes this weekend. I did not read the complete update on the meeting so I do not know what discussions were had in this area. I am, therefore, 48 hours out date, but I will write to the noble Lord.