European Union Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 16th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, on the need for proportionality and I accept that things will happen that we may not be able to foresee when we are drafting legislation and giving a legal basis to aspects of future decision-making. However, before I speak to Amendment 39B, I should like to say a few words about Amendment 39A.

I welcome the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, of how the Labour Party has moved considerably to advance accountability. It is particularly welcome given that it failed to provide for that in the time that it was in office. I do not often find myself echoing the words of the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, very much, but this afternoon’s discussion on the budget rebate was a very useful one to remind us that even when it was in office it took accountability so lightly that when the budget provisions were changed, as it appeared from today’s discussion—and nobody on the Labour Benches rebutted it—in 2005, the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not even agree with that change. Yet it happened.

I turn specifically to Amendment 39A. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, explained what his amendment would do. I have some sympathy with the idea that you would have a level of scrutiny here that should determine what should happen—in other words, that Parliament should take a decision, rather than having a referendum. But my question would be to the noble Lord about his proposed new subsection (4B), which calls for a resolution of each House of Parliament. It is not entirely clear to me what would happen if one House of Parliament approved of holding a referendum but the other did not. Presumably, we would have a situation whereby a Joint Committee could have recommended a referendum and, potentially, the Commons would have agreed with the Joint Committee but perhaps this House would not. I wondered whether he would be able to tell us what would happen, in that case, on Amendment 39B.

In this variation, the review committee takes into account the significance, urgency and national interest at stake in its examination of the draft decision. Both urgency and national interest are, I say to noble Lords opposite, deeply subjective. We thought, with the European financial stability mechanism before us in February, that there was huge urgency in agreeing on what to do, because of the Greece, Ireland and Portugal scenarios. In fact one could argue that there is still considerable urgency, given where Spain—and, potentially, Italy—is. But the fact that other countries may be covered by that by the time the facility comes into being in 2013 suggests that something that one sees as urgent at a particular point in time may as events unfold not be quite as urgent as we thought.

Let me come to a consideration of a national interest. We know that this is notoriously difficult to define in international relations, which is one reason why this concept of national interest, which we all cherish and hold dear, has never been given legal force. I recall when I was a student reading the realist American scholar, Hans Morgenthau, who in 1951 wrote his book In Defense of the National Interest, which was contested throughout the 1950s, during the Cold War, and all through the 1960s, and is contested still today. It has never taken off as an argument that was legally testable in a court of law, so I would be concerned—while I see what the noble Lord means; we know the national interest when we see it. We can touch it; we can feel it; we can smell it. But to define it in legislation would be extremely difficult to do. I therefore suggest some caution about agreeing with the amendment. On Amendment 39B, I ask the noble Lord what he would do if one House went in a different direction from the other.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I would like to speak very briefly in support of this probing amendment, not because I am in total agreement with every detail of it but because I think that it addresses a very serious problem to which I alluded at the end of Second Reading, when I said that the effect of the Bill if passed unamended would be to lock the door and throw the key out of the window. I believe that that is an accurate description of what this Bill will do if not amended. These amendments are a sincere and quite well thought-out attempt to keep the key in the hands of the Government and the majority in both Houses of Parliament to some extent, subject to the reporting of a committee and so on.

I think that this issue should be taken a bit more seriously, frankly, than it is by those on the other side of the House. If the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, will forgive me for saying so, about the piece that she quoted—I hate to have to construe somebody else’s coalition agreement, which has nothing to do with me—the sovereignty issue to which she referred and which she read out is dealt with in Clause 18, not in the clauses that we are discussing now. We will probably have the delights of spending a whole day discussing that next week but it has nothing whatsoever to do with referendums. No one has ever suggested that it should be. The suggestion was that you should inscribe in the Bill some test of what the basis for European law in this country is. Anyway, I suggest that the Government really ought to think about this enormous multiplicity of referendums which are provided for and which cannot be dealt with just by casual remarks such as, “Oh well, don't worry—they won’t ever happen”.

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[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I have always found this argument very curious. To go to QMV requires a unanimous decision by those involved in taking the decision. The suggestion is that a country that is anxious to protect its national interest by blocking the move to QMV should nevertheless vote for QMV and for the power to be overridden by itself. That seems to be a turkeys-for-Christmas argument that does not add up in the real world. To imagine that by the muscle of QMV—I will not call it a sledge-hammer—one is going to get other countries to fall into line with a proposition that we might like to see pushed through is unrealistic. Why should they vote against themselves? That is not the way the pattern is ever going to work. The truth is this—my noble friend Lord Lamont touched on it—that the reason there is a long list of items in Schedule 1—

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

The Minister has, with enormous eloquence, destroyed the case for the Single European Act and the single market. I believe he was a member of the Government who negotiated and ratified that. I can accept that there are areas of unanimity that we will never want to allow to be subject to QMV, such as taxation. That is quite clear. We will not allow them to be, and because unanimity is required to move from that, it will not happen. There will not need to be a referendum or anything else. The root-and-branch description he has given of national interest is frankly completely contrary to the facts. The Single European Act, which provided for qualified majority voting in a number of areas of technical barriers to trade, which had been blocked for many years, has been to this country’s interest. The Germans, who voted for the Single European Act, found themselves being voted down on the banking regulation. They willed the use of QMV, and they accepted the consequences. This country has never been put in that position. I do not think we should generalise this argument. There is no dispute that there are areas where any British Government are going to refuse to move from unanimity to QMV.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I do not want to sound critical of the noble Lord, who has had such experience in these things, but I have to ask where he has been because this Bill is about the present and the future. It is not saying that we can unravel the Lisbon treaty or that we should revert from QMV back to unanimity on a vast number of things where there is QMV. This Bill does not take back any competences or powers, although there are people in this House and another place who would like to consider that some of the powers are somewhat out of date in the central situation and should perhaps be revisited. It is not about that at all. This Bill is about further treaty changes and further transfers of power.

Here I agree with my noble friend Lady Williams. I suspect that most people—not the noble Lord, Lord Pearson—think that we are right to be good Europeans and to be effective in the EU, that we have given the European Union enormous powers and that almost anything we want to do can be achieved within those powers and with legislation within the existing competences, but that the case for allowing a further expansion of the powers and competences without consulting people who feel that time and again they have not been consulted is a very weak case. The case for not allowing people is very weak, and the case for allowing them is extremely strong. That is what this Bill is about, so I do not understand the noble Lord’s intervention about the past. It just does not add up.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My noble friend puts the matter with wonderful clarity. The truth is that not only is it not in our interest to remove the locks on so many aspects that the noble Lord finds so difficult but that many member states, not all of them, like us want no such thing as a removal of the veto in so many areas. Indeed, this explains why most of the areas requiring unanimity are in the treaty in the first place, remain in the treaty and are in Clause 6 and Schedule 1.

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I have a strong preference for interpreting what I say myself and for not having it interpreted by another Member of the House. The reason I spoke as I did about the past was because the Minister spoke about it himself and expressed very strong views about the total unacceptability of movements from unanimity to QMV and about why it was inconceivable that any country would ever agree to that knowing that it might then be voted down. I gave one or two examples of why that was not inconceivable and why that had actually happened and had been in the British interest.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I am receiving strong hints—correct hints, I think—that not too much more time should be taken up from this Dispatch Box on these matters, and I will leave that debate aside for a moment.

This Bill is about a further expansion of competencies and powers; it is not about unravelling the past, because we are not in a position to do that, although some would like to. It remains unclear to me why the Opposition want more competencies and powers for the European Union; I am very interested that that is now the official position of the Opposition. I am longing to hear how they are going to deploy that and expand on it in the coming weeks and months.

Let me finally turn to Amendment 39B, which states that the committee must have regard to the urgency of the draft decision. Again, this shows a lack of understanding—possibly through my deficiency in being unable to convey how the system actually works, although there are other people in this Chamber who know it much better than I do. As I tried to explain previously on Amendments 16A and 16B, and as my noble friend Lady Falkner rightly said, one could think of few more urgent things than stabilising the eurozone. It still needs doing, of course, yet the use of the simplified revision procedure to enable member states in the euro area to set up the ESM to safeguard the financial and economic stability of the euro area will take 21 months to finalise. It was agreed in March 2011 and approved at the end of 2012. How could anyone consider that to be urgent? I do not understand what the “urgency” word is doing in that amendment.

There are a couple of other weaknesses in this probing amendment, which I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, who is extremely experienced in these matters, is well aware of. These amendments do not seem to take account of the work of our excellent scrutiny committees. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, thinks they are not paid enough attention. There is always the point that our scrutiny should be more effective, but it does go on and it is conducted with great vigour and assiduity under the leadership of people like the noble Lord, Lord Roper, in the European Union Committee of this House. It is within their gift to make recommendations similar to those prepared by the referendum committee at the time when Parliament came to debate the primary legislation required under Clause 6. It could be done there.

Finally, the amendments do not seem to take into account the need for primary legislation—the point that the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is reminding us of—in all these situations, which would provide for full parliamentary consideration of the decision in question through the rigour of the legislative process. It is therefore not clear how the provisions for resolutions of Parliament would fit with the requirements earlier in the clause for an Act of Parliament. Nor is it clear what would happen if one House approved the recommendations of the committee and the other House did not. Therefore, there is no need for the additional complications and opportunities for prevarication, because that is what we would get with these amendments, along with delay and opaqueness.

It is surely right that if a future Government really believe that a further transfer of power or competence from the UK to the EU is in the interests of this country, they should not be afraid to make the case to the British people and let them decide. Those who might be in favour of more powers to the EU and those who might be against should have the courage of their convictions—possibly more so than in the past—and be prepared to seek a mandate from the public, not from a small group of Parliament or some external committee. That is why I ask noble Lords to withdraw these amendments.