Lord Liddle
Main Page: Lord Liddle (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Liddle
My Lords, I should open with a rare act of deference to the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch: I worked for three years in the European Commission, and for good measure I have a wife who works for the BBC, and I am immensely proud of both. It is humbling and a bit daunting to make your debut from the opposition Front Bench on an issue and in a Chamber where so many noble Lords from all sides of the House have made such a distinguished contribution to the cause of Britain in Europe. Regrettably, the same cannot be said of the Bill before us.
We have had, as many noble Lords have said, some wonderful contributions in this debate, including that from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon—one of my pro-European heroes—who in a memorable speech destroyed the logic of the referendum locks which are central to the Bill. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby—who probably sacrificed her chances of becoming Labour’s first woman leader and Prime Minister because of her commitment to Europe—wondered whether it would ever be possible to find the key to any of those locks. That was a wonderful speech as well, as was the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Brittan of Spennithorne, who in his 10 years as a European Commissioner built on the achievement of the Single European Act by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and drove through the single market and negotiated the Uruguay round. I thought that the end of his speech, where he said that he could find nothing in the Bill to commend to your Lordships, was a very clear and devastating statement for the Government.
There have also been excellent speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hannay, who served as our permanent representatives in Brussels. I think that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, used to be described in the Foreign Office as the man with the golden pen. Tonight, in a really wonderful speech, he proved that he also has a golden tongue. We have also had the benefit of a tremendously logical and crystal clear exposure of the Bill from the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, who, as a former secretary-general of the European Commission, served first and foremost the cause of Europe and, in doing so, the cause of Britain. Whatever the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, may think, I think, and we think, that it is possible to do both.
We have had many good speeches but I cannot mention them all. I would, however, like to mention some of the speeches from my own side—from our former Commissioners, the noble Lords, Lord Clinton-Davis and Lord Richard. The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, was particularly excellent and brilliant.
I did a count as we were going through the debate. We will have 37 speakers in all, 33 of them from the Back Benches. There has been one loyal Conservative supporter, the noble Lord, Lord Sheikh, from the Conservative Back Benches. There were also four anti-European speeches which basically criticised the Bill because it is too little, too late. The noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, made a speech which I think was as much about how the European processes of legislation are inadequate as it was about the content of the Bill.
There were traces of support in three of the Liberal Democrat speeches—that is how I would assess the position. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, was perhaps the most enthusiastic in her support, whereas the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, was perhaps somewhat qualified. I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, was hedging her bets as to which way the Liberal Democrats will eventually go. However, a total of 24 of the speeches, from all sides of the House, were critical of the Bill in some way. So I think that Ministers will have to go away from the debate today and think, “Never before can a government Bill on Europe have been so comprehensively rubbished by those with the most claim to understand its purpose and content”.
I do not want to be unfair to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for whom I have genuine respect. On Europe, I see him as the epitome of the cautious pragmatist. I am always conscious of the need not to get too carried away by my own Euro-enthusiasm, so I rather warm to his pragmatism. The noble Lord is a Eurosceptic in the proper sense of the word. He is not someone for whom the misleading label of Eurosceptic is a cover for rabid anti-Europeanism, which this bad Bill was designed to propitiate, but a sceptic who is open to rational argument and persuasion. As this House’s scrutiny of this Bill proceeds, I trust that those qualities of the Minister will be allowed every opportunity to shine through by his political masters in the coalition because he will have some persuading to do. On this side of the House, we will do our best to help him.
The Government have one good point on which they attempt to build their whole case for this Bill. The EU has a serious legitimacy problem and not just in Britain. But so do our national politics, which the anti-Europeans never refer to. They have a serious legitimacy problem as well. Even accepting that the EU’s legitimacy problem is graver, it is by no means clear that the Bill’s remedies provide credible answers to the question or even that it has identified the right set of questions.
There are two schools of thought about how to address the problem of legitimacy. One is “output legitimacy”—that is, making the EU more effective so that citizens will better comprehend its purpose and its benefits. The other is “input legitimacy”—that is, improving the process of transparency and democratic accountability of European decision-making. Output legitimacy—a Europe of results, as the Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso, once described it—has been a long-standing British goal. But to get a Europe of results requires a pragmatic attitude to the powers that the EU may need in a rapidly changing world to be effective and to achieve results. By no stretch of the imagination can that spirit of pragmatic flexibility which is necessary be on display in this Bill.
As my noble friend Lord Anderson of Swansea put it, Clause 4 puts a ball and chain around the British Government’s agreement to virtually every flexibility to improve procedures that the Lisbon treaty contains, particularly the passerelles and the simplified revision procedure. Its “significance clause” throws the whole process open to judicial review, which, in an extraordinary way, is something that the Government appear to welcome.
I thought that the key point was made by the noble Lord, Lord Williamson. There are already strict safeguards in place on the use of these flexibilities. Under the Lisbon treaty, passerelles and treaty amendments can be agreed only by the unanimous agreement of all member states, including Britain. Under our own law, which was passed in 2008, they have to be endorsed by positive resolution of both Houses of Parliament and, in the case of treaty change, by an Act of Parliament.
Given that these safeguards already exist, what is so fundamentally at fault in the status quo? Surely, in order to give the Ministers the flexibility they wish to make use of, we can amend this Bill to exclude some of the passerelles from its coverage to widen the test of significance, which would allow Ministers more room for manoeuvre when they seek the pragmatic need to improve decision-making.
Instead of widening flexibility, Clause 6 and Schedule 1 list a whole series of decisions that would automatically be the subject of many other referendums. As many noble Lords have pointed out, these go way beyond the fundamental constitutional issues, which in the judgment of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution should be where referendums are most appropriately used. Does it really make sense, for example, under Clause 6(5)(c) for the,
“participation by the United Kingdom in a European Public Prosecutor’s Office”,
to be subject to a referendum? Let us return to the real world because that is where we should be: a world of “Events, dear boy, events”, as Harold Macmillan famously put it.
Let me illustrate that with one example. In the negotiations on the Maastricht treaty in the early 1990s, the 15 member states of the European Union decided that justice and home affairs should become an EU competence, but set them apart in a separate pillar where the Commission would have a reduced role and unanimity in decision-making would apply. Within 15 years, in a Union which had then grown to 25 member states, there was unanimous agreement that in order to safeguard citizens against greatly increased threats of terrorism, cross-border crime, drugs and human trafficking, these decisions should be made subject to the normal Community method. The nation states of Europe decided this not because they are mad federalists who want a united states of Europe, but because they felt that in our porous world, this was absolutely essential for the protection and security of their citizens. We have to have the pragmatism to adjust in line with events. Yet this Bill restricts, hampers and cramps the pragmatic flexibility the European Union needs for the future.
What the Bill does offer is wonderful provisions enabling the British people to vote in a referendum on matters of supreme clarity and importance to them, such as the suspension of the emergency brake procedure and the substitution of the ordinary legislative procedure for the special legislative procedure. What the coalition does not seem to recognise—I am surprised about the Liberal Democrats here—is that qualified majority voting can be and often is in the British national interest. We had an example of that in the past few weeks when we accepted qualified majority voting on enhanced co-operation on patents to make it work. That was in our interests, but under this Bill, it could not have occurred.
I agree that the flexibility I am talking about has to be complemented by strengthening democracy and accountability in the way European decisions are taken. That is the input legitimacy side. For decades, because of its origins, Europe has suffered on this score because it was the child of diplomacy between what were very suspicious and sovereign member states. But thank God for that diplomacy, which has given us 60 years of unparalleled peace, prosperity, social justice and democracy, in contrast to the previous 60 years of great power rivalry, two world wars and unimaginable horrors. So we need to strengthen both the role of the European Parliament and the processes of accountability within member states.
The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, was right to say that Westminster politicians consistently underestimate the European Parliament. They tend to think of it as a talking shop, but now it has real power through the extension of co-decision. There is a point about this that is relevant to the Bill. British Eurosceptics dismiss the European Parliament, saying that its legitimacy is low, the turnout for its elections is low, few people understand the complexities of what they are voting for and media coverage is at best patchy. But these are all arguments that could equally be made about local government, and even more so about the possibility of multiple referenda on obscure EU issues with the likelihood, as my noble friend Lord Lea said, of 10 per cent to 15 per cent turnouts or less, which is the central feature of this Bill.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch
My Lords, we Eurosceptics do not say that the European Parliament lacks legitimacy just because it is a talking shop; we say it lacks democratic legitimacy because it cannot even propose legislation. All European legislation—now the majority of legislation in this country—is proposed in secret by the unelected Commission; it is negotiated in secret by the unelected COREPER; and it is decided in secret by the Council, now sometimes, as the noble Lord said, with the participation of that fraud of democracy, the European Parliament.
Lord Liddle
I am afraid the noble Lord is describing a situation which might, at a stretch, have described European decision-making 30 or 40 years ago but certainly does not describe the way in which co-decision works today.
In addition to the European Parliament, there is also a need for a stronger role for national Parliaments in European decision-making. The previous Government did a great deal to push this: the treaty of Lisbon introduced the yellow card procedure on subsidiarity; and the Act of 2008 strengthened the accountability of Ministers to Parliament for their conduct of European business. We should have a serious debate about how we can strengthen parliamentary accountability. The Commons could learn a lot from the excellent work of the European committee of your Lordships’ House under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Roper, the reports of which are listened to across the European Union.
What you get instead in this Bill is not a serious debate about these issues but an attempt to insert a sovereignty clause which has been described in the debate as irrelevant, dangerous, spurious, futile and as a grubby political compromise. What is the point of it? We look forward to the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace.
The Bill has failed to decide what it is all about; it is a fundamentally confused Bill. Is it about increasing parliamentary accountability, with the added possibility of occasional referenda on issues of fundamental constitutional importance; or is it about a powerless Parliament, with weak leadership, where the most trivial subjects are decided in multiple referenda? Is the latter really the coalition’s vision of the future direction of our democracy? It is reality TV democracy, as the noble Lord, Lord Howell, described it, as against representative democracy. If we can justify the approach to multiple referenda on Europe, why not referenda on everything from hanging to dangerous dogs? It is a fundamental constitutional point.
On the question of whether these referenda matter, the present Government clearly think that they do not because there is no likelihood, they say, that they will ever call a referendum in Parliament under their own legislation—they say that there will be no transfers of powers to Brussels in the present Parliament—so what we have here is not relevant to the present Parliament; rather, it is a crude attempt to bind future Parliaments. This is contrary to our normal constitutional practice, and that is why the Opposition will support a sunset clause in the Bill. We look forward to the unanimous support of the Liberal Democrats on this issue, which the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, promised us. I hope that that promise will be fulfilled.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, must know that if the Bill is accepted as permanent it would have a disastrous impact on Britain’s position in Europe. We would have no room for manoeuvre as the EU develops. We would see the gradual emergence of a two-tier Europe, a situation that the Foreign Office has fought for 30 years to prevent. This is in an age when a stronger European Union is needed.
Last week I was in Brazil, speaking at a conference on globalisation. A distinguished Brazilian ambassador told me something that is relevant to our whole thinking about the European Union. Until 1928, Britain was Brazil’s largest trading partner. From 1928 to 2009, it was the United States. In 2010, it became China. After the devastation of the Second World War, Europe, in Alan Milward’s famous phrase, came to the rescue of the European nation state but because Britain had never been occupied or defeated, it never saw quite the same need to be rescued. Now, the huge challenge for Europe is globalisation. For all the nation states of Europe, including Britain, globalisation poses the need for another European rescue of the nation state. Yet instead of thinking big about the issues and how these questions are to be addressed, the Government come forward with this miserable, pathetic little Bill. This is a coalition not of leaders but of panderers. The House has shown today why the Bill is simply not good enough.