Lord Sewel
Main Page: Lord Sewel (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Lord Sewel
My Lords, at last we are moving towards the end of the debate, and the main lines on both sides of the argument have been laid down. That is accurate, but we must recognise that the weight of the argument has been solidly in one direction. It is a bit like the Barnsley by-election. Who will lose their deposit: the supporters of the Bill or those who say that it does not go far enough? The only thing we have to look forward to now, apart from the significant contributions of my noble friends Lord Tomlinson and Lord Liddle, is the winding up from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. I am afraid that we do so with some mischievous glee, because he has form on this issue. He is not the only member of the Wallace household who has such form, but perhaps we should not pry into what is said over the breakfast cereal: snap, crackle and pop.
At the beginning of the debate, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, prayed in aid the fact that in the other place the Second and Third Readings were passed without division, and there were no Divisions on amendments. This Chamber is at its best when it does not rerun the partisan jousts of the other place, but sets itself aside, across the Benches, and says to the other place, “We think that you have got it wrong”. On this Bill, the overwhelming weight of argument is that the other place so far has got it wrong and we should ask it to think again.
I could save some time for the House by indicating the noble Lords with whom I agree and whom I follow. The trouble is that that would probably take up as much time as saying what I want to say in any case. We all recognise the contributions of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, and of the noble Lords, Lord Richard, Lord Brittan of Spennithorne, Lord Davies of Stamford, Lord Hannay, Lord Taverne and Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, to name but a few.
As the noble Lord, Lord Richard, said, this is a bad Bill. It is bad in its construction and bad in its underlying methodology. As a legislature, the least that we should expect of the Executive is that they should bring forward Bills, especially on constitutional issues, that are underpinned by an organising principle. That principle should inform and give coherence to the entire Bill. That is singularly lacking in this case. Not only does the Bill lack any such unifying principle, it is schizophrenic. It is built on the conflicting principles of popular sovereignty on the one hand and parliamentary sovereignty on the other.
The guts of the Bill put in place detailed mechanisms establishing what are in effect binding referendums. The Bill makes it clear that the process of agreeing a transfer of powers and competences to the EU will be an act of Parliament followed by a confirmatory, binding referendum, all followed by a unanimous decision of the Council. I said that it makes it clear, but it does not quite do this because of the significance test. When I read the details of the test, I was tempted to think that it is only there in order to provide outdoor relief to the legal profession, because I am sure that many members of that profession will make a great deal of money by arguing about what is significant and what is insignificant.
I have two points to make. Is it sensible to create a situation where Parliament’s decision is set aside on the basis of a referendum with the possibility—indeed, probability, I am afraid to say—of a derisorily low turnout? I know that that may be difficult for some noble Lords to accept, because I know that some Members of your Lordships’ House and the other place are moved almost to paroxysms of agony and ecstasy when it comes to matters European. However, I doubt whether that is the position of most electors. I think that they will take a slightly more proportional and measured approach and stay at home. Therefore, a very low turnout is a real possibility, setting aside the position of the Government in the Council and the measured consideration of Parliament. I just ask whether that is a sensible way to proceed.
Secondly, on referendums, let us remember the de Gaulle problem, which basically boils down to the fact that a Government can determine the question that is asked but they cannot determine the question that the electors answer. The French people cared little about de Gaulle’s very sensible proposals on reform of the French Senate and regional government in France, but they did know that they had had enough of the general and they voted against him in the referendum in order to get rid of him. That had nothing to do with the content of the referendum, and that situation is likely to be rerun if we go down the route that the Bill invites us to go down.
The main part of the Bill establishing mandatory, confirmatory referendums is couched in terms of popular sovereignty. Then we suddenly come to Clause 18, and with that clause everything changes. Popular sovereignty disappears and is replaced by a rather curious assertion of parliamentary sovereignty. In terms of a principled argument, Clause 18 turns everything on its head and stands in flat contradiction to everything that has come before in the Bill. A legislature deserves something better—at least an attempt at internal consistency and coherence. I believe that it is just possible for parliamentary sovereignty to coexist with a diluted form of popular sovereignty, with advisory referendums on clearly significant and important issues. However, it is difficult to see how parliamentary sovereignty can, over the longer term, survive a sustained onslaught of mandatory, binding referendums, particularly when we introduce them on a whole series of detailed propositions with which, I am afraid, the electorate may have very little direct interest.
Finally, it is clear that the primary political purpose of the Bill is to perpetrate a constitutional outrage, which, as has been mentioned before, is to bind successor Parliaments. I think we all recognise that, and in that case the Government’s acceptance of a sunset clause is a minimum requirement.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am talking about the underlying issue that the Bill addresses, which is that of popular consent and distrust and how we rebuild popular consent.
This Bill is the product of the coalition agreement and a compromise between initially very different positions. It is intended to draw the line underneath popular accusations that power is slipping silently and conspiratorially from London to Brussels. To demonstrate to the public that there will be a transparent process of scrutiny, the competences will not creep away but the complex and opaque processes of EU decision-making —sufficiently complex that my wife and I used to make a good living out of trying to explain them—will have to engage with public acceptability and public persuasion.
The European policy of this Government is a product of coalition. It necessarily differs from what a Conservative -only Government would have pursued, under pressures from their own Back-Benchers, and from what a Liberal Democrat-only Government would have achieved. That is democratic politics and constructive compromise. A certain amount has been said about coalition. Indeed, I felt that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was suggesting that this coalition is somehow not entirely legitimate because it has not got an appropriate mandate. Because it is relevant to this, I would remind her again a little about where we were with the previous Government. That was an informal coalition between Brownites and Blairites in which, at one stage, according to Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s party kidnapped a Treasury official from Brussels to Luxembourg in order to try to discover what the Treasury was negotiating on financial concerns.
In the Lords, we now have a Labour alternative team of moderates proposing strong pro-European approaches. I note that it is a very different team to the one we had on AV, rather as one has an attacking and a defending team in American football. We look forward to detailed discussions on this but we start from where we are with the British public. We have their deep mistrust of the European Union. As we talk about the role of Parliament, we also need to remember that we have a mistrust of Parliament and the complex issue of parliamentary sovereignty. The Government, in their programme and policy, are moving to address the causes of that mistrust. The Bill sets out to address the anxieties of the British public.
Several noble Lords have mentioned the position of the press, which is part of the problem. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, that my understanding is that those sections of the press which are the most vigorous defenders of British sovereignty are indeed those which are most preferentially owned by people domiciled outside the United Kingdom. That is one of the many paradoxes of the situation we are now in. Yet the United Kingdom is no longer an exception. If one looks at public opinion in most other EU states, that has also become more sceptical, as have the press there. Part of that—here I address the noble Lord, Lord Liddle—is that the EU itself has changed a great deal. It has become a great deal more complicated and it is therefore much more difficult to explain, particularly to the younger generation, why the EU is a public good which we should expect our public to accept.
The Brussels bubble itself is one in which policy pursues an easy and seductive competence creep. I read a recent Policy Network document which was talking about how to revive social Europe. Indeed, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was its author.
Lord Sewel
Will the Minister give an assurance at this stage in his winding up that he will address the key issue, which is reconciling the concept of popular sovereignty with parliamentary sovereignty?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I will move to that very briefly.
However, there is a problem of competence creep and that is part of what we need to address in improving the quality of parliamentary scrutiny on the full range of EU legislation. My noble friend Lady Falkner asked about work on the balance of competences, and the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, talked about the problem of competences and the working time directive. I can confirm that, in line with the coalition agreement, work is now being undertaken to look at the issue of competences and at the way in which EU legislation is implemented in the UK, with concerns about overimplementation, and, extending from that, to look at issues of subsidiarity. We take the issue of parliamentary scrutiny of justice and home affairs particularly seriously. As noble Lords will be aware, my noble friend Lord Howell made a Statement last month setting out the Government’s intention to introduce new and strengthened arrangements for parliamentary scrutiny.
On the constitutional implications of the Bill, I am more and more struck as I listen to this debate, just as I was when I listened to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill debate, by the fuzzy nature both of the British constitution and of the understanding of it in this House. The Bill proposes a triple lock: resolutions in both Houses, Acts of Parliament and referendums. Much of the discussion that we have had today has been on one of these locks, the referendums, but I stress that parliamentary scrutiny and the improvement of it in both Houses is an important part of the Bill.