National Parliaments (EUC Report)

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)]

My Lords, I count myself very much a new boy on the European Union Committee of your Lordships’ House, although I have served on sub-committees, which do such valuable work in monitoring what goes on. It was particularly instructive for me to serve under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, on this particular report on the relationship with the European Parliament.

We are all very familiar—much too familiar, as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, said—with the general disenchantment in this country with political institutions. It is true that the disenchantment with European Union institutions goes even deeper than that. It is striking to compare that with the atmosphere in Scotland during the referendum earlier this year. There was enormous enthusiasm, voter turnout of 85% and deep, long discussions for weeks before the referendum took place. This was completely different from the attitude towards the overall national institutions and, indeed, towards Europe.

It may be that absence makes the heart grows fonder, but in political terms we see no evidence that political distance from the institution to which you belong makes the heart grow any fonder at all—rather, the contrary. That is why, surely, the role of national parliaments in the European Union is so important and why the recommendations of this report can be so useful in dealing with the problem.

National parliaments, after all, if seen to be taking an active role in European Union affairs and not just holding our own Ministers to account—which I think we do very well—can make people feel that their own views and their own interests are being properly brought to bear on European institutions. It does not solve the whole problem of mistrust of European institutions, but it can and it should help. I am sure that other noble Lords are much more capable and experienced than I am to deal with the detailed recommendations of the report. I should like to touch in general terms on two aspects. One of them is the relationship with the Commission; the other is the relationship with the European Parliament.

When the committee visited Brussels to hold talks, I was struck by how responsive and how willing to discuss matters some commissioners and some of the very well informed officials there were. That was not true of all commissioners, or of all officials, but it was quite marked how much it helped to go and talk to the people there. The use of the reasoned opinion—the so-called yellow card procedure—has already been dealt with in detail by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, but one cannot help but be struck by this institution’s being a very good way of involving national parliaments. Very seldom is it possible for the national parliaments to get together and produce enough votes to convince the Commission that it needs to think again. On that one recent occasion to which the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, referred, what did that particular bit of the Commission do but simply, brusquely brush it aside and pay no attention whatever to what was said? That cannot be right and one hopes that it will never be repeated.

Fortunately, it seems that the new Commission is more conscious of the need to be responsive to the views of national parliaments. Let us hope that the new Commission will also be more flexible in the ways that could broaden the grounds for objection by national parliaments; for instance, the idea of a test of proportionality—the sledgehammer-to-nut type problem. Although that is not covered by the treaties, it should surely be possible, with the right will, to find informal ways in which that, too, could be taken into account by the Commission. Of course, attempting reforms on small matters such as this would not possibly justify treaty change, but if there is the will, then on a number of these things one gets the impression that it should be possible to find informal ways in which they could be carried forward.

It is right that we should press for a greater role for national parliaments, but it is right, too, that we should not just talk about the greater legitimacy that it would give to European institutions if our national Parliaments were involved, but also recognise the legitimacy of the European Parliament and take account of that, particularly since the Lisbon treaty.

I shall just make one point on the question of having greater contact with our own MEPs. This falls by the wayside all too often, as the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, said, often because of timetabling issues, with MEPs rushing back to their enormous constituencies when there is no time for them to stop here in Westminster. It would be helpful if we could have greater contact with our own MEPs, here in Westminster if possible, but otherwise with us going to Brussels, or to Strasbourg if the Strasbourg institution is still operating. That would be a great advantage.

In all these things, we need to somehow get through the problem that the European institutions look like some huge and impenetrable bureaucratic machine, and the further away we are from it the more impenetrable it seems. If we can enhance the amount of personal contact that we have with our MEPs, commissioners and people who work in the Commission, I am sure that this would help. In many ways, it could be much more effective than reams of official papers.

It is encouraging that the Government took a generally positive attitude towards the recommendations of the committee, and encouraging that the new Commission seems responsive to the idea of greater involvement by national parliaments. However, much needs to be done to increase the role played by national parliaments, and we will need all these favourable winds to see the necessary and practical recommendations in the committee’s report put into practice.

Hong Kong

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn (CB)]

My Lords, with demonstrations still going on in Hong Kong and emotions running quite high, it is quite hard to know how we here can comment helpfully on the situation there. But perhaps this debate launched by my noble friend Lord Luce gives us the opportunity to stand back and try to see these events in context.

It is now 17 years since Hong Kong became a special administrative region, or SAR, of China and the UK ceased to have any direct responsibilities for administration there. It is even longer—some 30 years—since the joint declaration on the future of Hong Kong was signed by China and Britain, and registered in the United Nations as an international treaty. That joint declaration has stood up well against the passage of time. There are accusations made now and then that China has broken the terms of the joint declaration but I personally know of no valid evidence that either China or the Hong Kong SAR has offended against the terms of that declaration. Of course what is going on in Hong Kong at the moment is not directly related to the joint declaration; rather, it is related to Hong Kong’s mini-constitution—the Basic Law which, as the noble Lord, Lord Sassoon, said just now, was passed as long ago as 1990 by the National People’s Congress of China. It is of course a Chinese document, not part of the joint agreement with the UK.

Looking from a distance at those massive demonstrations which have been going on now in Hong Kong for well over two weeks, it is hard not to be impressed by the enthusiasm of thousands of young people and their commitment to their own political future. It is hard too not to be impressed by the generally peaceful way in which the demonstrations have been carried out, particularly in their early days. It is hard to think of a great city in the world where this sort of demonstrating can go on for so long with so few serious incidents. Apart from the incidents referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, where the police did certain things, some of the credit for this goes to the Hong Kong police as well.

I said that it was hard not to be impressed by some of these things, but it is hard not to be concerned as well. After all, the objectives that the demonstrators set for themselves seem to have so little chance of being realised. Many of them say just that. For instance, there is the demand that the Chief Executive, Mr Leung Chun-ying, should resign. Perhaps that one was largely symbolic, rather like what occurs down the Corridor in another place when there are calls for the Prime Minister or other Ministers to resign.

However, the heart of the protesters’ demands, as other noble Lords have said, is of course that the election of the next Chief Executive in three years’ time should be on an open list of candidates put forward by the public, not processed by a nomination committee, nor with the list of candidates limited to two or three by that committee. That demand is not being made in a vacuum. After all, it is calling for the abandonment of what was laid down in the Basic Law way back in the 1990s, as well as what has been said by the National People’s Congress since. The Basic Law had what it called the ultimate aim of a Chief Executive elected by universal suffrage but that was to be on the basis of a nomination committee, which was to be broadly representative and chosen by what was called a democratic process. It really is hard to see those provisions being changed as a result of the demonstrations that have been going on and are going on now. Perhaps, indeed, as noble Lords have suggested, it might be better for those who are strenuously opposed to the provisions now being laid down to concentrate rather on matters such as how to form that broadly represented nomination committee and how it should actually operate in practice.

There is another, more serious concern about the demands being made. If the next Chief Executive is to be elected in 2017 for the first time ever by all the electors of Hong Kong, a proposal to do that has to be passed by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council—by a two-thirds majority, incidentally. If there is no such majority because people want more than is on offer, then the whole process of choosing the next Chief Executive falls back to what is there now—in other words, a choice made only by that committee of 1,200 people, not by universal suffrage. So the opportunity for a major step forward in Hong Kong would be missed, and that, to put it mildly, would be a great shame.

Looking beyond these concerns, there is an even bigger issue. Hong Kong and the lives of all its people can prosper, rather as my noble friend Lord Luce was saying, on the basis of trust, and that is trust between Hong Kong and mainland China. Hong Kong itself can play a full role in the development of China, with its financial expertise, its superb communications and its rule of law, only if there is trust between mainland China and Hong Kong. So when the dust settles on the present disputes, the hope must be that all those in positions of leadership, and all those enthusiastic young people concerned about the future of their society, will devote their efforts to building up that trust.

China: Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament

Lord Wilson of Tillyorn Excerpts

Thursday 22nd November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wilson of Tillyorn]

My Lords, I am no expert in nuclear affairs but I have listened with enormous interest to the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, and others who are expert in that subject. It seems that we seldom get a chance to talk about China in general in this House, so I hope I may be forgiven if I join those who have a broader-brush view of the subject of this debate. I fear that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, is very generous in thinking that I may be able to interpret what is happening in the new Chinese leadership and what they are all going to do, but I will come back to that, to the extent that I can, a little bit later on.

The crucial background to all of this is the astonishing, phenomenal growth of the Chinese economy over the past two decades. It really is unprecedented in history. Part of it is what you see physically on the ground—the astonishing rise of skyscrapers in Shanghai; the transformation of Beijing, particularly in the suburbs—as well as the less pleasant side of that, such as the destruction of some of the older parts of Beijing. I feel sad about the fact that although the courtyard house in the centre of Beijing that I lived in about 50 years ago survived until about two years ago, the developers have now caught up and on my most recent visit to Beijing I saw that it had gone—but to my pleasure I saw that many of the traditional parts of Beijing are being preserved, which is good news.

However, the really significant thing is not those skyscrapers; it is the fact that millions and millions of people in China have been raised out of poverty, and that is what really matters. More germane to what we are discussing is the fact that inevitably when a country like China becomes as economically powerful as it now is—and even more, will be in the future—what goes with it is a greater degree of influence and involvement in the rest of the world. That is perhaps doubly so when, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, has just pointed out, the growth of military expenditure has gone up very greatly in the past few years. It is very striking to look at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s assessment—it is only an assessment—of expenditure on military matters by China, which it puts at $130 billion in 2011 as compared to only $88 billion four years previously in 2007. These are enormous sums of money, and enormous changes must be going on in China’s military power.

It is clear that when China gets involved in international and nuclear affairs, as in the case of North Korea, it exerts great influence. It was striking that China was so outspoken in 2006 when North Korea did its first test of a nuclear device. It shows what can happen and can be done when China involves herself in these sorts of international issues.

Two things follow from the growth of power and potential influence. The first is a question of other people’s trust in China and China’s trust in other people, and of transparency. As my noble friend Lord Hannay said, it is important that there should be as much transparency as possible in China’s strategic and military aims and its military expenditure. Perhaps that matters in particular in the case of the territorial disputes which are now very apparent in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, because the countries in that region will want to know what China’s strategic policies are and to be able to trust what China says. The disputes have been there for a very long time; Chinese maps have covered those areas as part of China long before—if we are to believe this morning’s Financial Times, the map appears as part of the new Chinese passport. With China now a very powerful military country, these issues are clearly very delicate and the handling of them will be of enormous importance.

The second thing is China’s involvement in discussion of international issues and playing the major part that it should have in international organisations. Here perhaps, to the extent that I can, I shall say a short word about the new Chinese leadership. We do not know as much as we would like, but you can tell, looking at the list of the new standing committee of the politburo, that they are remarkably well qualified. Academic qualifications may not always produce good political leaders, but the academic qualifications are there. Let us take the individuals—to pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, said. The new president, Xi Jinping, comes from a family of those who were major players in the Chinese Revolution. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was disgraced, like many of that generation, during the Cultural Revolution. He returned to a position in Guangdong province just opposite Hong Kong, and it just so happens, to join the reminiscences, that, in 1979, when the railway line between Canton and Kowloon in Hong Kong was reconnected for the first time since the Chinese Revolution—how recent that is and how different it seems—I visited Canton/Guangzhou with the then governor, later Lord MacLehose of Beoch, a Member of this House. We met Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun and asked him what he did when he was in disgrace and under house arrest. He said, “Well, I read a lot of books. One of the series of books I read was Winston Churchill’s books about the Second World War”.

There is a hinterland there for somebody with that family as a background; somebody who then, as it were, did penance as a young man in the Cultural Revolution. There is also a hinterland with the new premier, Li Keqiang, who studied, among other things, English law. How they will face up to the massive problems that confront them, and how they will deal with the factional disputes which, as mentioned earlier, must have been a major concern over the past year at least, we do not yet know. However, perhaps one can take some encouragement from the hinterland they have.

I hope that will be of value in the broader question of involving China in international organisations and international discussions—all the things that have been mentioned in the debate today. Maybe, since many of those organisations were set up long before China resumed its place as a major world player, we shall have to adjust the way we deal with things and adjust bits of the organisations to encompass China. A new major power coming in sometimes will not be comfortable but I suggest that we should be prepared to adjust if necessary.

To return to the precise subject of this debate, it is clear to me that a greater involvement by China in crucial international issues must include the issue of multilateral nuclear disarmament and I hope, like other noble Lords, that Britain will play its role in that as well.