Balance of Competences
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Hague
Certainly, public disillusionment with the European Union is the greatest that it has ever been. We should be clear about that. I remember my hon. Friend being there on the day we launched the campaign to save the pound; let us be thankful that it was successful. We had precious little help from the other side at that time. [Interruption.] I seem to remember that a certain Prime Minister—the one before the last one—was very keen on joining the euro, so it was important to put him off, which we helped to do. A referendum, however, is a separate question from this exercise. I am not saying that this review is the only thing that will happen in our policy on the European Union. Much else will be happening over the coming months. My attitude towards a referendum is as I expressed it earlier. Discussion about it and the debate within all the political parties about what should be proposed for the future will carry on at the same time as this review.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, but will he reflect on the fact that some years ago President Giscard d’Estaing himself—a wise European—said that the United Kingdom would need to negotiate for itself a special status in the European Union? I commend my right hon. Friend’s recognition of public opinion, but at least two thirds of public opinion favours a looser trade and co-operation relationship with the EU, rather than this disastrous process of integration. Will he shout from the rooftops that only a Conservative Government will deliver the renegotiation that British people want?
Mr Hague
Like my hon. Friend, I remember the statements of President Giscard d’Estaing. I am sure that my hon. Friend will make extensive contributions to the review, and I look forward to them. Although I shall of course be shouting from the rooftops about what a Conservative Government will do, I shall not be doing so from the Dispatch Box now, given that I represent a coalition Government as Foreign Secretary. However, I look forward to doing the shouting at the appropriate time.
Iran
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
We have yet to hear whether the right hon. Gentleman is going to support the amendment or the motion—[Hon. Members: “The amendment.”] I beg his pardon. Were the implicit military threat to be taken off the table, with whom in the current regime would we negotiate? Is that not a matter of considerable complexity? I am all in favour of negotiation, but with whom should we negotiate? Is that not part of the problem?
Mr Straw
I have had a serious problem in my right ear since 1981, and I can tell the hon. Gentleman that there is a very good consultant just across the river at St Thomas’s, on the NHS. I have been treated there for 30 years. I think it was within the hearing of the House and Hansard when, within about my first two sentences, I spelled out that I would support the amendment moved by the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington. I apologise if it did not quite get as far as the bubble in which the hon. Gentleman sits.
European Council
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
This debate is being conducted between some right hon. and hon. Members with an extraordinary air of complacency and myopia. The European Union is on the edge of the most appalling crisis—a self-inflicted crisis that many of us predicted when the euro was first conceived in the early 1990s and is now being fuelled by blindness and denial. The fundamental problem is that the euro cannot work—it cannot succeed. There are fundamental structural flaws that are destined to cause the euro eventually to fly apart into separate currencies. I do not want the euro to fail, but the fact remains that the crisis will go on and on until it does fail, so we should start to ask ourselves whether it is, in fact, in our interests that it be resolved quickly and in an orderly fashion, instead of waiting for the markets to do their work.
The fundamental structural problem is that the different national components of the euro represent very different economies, with different surpluses and deficits. The 2010 figures for trade in goods in the eurozone, provided by the Library, show that Germany has a surplus in exports to the other eurostates of €43.4 billion. Other countries have very large deficits: France’s is 4%, Greece’s 6% and Portugal’s 9%. Unless there is a system of fiscal transfers permanently operating to compensate for those surpluses and deficits, the European economies will become ever more out of balance. The debt problem has been greatly exacerbated by artificially low interest rates in countries that were used to much higher interest rates and therefore borrowed vast sums.
Mr Leigh
Is it in our interests that the other countries succeed in creating fiscal and monetary union? We will be excluded from a massive monetary union, which historically—for centuries—we have tried to avoid. Or is it in our interests that the euro gradually breaks up in a reasonably orderly way?
Mr Jenkin
I do not subscribe to the view that British foreign policy should be constantly to try to divide and rule on the continent. Actually, I think it would be in our interests if the euro succeeded with a democratic settlement in the European Union, but for the euro to succeed with 17 nations the institutions would be required to take on much more power, to accumulate much more taxation and to distribute money much more than they do now. I put it to the House that because there is a democratic deficit in the EU, which everyone acknowledges, the institutions lack the legitimacy and the authority to be able to impose their will across the democratic nations of the EU. There is a fundamental lack of consent to what would be required to impose the necessary discipline.
The problem with the fiscal union treaty is that it is a case of Germany trying to write German rules for the whole eurozone. That will not work—it cannot be sustained—and the result will be the break-up of the euro, so we had better start planning for that eventuality now. There are three things we should do, the first of which is to have a plan and not pretend that a break-up will not happen. I accept the suggestion made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) that the plan should be made in secret, but there should be a plan and the IMF should be its guardian. Secondly, the plan should be clear on what liabilities will be denominated in what currencies as each country comes out of the euro—easy for sovereign debt and very complicated for commercial paper, but it has to be done. Thirdly, the G20 must be ready to provide the liquidity needed to deal with the defaults that will occur as each country comes out of the euro—massive defaults that will require massive central Government printing of money to recapitalise the European banking system.
That can be done and it has to be done. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was absolutely right to veto the treaty on 9 December. He knows there can be no going back on that decision, because to do so would leave him a position where he might as well have not vetoed the treaty, and then where would we be?
European Union
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I will leave the matter of the institutions—it is obviously too sensitive a point—but why would South Korea not have agreed a bilateral arrangement with a country such as Britain in any case, given that we are one of its allies and so on? Why would the South Koreans want to take protectionist measures against us if they are prepared to make a free trade agreement with the rest of the European Union?
Mr Lidington
The terms that one is able to extract in the context of such a negotiation will be more favourable if one can negotiate as part of a bloc of 500 million consumers. What the EU was able to offer South Korea collectively was access to a market of 500 million. The UK on its own would have been able to offer access to a market of 50 million to 60 million consumers. That is not an insignificant number, but it is a tenth of the size of the European Union as a whole. That difference in scale means that European countries have greater weight and leverage when they are able to get their act together and negotiate en bloc.
The third reason I believe it remains in our national interest to stay an active member of the European Union is that membership enhances our ability to influence events abroad. On issues where there is a genuine common European interest, where the national interests of the 27 member states converge, it makes sense for those member states to act together, pool our influence and speak with a united voice. One voice representing 500 million consumers is heard more loudly in Beijing, Delhi and Brasilia than 27 separate voices. However, it is equally the case that where EU member states do not agree, it is right and proper that, as sovereign nations with our own national interests, we speak and act independently. It is also right that foreign policy and security and defence policy should remain matters where unanimous agreement is required for a European position to exist.
Emma Reynolds
Yes, we are going to divide the House, and if the hon. Gentleman had let me get to the second page of my speech, which I intend to be shorter than that of the Minister for Europe, he would have found that out.
I oppose this motion—we oppose this motion—as it bizarrely commends the Prime Minister for the outcome of last week’s summit. The truth is that it was the worst possible result for the country. We have never been so isolated: 26:1. I say to the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) that there is a difference between us and the other nine non-eurozone member states because the other nine are at least in the room, contributing to a decision that will have an impact on our economy. If the eurozone crisis deepens, it will have profound implications for our economy.
Emma Reynolds
I promise hon. Gentlemen that I will give way, but I am attempting to give a shorter speech than the one we just heard.
Sometimes a veto is necessary as a last resort, but it is a negative device that can be used to prevent change that we oppose. Back in the early 1990s, John Major used the veto at the Maastricht treaty summit. He got something in return—an opt-out from the single currency, which the Labour Government used to full effect while we were in office. However, the veto cannot be used as a positive device to force change that we want, as the Prime Minister demonstrated last week. He failed not only to secure the changes he demanded, but to stop the changes he opposed. The former Prime Minister got something in return for his veto; the current Prime Minister got nothing in return. It was a phantom veto; it failed to stop anything.
The truth is that the UK has never been outvoted on financial services in the 38 years during which we have been a member of the Common Market. The Prime Minister has defended nothing—walking out of the summit, leaving us weaker, not stronger. It is the greatest failure of peacetime diplomacy in more than half a century. Our partners do not recognise the Britain that walks away from a battle. As one French woman said in a vox pop to The Observer at the weekend:
“I’ve never seen the British give up.”
This is not the bulldog spirit; it is a form of diplomatic defeatism.
It is not surprising that other European leaders did not even give the Prime Minister a hearing. They were completely taken by surprise by a list of demands that did not seem to have anything to do with the discussions in the summit. Not one single line in the summit’s conclusion refers to financial services. Baroness Thatcher pioneered a single market to be decided by qualified majority voting and signed the Single European Act in 1986. The Prime Minister sought to overturn that decision last week, arguing for a removal of qualified majority voting in single market decisions. Needless to say, the Prime Minister’s handbag was not as powerful as Baroness Thatcher’s.
Emma Reynolds
First, had we been in government, we would not have been asleep at the wheel for the first nine months of this year. Secondly, we would have built alliances, not burned bridges, and we would not have found ourselves in a situation at the summit in which nobody agreed with us. We had no support from any of those member states.
It is clear that the Prime Minister spectacularly mishandled the summit by failing to prepare the ground, failing to talk to European leaders in advance and failing to build alliances. The Foreign Minister of Poland, until fairly recently one of our strongest allies, singled out the UK for criticism in a recent speech. It now transpires—[Interruption.] Conservative Members might be interested to hear about this. It now transpires that even our lead diplomat in Brussels, the British permanent representative, learned of the Government’s negotiating position only 48 hours before the summit. What a cack-handed way to prepare for important negotiations. No wonder the blame game has started in Whitehall between the Treasury and the Foreign Office.
Chris Heaton-Harris
Indeed I have.
Other myths have been circulated. It has been suggested, for instance, that the Prime Minister’s actions caused Britain to lose a seat at the table. Given that the United Kingdom was never going to take part in the Merkel-Sarkozy pact and thus potentially be subject to EU sanctions—I assume that the Opposition would be quite comfortable with that—I would not expect us to be invited to the monthly EU meetings that will start in January 2012. If the Prime Minister had signed up, the United Kingdom would still not be sitting at that table, because we are not in the eurozone, The veto changes mean nothing structurally in terms of UK influence at those meetings.
Another myth is that the Prime Minister’s veto has created a two-tier European Union. That is complete tosh. We have a eurozone of 17, and a whole new group of Schengen countries. In 2004, when we signed up to the EU accession, a group of countries decided to allow entry to workers from the accession countries, but only Britain allowed them to hold the burgundy passport immediately. Other countries decided to move at a completely different speed.
Chris Heaton-Harris
I entirely agree. The Prime Minister’s actions were, in fact, a timely reaction to the signs of caucusing of the 17 eurozone countries, and those countries that rely almost completely on Germany for their trade.
There are so many myths. There is, for instance, the myth perpetrated by the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders—or, at least, the person who wrote what was on her autocue—that the Prime Minister used his veto to protect a tiny part of our economy. In fact, financial services accounted for a £35 billion trade surplus last year, 2 million jobs in the United Kingdom, and £54 million paid to the Exchequer in taxes.
The truth is that these constitutional treaty changes are the result of yet another EU summit that skirted around the problem of eurozone debt without paying off one cent of it. Many commentators, and some politicians here and abroad, may well have had a fun weekend pointing fingers at the UK and pulling shocked faces at the fact that a British Prime Minister dared, after nearly two decades, to engage properly in negotiations by setting out a solid position at the beginning rather than just saying yes. Let us now get down to negotiations. Let us talk. I commend this excellent motion,.
European Council
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
It is an unexpected pleasure to be opening this debate, and also that it is taking place at all. We should, of course, have a full-day’s debate in the main Chamber in advance of a summit of the importance of the European Council summit that is about to take place. Under the previous arrangements there would have been such a debate, but the Government somehow do not seem able to provide for one under the new arrangements. Nevertheless, it is a great honour for me to have been given the responsibility to set out what many of us feel should be addressed at the forthcoming summit.
There is no doubt that this is a momentous moment in the history of Europe, and you do not need to take my word for it, Mr Turner. Speaking in Toulon last Thursday, President Sarkozy of France said Europe must be “refounded”, and he is talking today about the crucial historic moment of this summit. I think he is upping the ante a bit, perhaps unnecessarily, because no treaty will be signed at the summit. The participants will merely be agreeing issues in principle, and there will be long and arduous negotiations about the treaty text before anything is signed. In her speech to the Bundestag last Friday, Chancellor Merkel of Germany said:
“We have started a new phase of European integration”,
so the idea that nothing much of importance is happening in Brussels except trying to save the euro is a distortion.
The leaders of France and Germany came together on Monday to hammer out their vision, not just of how to save the euro but of the future of Europe. There will be only one real issue on the agenda in Brussels tomorrow: the final desperate act of European integration—fiscal union. In other words, the issue will be the formation of economic government of the 17. According to President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel in their letter to Herman Van Rompuy, this will
“need a renewed contract between the Euro area Member States”.
The coalition agreement never envisaged confronting a major change to the EU treaties in this Parliament. The EU was meant to be off the agenda and, indeed, the leadership of the Conservative party deliberately downplayed the issue of Europe, both before the election and in the first part of this Parliament. The Government have, therefore, found themselves ill-prepared for this crisis.
Official rhetoric on the EU might have moved on a bit from the days of John Major, but the substance of policy remains remarkably similar. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister now says that there should have been a referendum on the Maastricht treaty, but he has yet to criticise its substance. From today’s perspective, does anyone seriously doubt that John Major should have vetoed monetary union? Maastricht also established the principle of the two-speed EU, with its dangerously comforting opt-outs. Subsequent treaties, not least the Lisbon one, have proved that two-speed, multi-speed, or whatever you want to call it, means only one federalist direction for the EU, with the UK having less and less influence, since opportunities for veto have been given away more and more. As a result, at this summit the UK is presented with the unenviable dilemmas of the forthcoming decisions. Once again, the UK is reacting to an agenda set by other member states, and Ministers are left managing what can be described only as a retreat. To cite another of the Prime Minister’s phrases,
“we cannot go on like this.”
The Prime Minister has made it clear that
“the bottom line for us is always what is in the interest of the UK”,
and I agree, but what is the bottom line? In his article in The Times yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he was still committed to forging
“a new kind of Europe…a more competitive, dynamic and outward-looking Europe…a Europe that has the flexibility of a network, not the rigidity of a bloc. A Europe that looks beyond itself with its eyes to the horizon, and recognises that it must change fundamentally or fall behind. A Europe that cherishes its national identities as a source of strength.”
Well, amen to that. I do not think that a single member of the Conservative party would object to that, or indeed that a single person in the country could. But we have heard this before. It is an echo of the previous Prime Minister’s plea for a “global Europe”. Tony Blair spoke of a Europe that is “democratic”—one thing that the eurozone will not be—and John Major spoke of a Europe that recognises that
“the nation state is here to stay”.
These British visions of a different kind of EU have been proffered and offered to various EU summits down the decades, but they are not on the agenda of our fellow member states, or of the EU Commission and the other EU institutions. They never have been, and other member states are not spontaneously going to come round to our way of thinking. They are not interested in discussing those visions.
The Government say that they might veto the treaty changes discussed at the summit, unless the treaty has
“the right safeguards for Britain…around things like the importance of the single market and financial services”.
It is very important that the Prime Minister has put that on the record, but it gives the lie to the idea that it is unthinkable for the UK to refuse to accept the EU’s plans for fiscal union without making demands of our own. We are constantly being harangued by people, who say that if we are asking questions about the summit we must somehow want to wreck it, but the Prime Minister himself has offered the prospect of a veto, so they need to make that accusation to him as well, and of course that would be ridiculous. I commend the Prime Minister for making it clear that he will stick up for British interests.
There is no need to delay ratifying treaty changes unless other member states object to the reasonable demands that the UK Government should make. Then it will be our European partners holding up the summit, not the UK. The UK must hold out for the fundamental change in our relationship with the EU that fiscal union will make indispensable. The Prime Minister reminds us what this is really about. It is about competitiveness, jobs and the growth of our own economy in the short, medium and long term. And, I have to say, I commend the words of the Deputy Prime Minister, who warned of the dangers of a huge “club within a club.”
Yes, that is exactly the threat we are now facing. Our prosperity and competitiveness are already under constant attack from the burden of EU regulation, and the agency workers directive and the working time directive are typical of the costly and unnecessary regulations that destroy jobs. It is estimated that these two laws alone cost the UK economy £3.6 billion per year, and if we are not prepared to deal with that, we are not dealing with the problem we face. The British Chambers of Commerce calculate that the cost of additional EU regulation introduced between 1998 and 2010 is a staggering £60.75 billion. A recent Open Europe report entitled “Repatriating EU social policy: The best choice for jobs and growth?” has estimated that EU social law costs UK businesses and the public sector £8.6 billion per year.
This afternoon I wish to set out how the Government are asking us to believe two unbelievable things. The first is that a move towards fiscal union and even closer integration in the eurozone will not fundamentally alter the UK’s relationship with the EU, and the second is that the best time for the UK to negotiate to repatriate powers will be not now but in a few years’ time, after the changes in the eurozone have been made and by which time the eurozone crisis will supposedly have been settled. I will then set out what the UK must demand, and is entitled to demand, if fiscal union is to proceed, and finally I will explain why a referendum in the UK on the treaty changes will be desirable, necessary and probably inevitable.
First, fiscal union in the eurozone will utterly change the relationship with the EU, as it will fundamentally alter the nature of the EU itself. We will be linked by treaty to what will effectively be a new economic state, and we will be like a rowing boat dragged along in the slipstream of a supertanker. The EU will be dominated by a bloc of 17 euro countries with shared economic priorities and structures of government—that huge club within a club.
Social policy is just one area in which EU policy is operating contrary to the UK’s national interest. Let us not forget, too, the direct financial costs of EU membership: a net contribution of £7.6 billion by the UK this year, a sum similar to the aid budget and equivalent to around a quarter of our defence budget. Let us remember that all those pressures on the UK arise from our existing terms of membership. That is how the EU institutions operate against our interests. If they are doing that now, what will it be like in future?
The reality of what is happening in the EU was very well set out in The Spectator today by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. He rightly warns that the EU17 is planning to become
“a new and very powerful country which can dominate us”
through the existing treaty arrangements. The article continues:
“His concern is that a fiscally united eurozone will spend as a bloc, tax as a bloc — and, when it comes to European summits, vote as a bloc.”
As he is right to go on to say:
“It is wholly unacceptable to have a new bloc in which we would be permanently outvoted… if they want to go ahead and form their new country, we want to get the power to run our country back.”
Secondly, the Government are asking us to believe that we will have a better opportunity to discuss our fundamental concerns after the new EU treaty changes have been agreed and ratified, perhaps after another two or three years. Does anyone seriously believe that Germany and France would agree to that? What leverage would we have then? Why would they need to listen after we have already signed the new treaties? This is not only the best opportunity for us to renegotiate our terms of membership; it is likely to be the only one, short of taking unilateral action.
Let us, in passing, dispose of another myth. Unless all EU27 member states agree to those changes, there will be no fiscal union. Even a treaty of the 17 member states would need the support of all member states, or none of the EU institutions could be involved with the new proposed arrangement. That is why my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was absolutely right when he stated in The Times earlier this week:
“These institutions belong to all EU states”.
We should not allow them to be hijacked by a wholly new organisation.
A treaty change through article 48 of the treaty on European Union—the internal treaty revision procedure—would still require ratification by the UK. Any agreement falling short of fiscal union that avoids treaty change, such as altering protocol 12, as proposed by Herman Van Rompuy in his report, “Towards a stronger economic Union” would still require the UK’s approval at the European Council. There is, therefore, no way we can be bypassed if we place our demands on the table.
Far from it not being the time to renegotiate bringing powers back, this is the moment when we have the most leverage. We cannot afford to settle for another limited opt-out, safeguard, or protocol. That would not be the fundamental change that the Prime Minister and so many others say they wish to see. Things would simply carry on, but under the new arrangements, they would be worse.
What should the Government do now? A recent report by the TaxPayers Alliance, “Terms of Endearment”, sets out a list of powers that it would be desirable to repatriate to achieve a satisfactory new relationship. They include business regulation, employment law, fisheries and agriculture, and immigration and taxation.
I also much admire the work being undertaken by the all-party group on European reform and the Fresh Start project, under the leadership of my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). She is doing a great service for her country. That work certainly needs to be done, but as she acknowledges, it is detailed and complex, and it really would be unreasonable to embroil the EU machinery in such a breadth of contentious issues and in such legal complexity at this time. Attempts at this summit to nibble at certain powers are bound to be disappointing, as opt-outs and protocols have so often been circumvented by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice in the end.
There is an emerging consensus among many Members of Parliament and elsewhere that we need a more straightforward solution. Some of us in the Fresh Start group agreed a mission statement earlier this year to help guide our work. It said:
“UK citizens want co-operation and free commerce with our EU partners, but a majority believes that too much power has been transferred to the EU without their consent; in areas ranging from policing to employment law, from Health and safety to immigration, our citizens want control over their own destiny. The euro-zone crisis has created an opportunity for a new relationship with our EU partners, in which the UK can take more decisions and Brussels fewer; this would be in line with the basic principle that the authority to pass laws should be democratically accountable to those who are affected by them”.
That is relatively uncontentious; I do not see how anyone can object to that manifesto.
At this summit, or later, in the light of what we will learn about the detail of Germany’s intention for the euro 17, the UK should seek agreement in principle that the UK Parliament, and not the EU institutions, decide what laws apply in our own country, and how they should be interpreted and enforced. That would, in effect, be the UK nationalisation of the EU acquis communautaire. There would be no instant annulment of EU directives or regulations. It would be a matter for renegotiation with the EU on a case-by-case basis over time, and the same would apply to new proposals such as the ludicrous financial transactions tax. That would enable us to establish a new relationship with our EU partners on a fundamentally different basis, while remaining in the customs union, which is the founding element of the single market.
The Prime Minister can say, perfectly reasonably, that he has done his best to co-operate with our EU partners in the crisis but that he must take Parliament and the British people with him. He can say that fiscal union is too big a change in our relationship to countenance without a referendum in the UK, but that he should offer to put this new relationship to the British people, and on that basis he would campaign for a “yes” vote. I would vote for that and I would campaign for a “yes” vote, so we can stay in the EU on that new basis. There is absolutely no reason why that proposal should delay this summit. If the other states wanted to do so, it would be up to them, as I have said. That would allow Westminster politicians to fulfil the promises that we have made so often and broken, to give the people the right to decide the destiny of our nation.
As the Prime Minister has said:
“It is wrong that we did not have a referendum on Maastricht, Lisbon and those other treaties.”—[Official Report, 24 October 2011; Vol. 534, c. 33.]
The changes being proposed in this treaty are Maastricht-plus. Refusing to hold a referendum in such a situation will not stand. The Prime Minister told us:
“Future treaty change will bring opportunities for Britain. The country wants us to stay in Europe, but to retrieve some powers.”
Now, we want that opportunity. We may not have another chance like this. This is the time to renegotiate our relationship with the European Union. It is the catalyst that might bring about the reform of the EU. If not now, when?
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) and to find myself agreeing with him yet again—we also agree on high-speed rail. I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh) for his history lesson. I confess that I am one of those economists who tends to look at things from an economic perspective, rather than an historical one.
What concerns me about the latest proposals for eurozone crisis prevention measures is that they simply will not work. It boils down to the fact that what makes the difference between sovereign risk and credit risk is the undoubtedness of sovereign debt, backed by a lender of last resort. In the end, if a country is a sovereign risk, its lender of last resort can print money, its currency can devalue and it can get out of its difficulties that way. The eurozone has as yet failed to address that fundamental issue, and the measures that it now proposes mean nothing more than ever-greater fiscal integration, but without the ability to issue proper sovereign debt. Market chaos will therefore not cease for longer than the short term.
Mr Jenkin
Does my hon. Friend share my concern that, even if the European Central Bank was turned into a fully fledged sovereign central bank and printed unlimited sums, it might provide liquidity and buy some space for a while, but the fundamental structural problems between the different economies stuck in the eurozone would not be addressed? Austerity packages would still need to be applied, but the EU’s institutions do not have the democratic legitimacy to impose austerity on countries in that way.
Andrea Leadsom
Yes, I agree. The key issue is that if these countries are to have sovereign risk, they must completely guarantee and underwrite each other’s debt and obligations. That is very unlikely ever to be achieved in the EU, which just makes the problem of not having a lender of last resort even more existential for the eurozone. I therefore have genuine concerns about whether the proposals actually offer a solution.
Here we are on the eve of a very important summit, which is designed, on the face of it at least, to put the market’s fears to bed once and for all. The Prime Minister has a strong hand, because the German Chancellor and the French President need a treaty at the 27 member state level, for two practical reasons. First, if they started again, with just the 17 eurozone members trying to create a treaty between themselves, they simply could not do that in the time frame that the markets would permit them. That is a very practical issue, which they need to consider. Under the Lisbon treaty, however, treaty changes can be fast-tracked. Secondly, as was pointed out earlier, the 17, as a group, could not simply annex the EU institutions and use them for themselves; they would require the permission of the 27 EU members. For both those reasons, a treaty is needed at the 27 member state level, and that makes the Prime Minister’s hand very strong.
Like other Members, I am pleased that the Prime Minister is absolutely determined to protect Britain’s interests. What does that mean? First and foremost for every EU member, regardless of whether it is in or out of the euro, that must be about stopping the crisis—there is no doubt about that. If the euro descends into a disorderly collapse, that will easily cost 6% or 7% of British GDP, and it would probably push us into a worse recession than the one after the financial crisis of 2008. There is therefore no doubt that our top priority should be to solve the eurozone crisis.
Andrea Leadsom
We will just have to agree to disagree. If people are in government, they govern. At the current moment, a referendum would be extraordinarily important in the history of Britain, but it would be extraordinarily difficult to get the sort of answer that would give the Government a coherent direction. It is for the Government to make the best decision at this moment. For what it is worth, I have always thought that a referendum needs to come at the tail end of a renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with the euro and that it should be used to ratify such a renegotiation, based on the simple question of whether Britain should be in or out of the EU on the basis of a pre-negotiated set of terms with the EU.
Mr Jenkin
I could accept that approach, and my hon. Friend has answered her own question about what the referendum question could be. We will not agree the treaty texts at the summit; the meeting will discuss issues of principle and the treaties will then be drafted, but their ratification will take months if not years. We are talking about a referendum some time during that period to ratify a new deal for Britain. Does my hon. Friend not think that that would be a sensible way to go? Would it not strengthen our Prime Minister’s hand if he was to put that view to those at the meeting this weekend?
Andrea Leadsom
I am perhaps not understanding. The calls that I have seen in the media are all about our needing a referendum, but now is not the moment for one.
Mr Jenkin
If I may say so, my hon. Friend has seen a bit too much of the Government’s propaganda, rather than heard what some of us have been saying. We cannot, of course, ask for a referendum on the spur of the moment; we are asking for a referendum on renegotiated terms of membership, which we desperately need and which this summit demonstrates that we will need. We should be able to tell our European partners, “Go ahead with your proposals for fiscal union. We don’t think they’ll work. It’s a big change for us, so we need these measures in return. As part of the ratification process, we will put this to the British people and recommend a yes vote, as long as you agree our terms.”
Andrea Leadsom
I thank my hon. Friend. In truth, right now, I genuinely believe that the Prime Minister has to focus his effort on creating the best solution for Britain, and that is what he is doing. As for all the demands for referendums, the fact that I am confused about what my hon. Friend has been saying, although I am quite close to these issues, demonstrates that other people will doubtless also be confused. The demands are seen as our party, at least, trying to cause trouble for the Prime Minister. For that reason alone, now is the time to get behind the Prime Minister, who has promised the British people that he will defend our interests.
Let me come to why defending the City is the key priority at the moment. People talk about renegotiating EU directives that have already been implemented, but as we have found as part of the Fresh Start project work, that is real spaghetti; it is extraordinarily difficult to unwind existing, implemented policies. I am a very practical person, and the best approach in terms of doability is to look at what has not yet been implemented and what the biggest threat to Britain is. On those two counts, there is no doubt that we should focus on financial services.
Financial services account for 11% of Britain’s tax take each year—about £50 billion. It employs nearly 2 million people; it is our biggest export; and it creates a huge positive trade surplus. Given that we have a big overall trade deficit, we would be looking at a far worse trade balance without financial services. Added to that is the fact that the potential for the future growth of financial services is all outside the eurozone; it is in the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—and America and Asia. That is where the potential lies. Yet, before the financial crisis, Britain was in a strong position in creating an EU financial services single market. We were influential. That was all about deregulation, open access to markets, growth and jobs. Britain did very well out of that and so, by the way, did the rest of Europe. Other eurozone countries did extraordinarily well, because the City was the entry-point to European financial services markets. That benefited us all.
Since the financial crisis, however, the agenda has changed. Britain has rightly changed its regulatory environment by greatly increasing controls, the closeness of supervision and the requirements for capital, liquidity and so on. The EU’s goal has been more to ban what it does not like: “Let’s reduce financial activity; we will constrain, prevent and reduce what is going on.” Nowhere in the EU treaties is there any talk of prudential decisions that the EU might make that would go against the fundamental commitment to single markets and growth opportunities, so the 49 EU directives and other proposals on financial services coming down the track are already in breach of the spirit of the EU treaties, which are all about creating better markets and more access.
I want to mention a couple of those matters in particular. First, on the financial transactions tax, people may think, “They will never do it; it would be cutting off their nose to spite their face and the business will simply go elsewhere.” Actually, however, I think many people in the EU are determined to do it, because they do not want the business. They think that Anglo-Saxon light-touch regulation and the success of financial services are partly to blame for the eurozone crisis. They are quite wrong, but that is where they lay the blame, so they would consider a financial transactions tax that would drive business abroad to be a good thing. To anyone who thinks, “They would not do it,” I would say that they would if they had the opportunity. Of course, that would be disastrous for Britain. It would not be a tax on bankers; it would be a tax on pensioners, investors and savers, because it would go straight to the bottom line of every investment portfolio. If anyone said that it would serve bankers right, I would reply that it would affect not bankers but savers. I could not support that.
Secondly, a slightly unbelievable idea has been proposed in the eurozone that a clearing house with more than 5% of its turnover denominated in euros should relocate to the eurozone. That would be daylight robbery and steal our business, and I am glad that the British Government are already challenging it in the European Court of Justice. Where in the single market treaties, which are all about growth and jobs, does that appear? How would it support British growth and jobs? It would not. I am extremely concerned about the tone and extent of EU directives coming down the track. They are not yet implemented; but unfortunately, under QMV, they could be implemented without Britain’s say-so.
Mr Jenkin
We have one of the best nuclear inspectorate and safety regimes in the world, if not the best. Is the hon. Gentleman seriously saying that he would prefer nuclear inspections to be run by the people who could not even get their accounts audited for the past 15 years, and who gave us the common agricultural policy and the common fisheries policy? Does he not see that these multinational European bodies are grossly inefficient and hopelessly unaccountable, which is why the British people have had enough of them?
Martin Horwood
Well, no, in short. If the hon. Gentleman has such enormous confidence in Britain’s safety regime, then he should be trying to export those safety standards to the rest of Europe. I cannot see how he can possibly conceive of a better vehicle for doing that than the European Union. Is he seriously going to approach 27 different European nations and try to encourage them to adopt our safety standards, or is he going to use the vehicle of—
Martin Horwood
No, we need to move on from safety regimes. Is the hon. Gentleman seriously suggesting that that will be a more effective approach than trying to reach a common position across the European Union?
Martin Horwood
I have resiled from no undertaking whatever. There is a great habit of selective quotation of the Liberal Democrat manifesto. The whole sentence said that we would offer an in/out referendum at a time of a fundamental shift in the relationship between Britain and Europe. That is why we supported a referendum at the time of the Lisbon treaty—I am not sure which way the hon. Gentleman voted on that, but I do not remember many Conservative Members coming into the Lobby beside us. Incidentally, we also supported a referendum at the time of Maastricht, and did not succeed then, either. If there is another fundamental shift in Britain’s relationship with Europe, I fully expect us to support a referendum at that point.
Martin Horwood
That is a lovely rhetorical line, but that accusation has been levelled at the Liberal Democrats on many fronts, and yet we find ourselves in government and sticking to the letter and the spirit of our manifesto on a whole range of issues. [Interruption.] I opposed the increase in tuition fees and think that we ought to have stuck to that policy, too. We have, however, certainly delivered on the pupil premium and a whole range of things, such as taking many of the lowest paid out of taxation altogether or developing the green economy, and we will stick to our pledge on the European Union as well, which is to act responsibly and to propose referendums when it is appropriate, which will involve a wholesale examination of the relationship of nation states to the European Union. That is not happening at the moment, because we are looking at an economic crisis in which the eurozone countries face a fundamental question about control of fiscal discipline. Germany, quite reasonably, is saying that, in return for any shift towards, for instance, the European Central Bank acting as a lender of last resort, some process of fiscal discipline that is rather stronger than the one that has operated inside the eurozone until now must be enforced. The other member countries, however, retain the choice whether to submit to that fiscal discipline or to plan some different future for themselves.
Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)
It is a pleasure, Mr Turner, to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) on orchestrating this debate. I will make my comments relatively short, because I am conscious that other hon. Members wish to speak. Having said that, I believe that the EU summit is a defining moment, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a better relationship with the EU. I sincerely hope that the Prime Minister seizes that opportunity and seizes the moment.
[Mrs Anne Main in the Chair]
It is my belief that we need a fundamental renegotiation of our relationship with the EU, based on free trade, competitiveness and growth, and not political union and deadweight regulation. That is a relationship that other countries enjoy. One is not speaking of utopia or a textbook theory. Other countries enjoy such a relationship. For example, Switzerland has meaningfully good relations with the EU and trades with it freely, but it is not weighed down by political regulation and moves to ever closer political union. Such a relation reflects the fact that in 1973, and then in 1975, the British people voted for a free trade area and not political union. It reflects the fact that people generally are fed up with mindless interference from the EU. It reflects the fact that businesses, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, are fed up with regulation, some 90% of which comes from Brussels.
Such a relationship would reflect the fact that taxpayers are fed up with the increased cost of the EU. If one takes into account the diminishing rebates, the budget will come to around £40 billion over the next seven years. That would pay for a 6p cut in small business corporation tax in each of the seven years. My goodness, would that not be the spur for growth that we all want and are wishing for? I also believe that such a relationship would reflect the fact that this Conservative party—my Conservative party—is fed up with promises to rein in the EU, when very little has happened over the almost 40 years that we have been a member.
I am slightly more sceptical than most that we can work the repatriation of powers. There has been a lot of talk about that, but our history in repatriating powers has not been good. Let us take the working time directive as an example. We all remember the great hullabaloo about the importance of extracting the opt-out from that directive. It will be no surprise to hon. Members here that that directive was reintroduced through the back door. What are we doing now, before the summit? Once again, we are talking about repatriating powers such as the working time directive. If my memory serves me correctly, that power was supposed to be repatriated some time ago.
Mr Jenkin
The problem is that the word “repatriation” is open to confusion. The basic principle of the EU legal system is that powers cannot be repatriated. There is a judicial doctrine—the doctrine of the occupied field—and once member states have delegated a power to the European Union, it cannot be recovered. There is no mechanism for doing that, which is why we need a fundamental change in our relationship with the European Union to address the fundamental problem. The problem is the treaties.
Mr Baron
As I said at the start, I do not buy the repatriation of powers. I want a fundamental renegotiation of our relationship with the EU based on free trade, competition and growth. Such a renegotiation would recognise the fact that we want good relations with our EU neighbours, and we want good trade relations in particular, but we recognise that we need to engage better with the faster-growing economies throughout the world. In many regions of the world—those of the BRIC economies—growth rates are so much faster. This is not a little Englander approach; it is a globalist approach that recognises that we need to engage better with those faster-growing areas.
Mr Jenkin
I follow on the point about foreign direct investment that my hon. Friend made to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds). It is interesting that Poland, which one might describe as a pre-in—it is not in the euro, but a pre-in nation state in the European Union—supports the German line. That is precisely because it is such a huge beneficiary of public subsidies arriving through the European Union, largely paid for by the German taxpayer, and because it is massively dependent on FDI. As a result it is effectively already a satellite state of the eurozone.
Mr Cash
We must understand that countries need investment. Therefore, in a sense, I am not critical about it. However, I know that the consequences of that are the reasons behind the problems presented to the Prime Minister tonight. There are dilemmas in the matter. I am not just being generous-minded; I understand that there is a triangulation, which is a problem.
I regard the Prime Minister to be, as it were, standing alone at the moment in a quadrangle that is surrounded by four 40 foot-high walls. On one side, he has the Euro-elite—Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy—and the Eurocracy. Another wall is the fact that he has to reduce the deficit, which he cannot do without growth, and he cannot increase growth without a viable European Union. Another wall is the Conservative party, not only in Parliament but in the constituencies, and the country at large. The final wall—I pay my respects to the hon. Member for Cheltenham—is the coalition and its ideas on the matter, which preclude repatriation and renegotiation—[Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman may say that, but we had it quite clearly stated.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin). We might not agree on all the detail in relation to this debate, but I agree with him that the seriousness of the situation calls for time in this Chamber to discuss the European summit. The pre-summit dinner is only a couple of hours away, but it would also have been useful if the Prime Minister had been invited to last night’s dinner organised by the centre-right European People’s party, at which Chancellor Merkel, President Sarkozy, President Barroso and many other centre-right leaders—unfortunately, most European Union countries have centre-right Governments—were present. Unlike his centre-right equivalents, however, the Prime Minister was not invited, which is a shame.
Emma Reynolds
The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. When we were in government in 1999, 11 out of 15 Governments were on the centre-left and we attended such meetings, which proved very useful indeed.
I respectfully beg to differ with those hon. Members who have said that the Prime Minister has a strong hand in the negotiations. Last Friday, the Prime Minister was relegated to a quick sandwich lunch with President Sarkozy in Paris, without the inclusion of even a press conference in the programme. The French press hardly noticed that he was there. Given that we are one of the largest economies in the European Union and used to be at the heart of its decision-making, it is incredible just how isolated this Government have made the UK. Today’s New York Times leads with an article that says that the UK is merely a “bystander” at this European Union summit. That is not in the national interest.
The past few days have served to remind us how the Conservative party likes to debate the European Union and of—perhaps this is a point of nostalgia for some—the long, tortuous and, in some cases, destructive history of the division in the Conservative party on the EU. It is worth remembering the context of the Prime Minister’s current position and the labyrinthine trajectory he took to get there. In his bid to secure his party’s leadership while in opposition, he promised to withdraw his MEPs from the centre-right European People’s party, but they still sit in the European Parliament with the same group, which the Deputy Prime Minister has called
“nutters, anti-Semites, people who deny climate change exists and homophobes”.
After becoming the then leader of the Opposition, the Prime Minister told his party to stop “banging on about Europe”, because he hoped that the issue could be put to one side and ignored. How wrong he was.
I say to this Government that, for a year, they ignored the impending crisis in the eurozone. It was only recently that they stopped being asleep at the wheel and woke up to the seriousness of the situation. Six weeks ago, we saw the unedifying spectacle of nearly half of Conservative Back Benchers defying the Prime Minister’s three-line Whip and voting for a referendum on our membership of the European Union. During that same debate six weeks ago, the Prime Minister said that he wanted to repatriate powers from the European Union. He reiterated that demand last month at the lord mayor’s banquet and declared himself a sceptic who wanted a European Union that was a network, not a bloc, while in the same breath extolling the benefits of our membership and demanding a say at the top table.
Emma Reynolds
I agree that a co-operative approach is needed and that we need to constructively engage with our European partners. When you go to a European summit, you get what you want not by banging on the table, but by the power of your ideas and the strength of your alliances. [Interruption.] Government Members may laugh, but my right hon. Friends the Members for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) and for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) showed at the London G20 summit in 2009 just what you can achieve by the power of your ideas and the strength of your alliances.
Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)
Order. Before the hon. Gentleman speaks, may I ask the hon. Lady to address the debate through the Chair? I have never been to an EU summit and have certainly never given away any powers.
Mr Jenkin
I remind the hon. Lady that, after the collapse of the European constitution, Tony Blair went to the European Parliament and said that the trumpets were outside the walls of Jericho and asked whether anybody was listening. Nobody was listening and we got the Lisbon treaty instead. There is no evidence that any Labour Prime Minister had any influence over the general direction of the European Union any more than we do now.
Emma Reynolds
I disagree entirely. When our party was in government, we were at the centre of European decision-making, and the truth is that we are not any more.
Six weeks ago the Prime Minister demanded repatriation of powers, yet yesterday, in a 1,000-word article in The Times, in which he set out his position for the European summit, he did not mention repatriation once. We agree that the priority should be given to providing a lasting solution to the eurozone crisis, because we think it is in the national interest, but we also say that Britain should have a strong voice in these negotiations. Unfortunately, because the Prime Minister has tried to face two ways on the issue—on the one hand placating his Eurosceptic Back Benchers and some members of his Cabinet, and, on the other, trying to have a realistic negotiating position with our European partners—the risk is that he will not deliver on either of those objectives. Whereas many Conservative Back Benchers demand repatriation, a split has emerged, not only in the coalition, but in the Conservative party, over the past few days.
Mr Jenkin
I am most grateful, Mrs Main, for the opportunity to make a few remarks in the last couple of minutes available. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe is extremely generous, as always, in letting me reciprocate. No one doubts the sincerity of his commitment to doing the right thing for his country as well as for the party and the coalition. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne), who has patiently sat through the debate on behalf of the Prime Minister, whose gesture we appreciate.
May I be brutally frank? I hear the Government still in denial about the significance of what will happen. We will have a treaty of the 27 that will create a massive shift in the focus of power to the 17. The EU institutions will be concentrating on that and we will become peripheral, so we need a fundamental change in our relationship with the European Union to compensate for that change, not least because our existing terms of membership are already very damaging to this country’s competitiveness, growth and job creation. At the summit, the United Kingdom should seek an agreement in principle—so that it does not hold the summit up—that renegotiation has to be on the table. If the Government cannot even obtain that at such a moment, they are not building a position from which to negotiate in future.
As for a referendum guarantee that does not actually guarantee a referendum, I have made my point about that Act of Parliament: it is not sufficient because it does not address our circumstances. The treaty change is without doubt significant and, if the Government want the British people to consent to it, they must inevitably concede a referendum or it will never be ratified.
British Embassy (Tehran)
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(12 years, 11 months ago)
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Mr Hague
We are in constant touch with those nations, of course. I spoke to Turkey’s Foreign Minister twice last night. He spoke, as I did, to the Iranian Foreign Minister, expressing Turkey’s outrage about these events and asking for the protection of our diplomatic staff. We are in constant diplomatic touch with the Gulf states, which also share our outrage about what has happened. As I mentioned in my statement, the United Arab Emirates has been able to give us practical help in the evacuation of our staff. A large number of the flights out of Tehran go to the UAE, so we have been in close touch with it about that.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
May I explain to my right hon. Friend why I cheered during his statement? It was because he is absolutely right to show strength and resolution rather than surrender in the face of the provocation by the Iranian regime. May I also give him the fullest support for refusing to rule out the military option? There have been 10 years—more than a decade—of best intentions and positive diplomacy as we have tried to win the arguments with the Iranians. If this incident does not remove the rose-tinted spectacles from our eyes, nothing will.
Mr Hague
All options, of course, are kept on the table. However, I stress, as I have to other hon. Members, that we are not calling for military action. But I am grateful to my hon. Friend: in the House of Commons, we show approval with cheers, grunts or movements of the head, and all are acceptable on this occasion.
National Referendum on the European Union
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I happened to bump into the chairman of the Electoral Commission today and he did not rule out a three-option referendum as impractical. Did my right hon. Friend consult the Electoral Commission on this matter before giving his opinion?
Will my right hon. Friend also bear it in mind that the treaties are now so comprehensive that at the conclusion of the summit he has just attended, the European Union is setting up a new institution that does not even require the British signature on a new treaty: the so-called euro summit of the 17. He and his colleagues are having difficulty keeping track of things because that is how the European Union now works. The veto was the foundation of our membership and it is being eroded before our eyes.
Mr Hague
There is certainly no proposal at the moment to set up such an EU institution. That is an intergovernmental arrangement. Our first priority, as I and the Prime Minister have explained, is to ensure that matters that should be decided at the level of 27 countries are decided by the 27, not by the 17. I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s information about the Electoral Commission—another unelected body that is trying to decide what we might do. I am giving my opinion on the consequences of a three-way referendum.
I will give way one more time.
Mr Alexander
Some of the frustration and disappointment I hear from the Government Benches would be better directed towards the Treasury Bench, rather than the Opposition. On Lisbon, one need only recollect the cast-iron guarantee that the now Prime Minister offered to his own Back Benchers. The position on Lisbon has been well-rehearsed. What was new, frankly, was the Prime Minister’s statement today that he supported a referendum on Maastricht. That must have been news to the Foreign Secretary, who entered the Division Lobby to oppose such a referendum—if I recollect correctly.
Mr Jenkin
The right hon. Gentleman says that we should concentrate on reforming the EU from within, but what happened during 13 years of Labour Government? They failed to reform the CAP and the budget, while the accounts have not been signed off for more than 14 years. What happened to the Lisbon competitiveness agenda, signed up to in 2010, to make Europe the most competitive economy in the world? Where were we by 2010? Has he not demonstrated that he tested that policy to destruction and that there must be change?
Mr Alexander
The hon. Gentleman takes an honourable position with which I disagree: that Britain’s best interests are served by leaving the EU. On the EU’s changing character, I would pray in aid the accession of 10 new members of what was previously the eastern bloc and the change that that has effected to the balance within the EU. Of course, however, there are continuing challenges, which is why I regard it as such a disappointment that the Government seem to glory in the isolation that the Prime Minister has secured for himself, when we should be arguing for continued reform not just of the European budget—
Mr Alexander
It was the hon. Gentleman’s own Prime Minister who went to Brussels last year asserting that there was going to be no rise in the European budget but left having voted in favour of a rise.
Martin Horwood
The hon. and learned Gentleman has anticipated my next sentence. There has been a lot of talk about manifestos in this debate, so I will tell the House exactly what the Liberal Democrat manifesto said. It stated:
“Liberal Democrats…remain committed to an in/out referendum the next time a British government signs up for fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU.”
We support that now, we supported it at the general election and we supported it at the time of the Lisbon treaty, when such a fundamental change was actually being discussed. What is more, we put the matter to a vote of the House at that time, and many hon. Members who are now rising in criticism voted against it, including the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) and, actually, the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who succinctly asked earlier, “If not now, when?” Well, the answer was then, and I am afraid he missed the chance.
Mr Jenkin
I recall that debate about referendums at the time of the Lisbon treaty. One got the impression that the Liberal Democrats wanted to say they were in favour of a referendum but not vote for the amendment that might actually create one. It was a cynical manoeuvre and just the kind of thing that has brought the House into disrepute with the British people.
Martin Horwood
I thank the hon. Gentleman, but I have with me the list of how Members voted on our proposal for an in/out referendum at the time when we said it was appropriate, and I do not think his name is on the list of the Ayes. A few Labour Members did break ranks, however.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who has long made measured contributions to such debates, but I want to draw attention to my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway), who is not in the Chamber. He made the speech of the night so far by bringing his integrity and judgment to the fore at the expense of his political office in the Government. The House should respect him especially for that.
The fact is that this debate is beginning to show a pattern. Members who reflect the widely held public sentiment that our relationship with the European Union is not quite right and that something needs to change are all in favour of a referendum, whether that means a modest renegotiation or, like my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) says, leaving the EU altogether. Members who have spoken against the motion are determined to keep the relationship the same, at least for the time being.
I fully respect my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary, who says that he wants to repatriate powers, but as with St Augustine and chastity, he wants repatriation, but not yet. We know that public opinion overwhelmingly shows a strong sentiment for a fundamental change in our relationship with the EU. Unfortunately and sadly for the House, on an occasion when we could reflect our voters’ genuine concerns on this vexed subject, which has riven politics and both parties over many years, we will vote perhaps 4:1 against what we know most of our constituents would prefer.
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend accept that although the country is undoubtedly interested in all matters EU, it is probably more interested in issues such as growth and jobs? Does he also accept that a referendum at this time would simply create uncertainty, which would hardly be conducive to attracting the foreign investors that we need to help with growth and jobs?
Mr Jenkin
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point, but this issue has come to the fore because it is about not only democracy and consent, but growth and jobs. If the coalition came into being for anything, it was for the deficit reduction programme. That is its raison d’être. It might not have escaped her notice that that programme is in trouble, because the economy is not growing. There are many reasons for that—the US, the crisis in the eurozone, and our country’s indebtedness and excessive taxation—but one fundamental reason is that we are overburdened with European regulation. That is why a majority of businessmen in this country now say that the advantages of the single market are outweighed by the disadvantages.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
I agree entirely with my hon. Friend. I spent 10 years in the European Parliament and watched powers transferred from Westminster to Brussels, making business more expensive and introducing more regulation. If we want to free up our economy and move forward, we need substantially to renegotiate. The motion gives us a chance to send that message to the Government and to strengthen Ministers’ hands when they go to Europe to do so.
Mr Jenkin
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that point.
We know from experience that we cannot rely even on the assurances given to us by our European partners. In 1992, we thought we had opted out of what was then called the social chapter. We thought that would protect us from the working time directive, but by the end of that Parliament the EU had circumvented the opt-out in typical fashion: it used a different treaty base to force the directive on to our statute book, against the wishes of our Parliament, by making it a health and safety programme.
The same thing is happening with the agency workers directive, which the Government have bitterly opposed because they know that it will price more young people out of the labour market. We now have above-average youth unemployment in this country when it used to be below-average.
Mr Jenkin
I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, but I have given way twice.
The same thing is happening in the regulation of the City of London. If there is one thing that we should never have agreed to in principle, it is that the European Union and Michel Barnier should take over the regulation of the City—our biggest single tax generator. That was driven by a misplaced notion that Bonn, Frankfurt, Paris and the City should be given equal status as global financial centres. That would be disastrous for the City.
We should oppose the Tobin tax on principle, because at the end of the day, it is another tax that takes money out of the pockets of ordinary people, but you wait, Mr Deputy Speaker, the financial transactions tax proposed by the EU will be forced through on some spurious treaty basis.
Mr Jenkin
The hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Sir Stuart Bell) agrees that that will be forced through on a spurious basis to cover the City. To coin a phrase, we can’t go on like this. Now that the EU is moving into a phase in which huge decisions, such as the decisions of the 17 on fiscal union, are being taken without the requirement of a British signatory on any treaty, we are losing the veto, which was the foundation of our EU membership and which made it acceptable.
Therefore, it is now time to renegotiate. It is urgent for our economy. If we need a referendum to force the Government’s hand, that is what I will vote for.
European Union Bill
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Lidington
The amendments to clause 6 would introduce huge inconsistency in the referendum lock. They would make the method used to transfer competence or power the determining factor in deciding whether or not a referendum should be held, rather than the fact of the transfer of competence or power itself. There are four ways of amending the treaties to allow transfers of power and competence from the United Kingdom to the European Union. First, there is the ordinary treaty revision procedure. Secondly, there is the first part of the simplified revision procedure, which was the method used recently to agree the recent treaty change on the eurozone stability mechanism. Thirdly, the British veto could be given up using the second part of the simplified revision procedure set out in article 48(7) of the treaty on European Union. The fourth and final way is through the use of a decision or passerelle without formal treaty change.
The Lords amendments seek to remove the last two methods from the referendum lock. I do not see the logic in this. For example, the amendments would mean that were a future UK Government to decide to give up their veto over foreign and security policy under the ordinary treaty revision procedure, there would first have to be a referendum, but if they decided to give up that veto under the passerelle decision in article 31(3), which would have exactly the same effect as a change under the ordinary revision procedure, there would be no requirement for a referendum. I do not think that the British public would understand being able to vote on a treaty change that gave up the veto but not having a say over a passerelle that did exactly the same thing, and there are other such examples. As my right hon. and noble Friend Lord Howell argued, this would be tantamount to locking the front and back doors of a house but leaving the kitchen window open. It is not the way to restore the trust of the British people.
The amendments would also draw an artificial distinction between a possible future agreement on a common European defence that would involve the creation of a single, integrated military force and other similar decisions that would not. The amendment suggests that the only controversial element would be a decision to develop a “single, integrated military force”, but there would inevitably be confusion over the extent to which such a force would be established. For example, would the establishment of an integrated command structure, an integrated unit or integrated budgets count? That lack of clarity could allow each step to be presented as “not quite” leading to a single integrated military force, and therefore “not quite” justifying a referendum. It is important that we hold to the principle that were a British Government to decide to opt in to a common European defence, that should ultimately be subject to a decision by the British people. A common defence could undermine the pre-eminence or capability of NATO, notwithstanding any assurances provided in the EU treaties. Maintaining that pre-eminence has been a long-standing concern of this and previous British Governments.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making an able demolition of these unacceptable amendments, but will he describe what sorts of decisions on common defence he thinks would currently trigger a referendum, because it is difficult to see how such decisions would constitute a transfer of power under the rather narrow definition set out in the Bill?
Mr Lidington
As the House debated in Committee and on Report, in the Bill it is the creation of a common European defence entity that goes beyond what is defined as a common security and defence policy, which as my hon. Friend knows is very limited in scope within the treaties as they stand. If there was to be a common European defence, that would clearly have to be defined in treaty terms, but sometimes, as he would be the first to note, language that appears quite generalised in scope, once written into a treaty, provides the basis on which numerous detailed measures can then be brought forward because there has been an overall extension of competence to the EU institutions. It could—I am not saying that it always would—spell the end of an independent UK defence policy, which was one of the previous Government’s red lines during their negotiations on the Lisbon treaty.
The amendments would also remove any decision to participate in a European public prosecutor from the referendum requirement. Hon. Members will recall the sensitivity and divergence in views across Europe over the idea of a European public prosecutor who would be able to launch prosecutions in the United Kingdom and other member states in areas affecting the EU’s financial interests. When we considered this issue earlier this year it was accepted that people should be asked for their approval before any Government could agree to participate and allow cases to be prosecuted independently in the UK’s legal system.
We have always guarded jealously—rightly, I think—the principle that decisions on whether to prosecute any individual or corporate entity should be taken by the designated independent prosecutors. To give those powers to some new European body that could come in and state whether a prosecution would or would not take place, irrespective of what the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions or Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs said about a particular case, would be a very serious shift of power and competence away from this country to Brussels. It would be right for the British people to be asked to assent to that before a Government were allowed to ratify such a decision.
Before I move on from the Lords amendments to clause 6, I should like to express my amazement that, when the House of Lords voted for an amendment to remove from the referendum lock a decision to end the requirement for unanimity in agreement to the EU’s multi-annual financial frameworks, the official Opposition voted in favour of that proposal. I hope that the hon. Member for Caerphilly will explain on the record where the Opposition now stand on the matter. Everyone in the House, whatever their views on the EU, knows that in the next couple of years a key issue facing every Government in the EU and all the Brussels institutions is the negotiation on the new MFF which will effectively set budgetary decisions and ceilings for the next five or seven years in the EU’s life and development. It is vital that that remains subject to unanimity and that the British Government, whoever is in office, continue to have a right of veto.
Mr Jenkin
It gives me some pleasure to speak in support of the Government in opposing these Lords amendments. It also gives me the opportunity to address the remarks of the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David). From listening to his description of, and support for, the so-called sunrise clause, I thought he advanced some unusual and novel arguments, albeit that they were supposedly supported by eminent people. I suggest that their words may have been a little removed from their context, because the hon. Gentleman is asking the House to adopt the relatively new constitutional doctrine that no legislation should be passed that is in any way an attempt to bind successor Governments. Legislation binds not future Parliaments but future Governments, unless Parliament chooses to change it. I think he gets the terms “Government” and “Parliament” muddled up. Every piece of legislation binds future Governments to some extent, unless they manage to obtain a majority in Parliament to change it.
Mr Jenkin
But that applies to a great deal of legislation. I do not understand the distinction that the hon. Gentleman is attempting to make. Actually, what the Bill will do is restrict the ability of Governments to give away power and to reach decisions in the EU and present them to Parliament as faits accomplis without reference to the people. That seems to me a thoroughly good and democratic thing.
The hon. Gentleman has given the game away this evening about the future direction of the Labour party’s policy. What he has told the House tonight is that he is quite happy for aspects of the Bill to go through, but he is not happy for its provisions to apply to a future Labour Government. He does not want a future Labour Government to have their hands tied by the necessity of referendums before they give away more powers. He wants to go back to the system to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) referred—of signing up to treaties, promising referendums on them and then ratting on those promises. That was the record of the Labour Government.
I regard all these Lords amendments as completely unacceptable. Whatever shortcomings the Bill has—I am afraid there are many, because it is limited in scope—the amendments are designed to pull the guts out of this democratising measure. The vote threshold proposed in Lords amendment 3 is not a recognisable one but a perverse one. It does not suggest that unless the number of votes reaches a certain level, a decision cannot be taken. It suggests that if the votes do not reach a certain level, the Government and Parliament can carry on as they like. I thought the whole point of a threshold was to test whether there was a measure of consent for a particular constitutional change. The threshold in the amendment is not about testing whether there is a measure of consent but is more about testing whether there is a measure of resistance, or whether there is apathy.
Unfortunately, the people who have largely guided European policy in this country for the past 20, 30 or 40 years have got away with what they have done largely by relying on people’s apathy and ignorance. The proposed threshold is designed to create an incentive for a Government who wish to transfer more powers to the EU to maintain high levels of apathy and ignorance. I am reminded of my late noble Friend Lord Whitelaw, who during the 1975 referendum accused the right hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn of going around the country stirring up apathy. The amendment is a charter for going around the country and doing just that. It is completely unjustified and should be given very short shrift.
Lords amendments 6 to 13, to clause 6, are simply designed to rip the guts out of the Bill. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe very properly went through some of the things that Governments in future would be able to do without a referendum if the amendments were not disagreed to. Under the amendments, Governments could, without a referendum, give up the veto over foreign policy and over almost anything else under article 48(7). The amendments would allow the UK to join the public prosecutor and to extend the role of the public prosecutor to any serious crime with a cross-border dimension. We should think about what that means for the criminal justice system of this country. The amendments would allow Governments, without a referendum, to give up the veto over labour laws, taxes and planning, and the multi-annual financial framework and spending of the EU. The Opposition should shed no crocodile tears over how much the EU is spending if they are prepared to give up that veto without proper consent.
The amendments would remove the veto from all the enhanced co-operation procedures, which would enable what is effectively majority voting to come into effect in a whole lot of areas. Clearly, that is an anti-democratic provision. If there is one thing that ardent advocates of the EU should have learned, it is that that structure lacks popular consent. It legislates without popular consent. If there is one thing that true Europeans should want it is that we reconnect the decisions on how powers are exercised with popular democratic consent. The Bill goes some way towards doing that.
The sunrise provision is simply the last gasp of a past generation who are trying to neuter what is today called Euroscepticism. The support of the hon. Member for Caerphilly for Lords amendment 15 gives the lie to the idea that the new Labour party, under its new leader, is flirting with Euroscepticism. It is not. It has no intention of following through. It might pretend to be, and to sound, sceptical, and it might even start talking of an in-out referendum, inviting one or two of my more radical hon. Friends to fall into the trap of thinking that that is the way out, when it probably is not. However, the fact is that we need a Government who are prepared to negotiate vigorously, and to do so with the extra leverage and strengthened hand that the requirement for a referendum gives them.
Henry Smith
Does my hon. Friend agree that what we see from Opposition Members is not so much a rebirth of Euroscepticism as referendum cynicism?
Mr Jenkin
I agree with my hon. Friend. I rather like the hon. Member for Caerphilly, who is an engaging and assiduous parliamentarian, but I do not know whether he has given vent to his real feelings on these matters. Unfortunately, if one is speaking from the Front Bench, one’s real feelings rarely matter. One just has to do the bidding of one’s superiors. I just wish to end by—
Mr Cash
Before my hon. Friend ends his speech, would he be good enough to allow me to put one thought to him? The number of occasions when the referendum will be required has been dramatically, drastically and absurdly reduced by the Lords amendment. However, does he agree that the fundamental question is not whether we select what functions might or might not be affected, but the whole business of our relationship with the EU, that completely failed project, which is quite clearly causing enormous damage not only to the UK but to other countries? That is the test on which a referendum should be determined. It should not be determined just on the minutiae of individual questions, including the single currency, foreign policy and so on.
Mr Jenkin
I know that my hon. Friend does not advocate an in-out referendum, but the general direction of the EU certainly merits a referendum at some stage. I still flirt with the idea that we should have a referendum on the proposed treaty amendment. My right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe adverted to the fact that four fifths of the British public think that we should have a referendum on any treaty amendment. That seemed to be the substance of the Government’s original commitment, which has been hedged in the Bill.
Perish the thought that I am straying from my support for the Government on the Lords amendments—I would rather stay where I am—but I would finally wish to remark that the authors of the Lords amendments have a track record of their own. The introducers of the amendments are not minor figures. The amendment on the threshold was introduced by Lord Williamson of Horton—he who was secretary-general of the Commission during the passage of the Maastricht treaty; he who was the secretary-general who pushed through the social action programme, which negated any effective UK Government opt-out from the social chapter; and he who was one of the architects of economic and monetary union, which is now collapsing around our ears.
In Lords amendment 8 to clause 6, which incidentally completely fails to define, as my right hon. Friend the Minister for Europe said,
“a single, integrated military force”,
Lord Williamson is pretending that we should have a referendum on defence matters. However, I would just pose this question: does NATO constitute
“a single, integrated military force”?
I would submit that it probably does not. We could therefore form a NATO-style command structure in the EU, which successive Governments have set their face against, and pass such powers into the treaties of the EU, without a referendum. I hardly think that the British people would vote for that.
The noble Lord Hannay, former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and former chief negotiator for the UK in the EU—an illustrious and distinguished person—is also an author of the Lords amendments. Do not mistake me: I have great admiration for the ability and sincerity of those people, but I just advert to their track record of advocating policy on the EU. Lord Hannay said quite recently that the single currency would be quite a good thing for the UK, as did Lord Kerr of Kinlochard. As recently as 26 May 2009, the latter delivered a lecture in Edinburgh on monetary union, in which he lamented that we were not trying to join the single currency.
I raise those points not to stray from the substance of the debate, but just to question whether the people who proposed the Lords amendments should not stop trying to get Britain further into the EU, and start apologising for the appalling judgment and advice that they have given to successive Governments. Their advice has put this country into a perilous economic position—because of the state of the EU and the euro—but they have also advised successive Governments to hand over more and more powers. I would not usually criticise civil servants in public, but they are now taking part in the political process having advised successive Governments to hand over more and more powers, as a result of which Governments have been in an ever-weaker position from which to defend our national interests.
The Bill is a small step towards starting to redress the balance in the relationship between the overweening power of the EU and the people in this country governed by the laws it makes.
Mr Jenkin
Yes, but I am left wondering whether their advice to us from the House of Lords today reflects the advice they gave to Ministers and the policies that Ministers in their day pursued. I am also left wondering whether my right hon. Friend the Minister’s advisers, when they go to the other place, will be advocating the policy he is now pursuing. I think that we are up against the establishment here. The establishment in this country is still wedded to the idea of ever-closer integration and even of joining the euro. I do not think that the British people or the Conservative party, which I think represents the aspirations of the British people on this subject, accept that view. I hope that there is a change of heart in Whitehall officialdom such that when the next generation of civil servants arrives, they will seek to re-establish the independence of the UK within the EU, rather than to carry on weakening it.
Andrea Leadsom
Does my hon. Friend agree that the referendum lock will place a new onus on successive Governments, if needs be, to work harder on any further giveaway of powers so that this and future Governments, rather than giving way to civil service opinion, will have to consider public opinion much more carefully and seek to justify any further transfer of powers? That has to be a good thing.
Kelvin Hopkins
I will speak on these amendments only briefly because much has been said already that I need not repeat. I took the trouble to spend some time in the Library going through the Order Paper and amendments, and I wrote against each of them, “KH against”—those are my initials, so it meant that I was personally against all of them—which seems to be in line with the Government’s position. I hope therefore that my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Mr David) will advise Labour Members either to abstain or to support the Government’s position.
The amendments have clearly been moved by people who are trying to undermine and wreck the Bill by making it toothless. It is not a strong Bill but, with the amendments, it would be feeble indeed. To restrict referendums to these three areas only would leave enormous scope for those who want constitution creep to succeed. I do not want it to succeed; I want the Government at least to consider a referendum for any significant change to any EU constitution. As to joining the euro, I think that the Labour Front Bench has become more Eurosceptic. There is no prospect of us supporting joining the euro, and one can see that very few Labour Members are willing to come along and take a strongly pro-euro position, as was perhaps the case under the previous Government and ones before that. I am pleased about that because I have been critical about joining the euro for many years.
The euro is in very serious trouble. As of today, we are talking about Italy—not just Ireland, Portugal and Greece—as being a significant problem. I also understand that the French proposal to roll forward the Greek debt and not to take too strong action has been rejected––I suspect by Germany. The euro faces serious problems, and I suspect that before long the euro may unravel and that several national currencies may be re-established to allow countries to adjust to their economic needs and choose their own interest rates and parities with other currencies, including with what remains of the euro.
Mr Lidington
I decided to include the words on the basis of the best legal advice available to me across Government at the time. When preparing the Bill for introduction into this House, I examined the wording and the question of whether a reference to the 1972 Act alone would be appropriate. I was given very clear legal advice that, because of the other statutes that make reference to the application of EU law, a simple reference to the 1972 legislation would not suffice. That explains the original wording of the Bill that came before the House of Commons.
What we have sought to do in framing our amendments to the Lords amendment is to recognise the view that the other place took that clause 18 should incorporate language that recognises the particular importance of the 1972 legislation. We see no reason why we should not amend the clause to make a specific reference to the 1972 Act so long as the clause also makes reference to those other Acts that give effect to EU law. This reflects the Government’s consistent position that other Acts of Parliament— independently of the European Communities Act 1972—might also allow for the incorporation of directly effective and directly applicable EU law into the UK legal order.
Mr Lidington
We believe that the original drafting met the tests that we had set to implement our policy of having a declaratory clause. What we are trying to do is to express through Government amendments the point made in the House of Lords that the 1972 legislation is of particular importance, while preserving the point of principle that we believe was incorporated in the original language as debated by the House of Commons.
Mr Jenkin
May I just test my understanding? Am I right in thinking that my hon. Friend is saying that the original wording of the clause, covered by the Interpretation Act, covered everything, but referring specifically to the European Communities Act 1972 serves to limit the meaning of the clause so that future amendments to the 1972 Act will not be covered by it and are therefore subject to the interpretation of the Supreme Court?
Mr Cash
Effectively yes, and that is the one thing we wanted to avoid above all else. That is why the Committee took the view that it did on clause 18, as shared by Lord Howe of Aberavon, who is by no means a Eurosceptic. On a matter of clear interpretation after very considerable consideration—he is both a former Foreign Secretary and distinguished Queen’s counsel who brought the European Communities Act into being in the House of Commons in 1972—he says that clause 18 is completely unnecessary. He agrees with the Committee, and now, for the sake of trying to counter-balance the views of Lord Mackay of Clashfern, the Government are falling into the trap that I have described and making the potential for interpretation by the courts extremely dangerous.
Mr David
With all due respect, I say to the hon. Gentleman that I have read in great detail all the evidence that was given to the European Scrutiny Committee and I think that his summation of it is his interpretation of the evidence given. Most of the witnesses to the European Scrutiny Committee said, as I have said, that clause 18 is a statement of fact and that it does not take us forward or back. Therefore, we should not get hot under the collar about it.
Mr Jenkin
I do not wish to detain the House for more than a few minutes. I had not intended to take part in this debate, as I took part extensively in the debate on clause 18 in Committee and I thought that we had covered all the issues then. I had become reconciled to accepting the clause as the Government had drafted it and I came to today’s debate expecting my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) to make a technical argument, but one that would not necessarily excite me—of course I was wrong. The hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr David) says that the clause does not take us back and it does not take us forward, but he has missed the fundamental point about the revised drafting of the clause. I am not a lawyer—I am an amateur lawyer—but ever since we started discussing this clause earlier this year, I have had the sinking feeling that we are in very deep water and that we are potentially creating completely unnecessary problems for this House and for Parliament. I say that because the sovereignty of Parliament is axiomatic; it is self-evident and it is a historical fact.
We do not need to legislate in any way to maintain the sovereignty of Parliament. There would have been some virtue in a declaratory Act with the legal effect of returning powers to the United Kingdom from the European Union to redress our relationship so that we had the ability to negotiate, but this clause, which has erroneously been nicknamed the “sovereignty” clause but is no such thing, does not even attempt to do that. In fact, it does not even refer to the word “sovereignty”.
The clause puts in statute issues that are contested by the European Union legal structures in a context that means that the Supreme Court might have to interpret them. We know that some justices of our Supreme Court question the very notion of the sovereignty of Parliament as I have described it and think it is a matter of common law rather than of history and fact. I believe they are wrong and that Parliament will always be able to prove them wrong by legislating, as statute law always overrides common law.
Mr Cash
Would my hon. Friend be interested to know that I was talking to an extremely eminent lawyer, although I hesitate to say who it was, and when he heard my arguments on clause 18, he said, “If a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court took the view that you are taking, it would be open to Parliament the next day”—he used those words—“to reverse that”? That troubles me, because if that happened it would precipitate a 100% crisis.
Mr Jenkin
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing the House’s attention to that conversation. We are potentially engaged in the early skirmishes of a dispute between Parliament and the judiciary about which has supremacy. By legislating on this issue, which touches on the sovereignty of the Queen in Parliament, we are tempting the justices of the Supreme Court to begin toying with those concepts. They have already done so in some of their ancillary statements to cases—I forget the right word for such statements. We know that they are tempted in that direction and putting this clause into statute, as the evidence received by the European Scrutiny Committee showed, could be the red rag to the bull, providing meat for the justices of the Supreme Court to chew on.
Mr Jenkin
I am just coming to the hon. Gentleman’s point.
I was minded to accept that we had done such a thing before I heard my hon. Friend the Member for Stone speak, but he has described how the situation might have been made worse than it would have been under the previous drafting of the clause. He referred to section 20 of the Interpretation Act 1978, which, if I understand it correctly, already stipulates that when an Act is referred to in an Act of Parliament that Act is deemed not to be constantly updated by subsequent amendments. The Act referred to in an Act of Parliament stands as it stood at the time of enactment and by specifying the European Communities Act 1972 in this clause we are opening up the possibility that at some stage in the future the 1972 Act will be amended but this clause will not apply to the amended Act or to the amendments to the Act, but only to the Act as it stands now. Should there be a dispute between the Supreme Court and Parliament about the sovereignty issues that touch on our relationship with the European Union, the question would be left open with more ambiguity rather than less.
Africa and the Middle East
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Speaker
Statements by the Foreign Secretary are not a secret; they are discussed in every pub in the land every day.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I commend my right hon. Friend’s determination to see through the NATO campaign to a positive conclusion, but when did the Government first realise that the campaign might take 100 days, six months or even longer? May I advise him that, having produced a report on strategic thinking in government, which the director of the Royal United Services Institute this morning described as a landmark report, the Public Administration Committee will return to the subject of how such decisions and assessments are made on a cross-departmental basis, which, as he rightly claims, he has much improved under this Government?
Mr Hague
I am grateful to my hon. Friend and look forward to the Public Administration Committee’s further consideration of the development of strategic thinking in government. To answer his question on the length of time, there is no fixed answer and no soothsayer would be able to divine how short or how long the Libya campaign might be. Of course, it is still not possible to say that, and we have never said that it would be possible to say that. Actually, even 1,000 boffins in a think-tank, all working together feverishly with all the information available to them, would still not have known how long the Libya campaign might last. We will continue to work with my hon. Friend on improving the Government’s strategic thinking, but however much we improve it, it will not be possible to say how long each military campaign will take.
Conflict Prevention
Bernard Jenkin Excerpts(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
Thank you, Mr Turner, for calling me to speak. Through you, I want to thank Mr Speaker for giving us this opportunity to debate the Government’s policy on conflict prevention. I also welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North West Norfolk (Mr Bellingham), to his place on the Front Bench today.
In the briefing that the House of Commons Library prepared for this debate, there is one particular article that summarises why I wanted us to have this debate, and my view is shared by the colleagues from other parties with whom I have the privilege of co-chairing the all-party group on conflict issues. I welcome the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) to the debate. Our third co-conspirator, the hon. Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter), cannot be with us this morning and sends his apologies. This debate is very much a cross-party initiative, rather than a personal one.
The particular article in the Library briefing that I want to start this debate by referring to is a BBC Online article from 11 April this year, headlined, “Aid spending should target conflict, World Bank urges”. It states:
“Poverty rates are 20% higher in countries hit by violence, so aid should target violence, the Bank says. The World Bank is recommending a major difference in the way aid is spent. A quarter of the world’s population live in states affected by conflict. In a report released on Monday, the World Bank says that there should be far more focus on building stable government, and on justice and police, than on health and education. The report says if there is not a major refocusing of aid in this direction, then other targets on poverty, health and education will not be reached. There is far more spent on alleviating the effects of conflict than preventing it from breaking out, and conflicts tend to be repeated. Ninety percent of recent civil wars occurred in countries that had already had a civil war in the last 30 years. The report found that cycles of violence were hard to stop, for example in South Africa and Central America. In Guatemala, twice as many people are dying now at the hands of criminals than died in the civil war in the 1980s. Poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by violence, but up to now, the World Bank found, there had been too little focus on ending corruption or reforming state institutions and justice systems. For instance, reform of justice was not one of the Millennium Development Goals...The report’s author Sarah Cliffe says this is the greatest development challenge facing the world. “It’s much easier for countries to get help with their militaries than it is with their police forces or justice systems, and much easier for them to get help with growth, health or education than it is with employment,” she says. “Our analysis would indicate that that should change.””
That is where I begin today and I am very grateful that, since the last election, the Government have made it clear that they give a great priority to conflict prevention. I am also very grateful to the Foreign Secretary who, when I have raised this specific issue with him on two occasions since the general election, has also made that clear, both generally—as a matter of strategy—and in relation to the initiative that he took recently to extend our diplomatic presence around the world. He said that those diplomatic missions would see conflict prevention as a key part of their work. So this is not a debate that has been called in order to rap the Government over the knuckles, but to encourage the trend in government, which began under the previous Government, to place a greater priority on conflict prevention for us as a country and for all the relevant partners in Government that work together on these issues. That means not only the Foreign and Commonwealth Office but the Department for International Development and the Ministry of Defence.
A few years ago, at the prompting of people from outside this House to whom I now pay tribute, the all-party group on conflict issues was formed. I hope that it has already been effective, if only in a modest way, in bringing issues to the attention of the House and in opening up debates. Indeed, in Westminster Hall we have had debates on the legacy of Northern Ireland, and debates between representatives of Russia and Georgia. Recently, we have had two sessions involving young people from Israel and Palestine talking about their vision for the future.
The themes of those debates and sessions are recurrent. It is all too easy to respond militarily when something goes wrong and then to try to pick up the pieces. It is much more intelligent and much cheaper to intervene to prevent a country, community or part of the world from falling to pieces in the first place.
About a fortnight ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) and I were part of a delegation that visited Israel and the west bank. If ever anyone wanted an example of a legacy of desperate failure to prevent conflict, they only have to go to those places. Whatever the good work that we, DFID and the FCO do to try to reconstruct community and civil society in the west bank or in Gaza, it is—bluntly—a much taller order than it would have been if there had not been the years of conflict in the first place.
Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)
I commend the right hon. Gentleman for securing this debate and for examining conflict prevention in the round. I support the aspiration to achieve the aid target of 0.7% of Britain’s GNP. However, does he share my view that, just as aid is very important in promoting conflict prevention, so is the role of our armed forces? They could play a much greater role in conflict prevention. In fact, their role is to prevent conflict and not to engage in it. However, if they are under-resourced they will be less able to play that role.
Simon Hughes
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend about that point. I have a brother who is still working for the MOD and who has been in the Army in various parts of the world. However, it did not take him to remind me that it is more useful for the Army to stabilise a situation and to teach the skills of conflict avoidance and so on, than it is for it to engage in conflict. Sometimes conflict prevention is not perceived as being the dramatic work by the armed forces for which we pay our taxes, but it is both the most productive role of the armed forces and—frankly—the way that we can save not only the lives of people in faraway countries, such as Afghanistan, but in countries such as our own, including the lives of our service people who would otherwise pay a very high cost.
I also share my hon. Friend’s view that we not only need to have an ambition about the share of our national cake that we give to overseas development but that we need to have our armed forces fully committed to conflict prevention, as they want to be and as they increasingly have the skills to be.
I want to give one or two examples of how successful conflict prevention can be, if it is got right. They are examples of the work of the United Nations Development Programme which, since 2002, has assisted fragile countries to build resilience by strengthening what the UNDP calls “infrastructures for peace”. I commend the work of the UNDP’s Chetan Kumar, who has shown how extraordinarily efficient and effective very small financial contributions can be in transforming difficult situations. Let me give some examples of the UNDP’s success.
In Ghana in December 2008, there were rising tensions between different regions. Chieftaincy-related conflicts in parts of the country and the discovery of oil led to new tensions as the country approached national elections. When the elections were held, there was the narrowest margin of votes recorded in an African election—only 50,000 votes separated the winner and the loser. With tensions rising still further, the National Peace Council of Ghana, an autonomous and statutory national body that was established with assistance from the UNDP, helped to mediate a peaceful political transition. As part of Ghana’s peace infrastructure or peace architecture, regional and district peace councils are also being established.
Then there is the example of Togo in 2005, which shows that all this is not past history; it is very recent history. There were about 250 deaths in the 2005 national elections. However, in 2010 the establishment of a platform for political dialogue prior to the national elections and the ability of civic actors to conduct a sustained peace campaign led to a reduction in tensions and to peaceful elections, as well as to a stable post-electoral period. A code of conduct for political parties and a public peace campaign were developed and implemented with UNDP assistance. Further development included consolidation of a national peace architecture as a priority in 2011.
In Timor, between 2007 and 2009 the peace process that had followed the establishment of East Timor as an independent state nearly collapsed, after a massive return of refugees and internally displaced persons. With UN assistance, a network of community mediators was established; the mediators were trained and deployed; and other conflict resolution efforts enabled the return and resettlement of 13,000 families by 2010. The Government there are now working with the UNDP to establish a new department for peace building so that the country has its own standing internal mediation system.
In Kyrgyzstan, the UNDP facilitated dialogue between civil society, the electoral commission and security agencies.
In Kenya just last year, there was a constitutional referendum without a single violent incident, in contrast to elections just three years previously when 1,500 people were killed and 300,000 displaced. I am very conscious that the Foreign Office Minister here today, who has responsibility for Africa, takes an active interest in these matters. One reason for what happened last year was that, in advance of the referendum, the UNDP provided support for national efforts to reach a political agreement on the new draft constitution and helped to implement an early warning and response system that prevented violent incidents from cropping up, and local peace committees were strengthened in all districts of the country.
I could go on with examples, but we do not have the time so I shall give just two illustrations of the cost-benefit, which is also a consideration in times of straitened finances. Kenya’s leading business association assessed economic losses from post-election violence in 2008 as being $3.6 billion. In contrast, the 2010 constitutional referendum, which was plagued by similar tensions, did not see any violence, and the supported prevention effort cost only about $5 million. In Kyrgyzstan, the recovery costs from the inter-ethnic violence in mid-2010 were estimated to be $71 million, but the regional UN efforts to restore political and inter-ethnic confidence cost approximately only $6 million. I could go on, but I think that people understand my point.