Employment Opportunities Bill
Debate between Denis MacShane and Christopher Chope
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes a brilliant point, and I hope very much that he will be willing to serve on the Committee when that occasion arises. I am sorry that he will not be able to participate fully in the debate, but I understand that he is seeing constituents. His long-standing interest in common sense applies particularly to work opportunities for young people and is well known and respected across the House.
Members of the House are so conditioned to the advances of state socialism by stealth that the Bill may come as a bit of a shock.
Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)
Perhaps later on the hon. Gentleman could give us an example of socialism in Britain. Some Opposition Members might be interested to find out more about this new invention. Should not the Bill properly be called the increase in working poverty Bill, because the assault on the minimum wage—that thin line that protects the poorest workers from employer exploitation—which is the thrust of the Bill, is the meanest most miserable act from a mean and miserable party that hates the working people of this country?
Inter-Parliamentary Scrutiny (EU Foreign, Defence and Security Policy)
Debate between Denis MacShane and Christopher Chope(13 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr MacShane
France has only just rejoined NATO. It does not have quite the same weight in NATO councils as ourselves, Germany and Italy. We have a real problem.
We could have been a lot more robust about preserving the Western European Union. The idea was put to me when I was a Minister, but it was one of those topics that just get put back in the box in the hope that it dies. The last Labour Government and their Foreign and Commonwealth Office team should not be awfully proud of that. The WEU was not the greatest organisation in the world, but it did bring together serious, real-life parliamentarians from countries that were directly involved in military activities. Instead, we have now got an absolute disaster of a sequence of proposals, of which I worry most about the proposal from the presidency of the EU, which is currently held by Belgium. I do not know where that proposal comes from because Belgium does not have a Government to put a proposal forward.
We heard some interesting comments in this week’s debate on the EU referendum Bill from the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash), the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee. He started animadverting on something called a non-paper and treated the concept with immense scorn, but a non-paper or aide memoire is quite a common bit of diplomatic terminology. However, this is the first time that the current House of Commons has had to deal with a very major proposal relegating its importance, and coming from a non-Government.
I hope we can be robust on this issue, because let us be quite clear: the Belgian presidency proposal sets up a new committee of which six members will come from the Westminster Parliament—both Houses—and 54 from the European Parliament, so it will have nine times more representatives on the committee. Having spent some time in the couloirs of European Union decision making, let me assure Members that a proposal put forward by the country holding the EU presidency carries a lot more weight than a resolution of any particular committee of any particular national Parliament, much as we all respect, love and admire our own Foreign Affairs Committee.
Mr MacShane
There we are. I never get to eat as many Belgian chocolates as I would wish, and the amount is going down minute by minute. I thought the figure was six, but now it is four, which amounts to 13 or 14 times less representation than that of the European Parliament.
The Foreign Affairs Committee report is what the French would call a nombriliste discussion, which is to say a lot of navel gazing. It is a discussion about different bits of the axis between your Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the Woolsack. There is some reference to the Speaker not appointing a Chair. I am very interested in what the constitutional and parliamentary reasons for, or implications of, that are, but this is about what we say to each other in three Select Committees in this House and two in the other place. What is not on the record is what we should have been doing. We are utterly incapable of doing this, although we actually did start debating the matter a bit on Tuesday. I am talking about working out how we connect this House to other national Parliaments and parliamentarians in order to discuss EU business.
It is no use just sitting on endless piles of the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph in London or telling each other across the Chamber about these wretched things called the European Union and the European Parliament, which some hon. Members do not like. We need to reorganise how we link up with many like-minded members of national Parliaments to put in place a more effective national parliamentary network to look at how the affairs of the European Union can better mesh and integrate with the work of national Parliaments. That is because, in essence, a huge transfer of authority is taking place away from the now defunct WEU to the European Union and the European Parliament. We do, however, have the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which is a very worthwhile outfit, to which many of the member states that will now be excluded can come and others can come by invitation.
We are seeing that Europe is completely unable to respond to the Libyan crisis in the southern Mediterranean with a degree of muscular soft power or slightly less than full military hard power. In our debates, we find that the new structure being proposed is expected to provide the European parliamentary supervision of exactly the decisions that are or are not being taken on Libya and the other north African countries in revolt. A Heads of Government meeting will take place tomorrow, and I wish the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary and his team well in coming up with a policy that can connect, but it will have to have some parliamentary oversight. We are already being told no to war. We are being told that NATO must not intervene. We can sense a protest building out there, whereby if this country were to be involved in some kind of decision, with or without UN sanctions, that might produce a public opinion backlash. Again, we have given up adequate parliamentary supervision and discussion of these issues. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for North Dorset (Mr Walter), who valiantly tried to keep the WEU alive, made all sorts of concessions and worked with colleagues, but was steamrollered by Whitehall.