Russian Membership of the Council of Europe
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
We owe a debt to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for securing the debate, because it encourages a useful exchange of views. He is the most distinguished leader of the European Conservatives Group on the Council of Europe. He has devoted himself body and soul to working on the Council in an often unsung role, and we are grateful to him. We all understand the depth of his feeling, and we can understand why he advances the argument that we should now expel Russia from the Council of Europe. I am sorry to say that I disagree with that argument. So far, Russia has behaved in an utterly lamentable fashion, and the Council of Europe has decided effectively to suspend it. In theory, Russia can turn up, but in practice it does not. It does not vote or speak.
Taking the next dramatic step of expelling Russia would be a mistake because, although my hon. Friend will not agree, as long as Russia is involved in the Council of Europe, whether on the death penalty, human rights or its position with regard to other countries, there is some sort of link and encouragement for it to make progress along the road of human rights.
Why was the Council of Europe set up? It is a very different organisation from the European Union. As my hon. Friend said, we are one of the creators of the Council of Europe. He referred to the famous remark of Winston Churchill in 1954:
“To jaw-jaw is…better than to war-war.”
That is what the Council of Europe is all about. I view it not as an executive body like the European Union; I view it as an inter-parliamentary assembly. I am a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and one of the Council of Europe’s values is that we recognise that our powers are extremely limited—in fact, they are virtually non-existent, with the exception of voting for judges on the European Court of Human Rights—but it is an opportunity to meet Members of Parliaments from across Europe to exchange views. That is what the Council of Europe is: it is an inter-parliamentary assembly.
Article 1 of the statute of the Council of Europe states that its purpose is
“to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose of safeguarding and realising the ideals and principles which are their common heritage and facilitating their economic and social progress.”
As long as Russia is, albeit suspended, a member of the Council of Europe, we can hope to press it to mend its ways. Expelling Russia would be a considerable step. My hon. Friend mentioned suspended members of the Commonwealth, but it has been a rare step to expel countries from the Commonwealth—South Africa might have been expelled, and it might even have expelled itself in the early years of apartheid—and expelling a member of the Council of Europe would be a dangerous precedent, particularly in our vulnerable situation, as has already been mentioned.
As I understand it, in our Conservative party manifesto, we will proclaim the supremacy of Parliament. We will proclaim that, if our Parliament votes for a particular position, such as on prisoner voting rights, the Court cannot gainsay it. If there is a Conservative Government and if we pass such an Act of Parliament, there will undoubtedly be a move from some of our friends in Europe to expel us, but I am pretty sure that we will not be expelled. It is pretty foolish for us to set a precedent by now expelling Russia.
What Russia is doing by invading a sovereign country, its neighbour, is infinitely more egregious, more damaging to human rights and more lamentable in every respect than our will and desire to proclaim the supremacy of Parliament—I recognise that—but we have a problem, have we not? As some people will articulate, we have signed various conventions and, in a very real sense, the European Court of Human Rights is a supreme court, an ultimate authority of laws. Although we will undoubtedly want to stay in the Council of Europe—my right hon. Friend the Minister can confirm that—despite proclaiming the supremacy of Parliament, we will be in some difficulty. It is not entirely useful for us to set a precedent.
Mr Chope
Article 8 outlines a two-stage process. The first stage states:
“Any member of the Council of Europe which has seriously violated Article 3 may be suspended from its rights of representation”.
That is what I am suggesting as a first stage. Article 8 goes on to say what can happen afterwards. My hon. Friend says that expulsion would be a very strong sanction, but my suggestion is that we should start off with suspension, using the powers under article 8.
Sir Edward Leigh
I apologise if I misunderstood my hon. Friend. I argue with the position that we effectively have at the moment. Russia might not be formally suspended, but it is effectively suspended, which is a sort of halfway house. We are rapping its knuckles. If he is now saying that under no circumstances does he wish to expel Russia and that he does not view this as a process towards expelling Russia, I am sorry that I misunderstood his arguments. I am in favour of giving a message to Russia, but I am not in favour of expelling Russia. If he wants to make it clear that he is also not in favour of expelling Russia, I will happily give way.
Mr Chope
There are two separate issues: the Russian delegation’s membership of the Parliamentary Assembly and Russia’s membership of the Council of Europe as a country. I am saying that article 8 should be applied on that latter point. I am not talking about the situation within the Parliamentary Assembly, which has already been well rehearsed. I am talking about the Government’s responsibility to do something under article 8.
Sir Edward Leigh
We now understand each other perfectly. I tell my right hon. Friend the Minister that I do not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch. We have taken the right, measured steps within the Parliamentary Assembly. The process of suspension may result in expulsion, and there should be no route towards suspending or expelling Russia from the Council of Europe. I think we have done the right thing.
Sir Edward Leigh
I agree entirely. I was thinking of intervening on my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch when he introduced this debate. Has he been in touch with non-governmental organisations across Russia? Has he been in touch with people who are appealing to the Court, as my hon. and learned Friend said? My understanding—the Minister can confirm this or otherwise—is that the Council of Europe is valued by some people in Russia. They still have the right to go to the Court, and starting a process to expel Russia from the Council of Europe and denying those people the right to appeal to the Court would be dangerous.
Time is running by, and we do not want to get bogged down on the invasion of Ukraine. I am not pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian. All I seek is to understand the mentality of the Russian people and the Russian Government, and that is part of the importance of sitting on a body such as the Council of Europe. Seeking to understand our opponent’s position does not necessarily mean that we agree with that position. It belittles and over-simplifies the debate to say that, because the current President of Russia, Mr Putin, is a tyrant—he may well be a tyrant and an extremely unpleasant person—this is somehow all his doing and that, if we in Britain were to apply certain pressures on him such as starting the process of expelling his country from the Council of Europe, we would somehow influence him.
We have to understand the attitude of many people in Crimea, eastern Ukraine and Russia. Thirty-four of the Council of Europe’s 47 member states have recognised the forcible division of Serbia after Kosovo proclaimed its independence. That is often cited, and it was directly cited by the Crimean Parliament when it voted to leave Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. It blames us for double standards on Serbia, and it asks us, “Where were you, Britain, and what debates were there in the House of Commons, when Khrushchev forcibly, by diktat, removed Crimea from Russia and gave it to Ukraine in the 1950s?”
I do not want to comment on whether this is right or wrong, but there is a substantial body of opinion—a majority opinion—in Crimea and Russia that thinks that the people of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, who are ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, have a right to self-determination. We can have as many debates as we like, we can pose as many sanctions as we want and we can criticise Mr Putin as often as we like, but we are up against the absolute, convinced opinion of an overwhelming majority of Russian people, who think that the people of eastern Ukraine have a right to self-determination.
Sir Edward Leigh
I am simply seeking to understand the Russian point of view. There is a difficulty with Latvia, because there are 300,000 ethnic Russian speakers in that country who are effectively denied their human rights. I am not going to get involved in a debate about whether that is bad or good, but my hon. Friend is right to say that it is often talked about in Russia. It is a real problem. However, there is a difference, because Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are members of NATO. We decided to draw them into NATO, so we are bound by article 5 to defend them.
I must end in a moment, because I do not want to weary the House by speaking for too long. I believe—I have said this before and I will say it again—that Great Britain has an historic role. There is no history between us and Russia, so we are natural arbiters. We were allies in the two greatest conflicts of the 20th century, and in many ways we are natural allies. There is a way out of this impasse.
I spent an hour with the Russian ambassador recently, and I asked his opinion. Hon. Members may say that he is just another diplomat sent abroad to lie for his country. I did not believe everything that he told me, but he said that Russia’s position—take it or leave it, but it is not completely unreasonable, and it is the basis for some sort of negotiated peace—is that Ukraine should not join NATO. Apparently, we have no desire for Ukraine to join NATO. The Russians claim that they are reasonably relaxed about Ukraine’s moving further towards the European Union, but they would like that to be balanced with corresponding trade agreements with Russia, which is a perfectly reasonable position. They recognise that eastern Ukraine should remain part of the sovereign state of Ukraine, which should have self-determination. Those three points of view are not completely unreasonable; they are the basis for peace.
I believe strongly that we should keep Russia in the Council of Europe and that we should go on talking to it. We should seek a solution based on peace; otherwise, we will be in a situation of war without end. The Russian people, who suffered terribly during the 20th century, will not give up on this issue. It is not of massive strategic concern to the British people, although we have an interest and a role to play as an arbiter. I believe that we should go on playing the role of arbiter and be a proponent of peace in the Council of Europe.
UK Borders Control Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has given a comprehensive description of his Bill. I do not need to follow him down that route and will speak very briefly indeed.
My hon. Friend was right to have this short debate to draw the attention of the House to what has become one of the most important issues facing our country. Managed migration works. We welcome people, in a managed way, who want to come here to live, work and make a contribution. That is good for the economy. There is no dispute about that, and neither was there any dispute in the early years of our membership of the European Union over whether the free movement of workers between economies that performed in fundamentally the same way worked.
Unfortunately, the whole system is breaking down. It is breaking down not just in our country, but across Europe. The reason it is breaking down is that we now have economies that perform on a very different level and that have very different levels of benefits—in countries such as Romania and Bulgaria. I make no criticism of Romanians or Bulgarians—they are wonderful people, they work hard and they are welcome to come here in a managed way. I have always warmly welcomed people of Polish and Lithuanian extraction. Nobody disputes that they should be welcome. However, because there are economies with very low wage and benefit rates, the cardinal principle of the European Union, which perhaps worked in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, simply does not work now.
This debate is exercising the whole nation, not just a small group of Conservative Back Benchers who are obsessed with European and want to criticise the European Union. Many people around Europe who take an intelligent interest in whether the European Union is functioning properly are concerned about this issue. There is concern about it throughout the Conservative party, from the bottom to the top, because we are simply reflecting public opinion. The public are concerned and, therefore, there is concern even at the level of the Prime Minister.
Mr Chope
Does my hon. Friend accept that another issue that concerns the public is the distortion of policy? If 120,000 people a year are coming in from the European Union and we cannot do anything about it, all the pressure is on trying to reduce the number of people who come in from outside the European Union, many of whom might be able to make a bigger contribution to our economy and society.
Sir Edward Leigh
Yes, and we have had that debate. Apparently there is also a debate inside the Government. Those such as the Home Secretary argue that we must effectively expel all people who have completed their course—as I think happens in the United States—so that the moment they complete their university or college education they must go back to India or wherever. We read in the press that, apparently, other members of the Government—such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer who is responsible for the good management of the economy—say that we must allow those people in. All the pressure now on the Home Secretary is to try and reduce immigration from elsewhere in the world, but those people may be essential to our economy. The whole system is not working well at the moment.
As I was saying, it is not only a small group of Conservative Back Benchers who are concerned with this matter, but the wider public and indeed the Prime Minister. We understand that when he was drafting his recent speech on immigration, right up to the last minute he was determined—indeed, he went to a parliamentary meeting and talked to colleagues—to take action in terms of having some control over our borders, such as an emergency brake or whatever. This Bill is a contribution to that debate, and we must have a serious debate, away from emotion, charges of racism and all that sort of nonsense, which obviously do not apply in this case. People simply want managed migration. The system is not working at the moment, and there must be a sensible debate.
It is simply not acceptable for the Chancellor of Germany to say that such a debate is a no-go area. If we are fortunate enough to see the return of a Conservative Government, there will be a referendum. At the moment we understand that the German Chancellor has said that the issue is a no-go area, and that if it is brought up in negotiations she will veto it and it will not happen. I do not think that is a good way to proceed. If we believe in the European Union but proceed in that way, all we are doing is fuelling the fire of Euroscepticism, and forcing more and more broad-minded people, who otherwise would support our membership of the EU, to say that we have to leave. If someone supports membership of the EU, they must believe that it needs to evolve. If we believe that because a principle worked well when the European Union had very few members it is some sort of religion that is set in stone and cannot be changed, all we do is fuel the fires of Euroscepticism, and indeed something much more sinister.
We see throughout Europe what I believe is the wrong view that states that everything is bad about our countries—I do not believe that for a moment; I think they are some of the most wonderful countries in the world—and that that is the fault of a particular minority. Today it might be Romanians, Bulgarians or Poles, but in the last century it was other minority groups such as Jewish people, and in the preceding centuries it might have been those of a different religious domination. If we do not have managed migration, and if the centrist parties—the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberals—do not have a sensible debate, all we do is fuel support for extremist parties that will run with this issue. There is no doubt about that. This serious matter needs to be addressed. It will not be resolved by my hon. Friend’s Bill, but we must have a managed, rational debate on managed migration. The Bill is the first step in the right direction, which is why I commend it.
Repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(10 years, 1 month ago)
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Sir Edward Leigh
I am coming to an end. I have put it several times to our beloved Prime Minister that we should end this coalition, which is haemorrhaging our support, and the support of the Liberal Democrats. He says that he cannot do it because, under this ridiculous Act of Parliament, he could not call a general election, and the Leader of the Opposition might be in power by teatime. I do not know whether or not that is right, but there is a certain rigidity in the system. We should end this coalition and go to the people at an appropriate moment.
The Fixed-term Parliaments Act is a constitutional aberration. It was cobbled together without pre-legislative review or proper national debate. It could and does result in zombie-government in the latter part of the term. Indeed it could conceivably lead to a Belgian situation of weak Government and weak Parliament. As is found around the world, it could and does lead to rigidity and angry calls by a disaffected public to extra-parliamentary activity. It actually leads to the growth of extremist fringe parties, as we are finding in our own country.
Sir Edward Leigh
Indeed, and dangerous situations can often be the result of fixed-terms.
We could see, as a result of this Act, an unprecedented long period without any Government at all. This is a bad Act. It was not thought through and it is not in our traditions. It should be reviewed and repealed.
Benefit Entitlement (Restriction) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now Read a Second time.
It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship for the first time on a Friday, Madam Deputy Speaker.
This is one of a series of Bills presented, and for every week that has passed since it was first printed, it has become more relevant. There is tremendous public concern about this matter. The Bill would make
“provision to restrict the entitlement of non-UK citizens from the European Union and the European Economic Area to taxpayer-funded benefits.”
Last week, the front page of The Sunday Times carried a big headline reading, “Ban migrant welfare for two years”. Those were the words of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who was quoted in the article as saying:
“Britain should be able to say to a migrant: ‘Demonstrate that you are committed to the country, that you are a resident and that you are here for a period of time and you are generally taking work and that you are contributing… At that particular point…it could be a year, it could be two years, after that, then we will consider you a resident of the UK’”.
Unfortunately, what my right hon. Friend says does not accord with EU law, so it was no surprise to read the brief on my Bill produced by the policy research unit, which referred to the quote from the Secretary of State, but then said:
“However, this is not Government policy. Sources close to Mr Duncan Smith stressed he was expressing an aspiration for the future, rather than spelling out a policy.”
That is the problem. Senior politicians, whether it be the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions or even the Deputy Prime Minister, can beat their chests and say, “The present state of affairs, with EU migrants coming here and sponging off our taxpayer-funded benefits system, is unacceptable”, but when one looks at the detail, one sees that despite their huffing and puffing, they cannot do anything about it, except perhaps for the first three months that somebody is here, which is no big deal. Once someone from another EU country has been here for more than three months, they effectively have as much access to our benefits system as you or me, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
Apparently, one reason we cannot do much about it, legally, is that we have a universal system, rather than a contributory system. The Bulgarian Prime Minister says that our Prime Minister is being nasty, but he is not. It is actually much more difficult to get benefits in a country such as Germany, so we are just being sensible, and if the only way we can deal with this problem is to move to a contributory system, perhaps we should. There is a desire among many countries, particularly Germany, Britain and other developed countries, to try to solve this problem. It is not about being nasty; it is about being sensible.
Mr Chope
I certainly agree that it is about being sensible, but I am not sure the solution lies in trying to change our benefits system. Surely, we, as a sovereign country, should be able to decide what benefits system we want for our own people and should not have to try to tailor it so that it cannot be abused under EU rules.
The bigger problem was referred to by Dominic Lawson also in an article in last week’s edition of The Sunday Times. He wrote that
“although the great majority of east European migrants are entrepreneurially seeking the much higher wages available in the richer nations, a proportion will be welfare tourists.”
He then referred to the
“point made many years ago by Milton Friedman, who believed in open borders: he asserted that you can have a generous welfare state or open borders, but not both…There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state, it is a different story; the supply of immigrants will become infinite.”
Indeed, that is the concern of people in this country—that the supply of immigrants is becoming infinite. We look in the Government statistics for the numbers, but again we find that they fudge the figures and do not even collect the raw material.
Mr Chope
As I shall go on to discuss, the problem is that EU law in this area is evolving and changing. That is largely being done through regulation, but it is also occurring through decisions taken by the unelected judges in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. They are, in effect, giving an interpretation of what was originally a free movement directive—everybody would have gone along with that, because one core element in the European Economic Community was that people should be able to go from one country to another and take up employment there. Following the successive treaties, directives and regulations, the interpretation now is of people having a right to go to claim benefits in any country in the European Union once they have been there for more than three months.
Sir Edward Leigh
We are told that this proposal is against European law, but clearly the law is evolving. In any event, people cannot claim benefits in a place such as Germany unless they have been there for a considerable time. So why do the Government indulge in the politics of the pre-emptive cringe, kowtowing before what the European Commission might say in the future? Why do we not just say, “You cannot get a benefit for 12 months” and see whether it takes us to court? We could argue about it for years, so I do not know why we do not just stand firm on this.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Indeed, he will see that clauses 2, 3 and 4 of the Bill state:
“Notwithstanding…the European Communities Act 1972”.
In other words, the Bill would ensure that we were able to decide these things for ourselves, as a sovereign legislature, and override European Union law. My hon. Friend’s point was, in a sense, echoed by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in an article in The Sunday Times to which I referred earlier. It states that he
“added that reforming benefits was part of a wider move towards no longer automatically accepting rulings from the European Commission and courts.”
He welcomed the comments by Lord Judge, the former lord chief justice, that ‘we shouldn’t always assume straight away that anything that comes legally out of Europe we have to impose’ and said he was optimistic that there was the ‘beginning of a twitch with the Supreme Court”.
My Bill is designed to go a bit further than a twitch; it is designed to ensure that we change our law. If we suffer infraction proceedings in the European Court of Justice, one thing is certain: they are unlikely to reach a conclusion until you and I are in our dotage, Madam Deputy Speaker. The ECJ involves a very long-winded process, and because it is so long-winded, the French Government, for example, will deliberately defy EU law in the knowledge that any sanctions arising from their defiance will not be apparent until many, many years later.
Sir Edward Leigh
It was suggested that our proposal that Parliament should have a right to veto European legislation is contrary to European law, but it is interesting that a member of the German Bundestag said on the “Today” programme that, in his opinion, such a veto is not contrary to European law because the German supreme court can apparently strike down legislation that is contrary to the German constitution. So the proposal contained in the letter from our hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) is eminently sensible, and we could do it. We should at least include the proposal in our manifesto.
Mr Chope
I agree with my hon. Friend. If the Government were more open with the people about the fact that they have no scope under existing law to do anything about the people’s concerns on other European Union citizens’ access to our taxpayer-funded benefits, that would help the Government to make the case for a completely fresh arrangement with the European Union. At the moment, we are deluding ourselves and the people in thinking that we can address those very serious concerns.
When my hon. Friends and I launched our Bills after the Queen’s Speech, the noble Lord Ashcroft commissioned a survey of the popularity of the proposed measures. I remind my hon. Friend the Minister that the proposal in clause 1 to record the nationality of everyone with a national insurance number or on benefits received the support of 71% of the sample, with only 8% of people against the proposal and 21% undecided. On the proposal to restrict welfare benefits to UK citizens only, which is effectively the rest of the Bill, 74% were in favour, with another 13% undecided.
I hope the Minister will realise that he should not be in any doubt, if there is any doubt, about the public demand for the measure. At the moment, the public are demanding the measure and the Government are not saying, “No we can’t do it because we are tied by European Union law. We therefore have to change the European Union law or get out of the European Union.” The Government are pretending that they have freedom and flexibility to act under European Union law when they do not. I suppose no one really wants to admit impotence, least of all a Government, but that is their situation in the face of the evolving European Union law in this field.
I will not address in great detail the way in which European Union law has evolved, but I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will answer some of the questions I asked in the debate on 5 June 2013 that were never answered. I asked:
“Does the Minister agree with the basic proposition that if someone from another European country decides to move to the United Kingdom, they should not expect to receive taxpayer-funded assistance for their housing, health care, education or living expenses?”—[Official Report, 5 June 2013; Vol. 563, c. 256WH.]
If the answer is that the Minister does not agree, let us have it on the record. It is no good ducking these questions. If a non-British EU national cannot afford to live in the United Kingdom without recourse to taxpayer-funded services, should not that person return to his own EU country rather than relying on UK taxpayer handouts? If the Government do not agree with that they should say so and then we can have a proper debate. I am sure we will then get even more letters than we do at the moment from UK Independence party supporters saying how out of the touch the Government are with the feelings of the people—but that is only an aside, Madam Deputy Speaker.
I hope that we will get some answers to those questions and will move away from the very carefully worded statements that on close analysis mean absolutely nothing, such as, “People will not be allowed to have benefits subject to their European Union rights.” Since their European Union rights give them access to almost all benefits, I submit that such a statement is without any value.
In essence, what happened was that we joined the European Economic Community, the fundamentals of which include freedom of movement, but over a period of time freedom of movement has been extended by treaty, directive, regulation and case law into areas that nobody could ever have contemplated. None of those extensions was discussed with the British people and hardly any of them were discussed with our Parliament.
The legal annexe, which is a scholarly document, spells out in frightening detail the extent to which the European Court of Justice has extended the scope of the various directives. For example, paragraph 47 states:
“In the case of Metock”
in 2008, the European Court of Justice made it clear that the free movement directive
“should not be interpreted restrictively and that its objectives must not be interpreted so as to deprive them of their effectiveness. The particular impact of the case in terms of the UK’s competence was its clear assertion that a member state should not be imposing additional requirements on those seeking to rely on free movement rights in addition to those set out in the existing legislation”.
The European Court of Justice is extending the law because it has direct application and because of the so-called shares of competence, which effectively mean that if the European Union legislates in this area it is not open to the UK Parliament or the UK Government to legislate in conflict with that.
Through the process of treating people from other countries in Europe who come to the United Kingdom as equals, we are moving inexorably towards the ever-closer union whereby people would not be citizens of an individual country but would just be citizens of the European Union. That is the agenda. When one sees the European Court of Justice’s interpretation of the various expressions in the legislation, one can see exactly what the threats on the horizon are and that they go beyond those that we have already witnessed.
House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(11 years, 1 month ago)
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Sir Edward Leigh
I did know that. I share with my hon. Friend a certain interest in those matters. It would be perfectly possible to allow Members of the other place who were over 80 to attend and go on using the facilities, but not to vote. That would put them on a par with the cardinals. I believe that setting a sensible retirement age and placing a limit on the number of peers would solve many of the problems.
The importance of this very small Bill in terms of constitutional change is that, if by some miracle it gets through its Second Reading by 2.30—I hope that it does, and there is no reason why it should not—and if it proceeds through the House of Lords in the ordinary way, we will have established the principle that it is possible to make these small, incremental changes.
We have been talking about these matters for a very long time. We started with the Parliament Act 1911, after which came the Bryce commission, which was set up by Lloyd George following the interregnum of the first world war. The commission failed to agree on any proposals. It is interesting to note that most people then favoured a House of Lords with 246 Members, chosen by MPs, from different geographical regions. I have said that there is something wrong with the size of the House of Lords, but there is also something wrong with the geographical spread of its membership.
About 22% of Members of the House of Lords come from London, and 18% come from elsewhere in the south-east. Only 2.94% come from my region, the east midlands, and 2.2% come from the north-east. That geographical concentration on London is a problem, and the House of Lords has become the home of the metropolitan liberal elite. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) would agree that it is a sad fact that there are probably now more social conservatives in the House of Commons than in the House of Lords. Without wishing to get into the whole subject of gay marriage, we saw that, when that legislation was passed. The membership of the House of Lords is not spread widely enough, geographically. If it had more Members from the midlands and the north of England, we might get a more representative debate.
I have mentioned the initial reforms that attempted to achieve such a geographical spread, and the Bryce commission, which proposed those ideas in 1922. At that time, people were still talking about limiting membership of the House of Lords to hereditary peers, albeit with some kind of election by the House of Commons. All along, however, and even in those early days, and there was a determination not to upset parliamentary conventions, as does this Bill, which I like, so there was no power to amend or reject money Bills and the Parliament Act would not apply. The gradualist notion that my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire is talking about is important because it means that the fundamental conventions, which primarily ensure the supremacy of the elected House of Commons, are not affected. All those who take part in these debates must constantly repeat the point that no Bill should so radically alter the House of Lords or make it democratically justifiable in some shape or form that the supremacy of this House of Commons, which has been supreme now for over 100 years, would in any way be questioned.
The Marquess of Salisbury proposed a scheme based on the Bryce idea and that received a Second Reading in 1934, but again no progress was made. An inter-party conference on Lords reforms in the late 1940s agreed on nine principles, and I do not think any of them would be affected by this Bill, and none of them would fall foul of the notion of gradualism. They included the principle that no party should have overall control of the reformed House, that life peerages would be created, that women would be allowed to be Members and that allowances would be introduced. They at least had the right idea, therefore, which was that they should reform gradually.
The Life Peerages Act 1958 brought in life peerages, while the Peerage Act 1963 allowed all Scottish hereditary peers, previously subject to election as representative peers, as well as peeresses, to sit in the Lords in their own right, and we all know about the innovation of disclaiming a hereditary peerage, à la Tony Benn.
The Parliament (No. 2) Bill 1968 would have introduced various changes so that primary legislation was subject to shorter delays and so that the Commons had the power to override a Lords veto of statutory instruments. Harold Wilson dropped the Bill in order to allow time for more pressing Government business.
We are all familiar with what happened in 1999, so we do not need to rehearse it. That reform produced roughly the House of Lords we have today. What is interesting is the sheer number of reports that have followed it: the Wakeham commission of 2000, the White Paper, “Completing the Reform”, of 2001; the first and second reports of the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform of 2002; the Government consultation paper, “Constitutional Reform: next steps for the House of Lords” of 2003; the Labour White Paper, “The House of Lords: reform” of February 2007; and its Green Paper, “The Governance of Britain” of July 2007.
These involved a wide variety of plans for mostly, or completely, elected Chambers. The point is that no consensus was ever found, and it is my contention that no consensus will ever be found, so let’s get over it. Perhaps we should send buses around London bearing billboards saying, “The House of Lords will not be elected: get over it,” because that is the reality. No consensus will ever be found in the House of Commons to create any kind of elected House of Lords, and that is why the approach we are trying to follow today is right and important.
The addition of any element of a reformed Chamber that includes directly elected Lords threatens the whole raft of conventions that have been carefully built up over 100 years, and which determine the relationship between the Commons and the Lords. These conventions are important and bear repeating: the Salisbury convention regarding Bills implementing manifesto commitments; the convention that the Lords do not usually object to secondary legislation; the convention that the Government should be able to get their business done in reasonable time; the financial privilege of the House of Commons; and the convention on the exchange of amendments between the Houses. These conventions are not unimportant. They are central to our constitution and I believe they have to be preserved because they conserve the supremacy of the elected House of Commons.
I am not in favour of these conventions being codified, because the lack of codification gives them a flexibility whereby they can adapt and change slowly over time. That is what we are doing with this Bill: we are slowly changing things over time. This adaptability and the ability to bend is a strength of the British parliamentary system and of our common law: it bends rather than breaks.
Mr Chope
My hon. Friend is making an excellent point about convention. Does he accept that one of the problems with the Government bringing forward large numbers of new peers based on the vote at the previous general election is that that undermines the convention of give and take with the House of Lords, and that it would be much better if the Government just forgot about what had happened at the last general election and looked at what was best for the House of Lords?
Sir Edward Leigh
Yes, I think one of the key elements of traditional Conservative thinking is that we do not necessarily think that in order to be representative and to feel justified we have to have some direct relationship with what happens in a general election, particularly one based on proportional representation.
I therefore think that the Government should get all the extraneous and radical thoughts out of their mind. I know my right hon. Friend the Minister is a great thinker on these matters and he would much rather have extended his speech to include some of his thoughts on these wider constitutional conventions and ideas. I suspect he felt rather constrained—but that, of course, is in the nature of being a Minister.
Although the House of Lords is fundamentally irrational in many ways, it fulfils its central purposes. That is the point my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire was making. When we talk about House of Lords reforms, we focus far too much on structures. We should be focusing instead on this question: does it work? Does it do its job as a revising Chamber? The answer, surely, in terms of both quality of debate and its general ethos is that it does. That point was made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset. It does not matter if somebody speaks in the House of Lords only once every year—or, I have to say to my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), if they only speak once over 10 years—if they speak with sufficient knowledge from personal experience. That is what they are there to do. We are here in the House of Commons not to speak as experts; we are generalists. We are here to represent public opinion as we see it. Of course our own prejudices occasionally come into play, but we do attempt to reflect public opinion. The House of Lords is not there for that purpose. It is a Chamber of experts, and it does its job in those terms in an excellent fashion.
People should not criticise my hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire by saying, “He’s had the opportunity of a whole day for his private Member’s Bill and he could have done something far more radical.” I am sure he could intervene on me to give me a dozen ideas of how he would wish to improve the House of Lords further. Perhaps, like me, he thinks that there should be some sort of retirement age and limitation on numbers, but he knows that if he takes one step too many—if he takes four or five steps, rather than one or two—those who are determined to kill off anything but the most modest of reforms would ensure that this Bill never made any more progress. So he has conducted himself wisely on constitutional reform.
Citizenship (Armed Forces) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Sir Edward Leigh
You, Mr Speaker, must have immediately spotted this: I am sorry, but I misspoke as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch and I only arrived in the House in 1983. We have been here so long, and sometimes old men forget. We are not responsible for this Act, therefore, so that question will have to go to the Minister, and I am very happy to pass it on to him.
Sir Edward Leigh
The Bill’s promoter is unavoidably absent from the Chamber for a few moments, but he will have to answer that question. My understanding, however, is that the answer is yes. We are creating a special dispensation today because we say, “Surely if someone has served their country for five years, they should not be disadvantaged in getting British citizenship just because they have been serving in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” That may be a controversial statement but what greater qualification is there to become a citizen of a country than to have served that country?
All armies in history have done that. The quickest and best way to become a citizen of the Roman empire was to join a Roman legion, and there was very good thinking behind that. I do not think we should be in a different position, but, again, this is for the Minister to answer. I am still not clear, however, not only about exactly how many people will be involved, but whether, if this Bill becomes law and the 1981 Act is still in place, someone who has joined the armed forces, behaved well and served for five years but has never set foot in this country will pretty well have an automatic right to become a British citizen. They will have to go through the normal processes, of course, but is that the thinking? I am not sure whether I have had an answer to that yet. I know some people watching this debate may not agree with that, but I just ask the question—I am not sure I have an answer myself. Are we now moving to a situation where someone who joins the British forces, serves overseas all that time and never sets foot in this country can become British citizen? Will the Minister please make a particular note of that question and answer it.
I ask that because the 1981 Act requires that
“on the date of the application he is serving outside the United Kingdom in Crown service”.
No minimum period of service is specified, nor is there any requirement to be present in the UK at any particular time. However, those who are not overseas or not still in service at the time of applying for naturalisation cannot benefit from the provision. These are all technical but important points.
The provisions made in the 1981 Act are, however, used sparingly, as we know. Home Office guidance sets out that criteria such as rank and quality of service should be considered when assessing applications. Quality of service is of key importance in the assessment, with applications that do not satisfy on that ground being unlikely to be accepted, regardless of whether they satisfy statutory requirements.
The amendments made by the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Act 2009 give the Secretary of State discretion to waive all residential requirements where
“a particular case…is an armed forces case”,
where the applicant was a member of the armed forces on the date of the application. That does not, however, cater for individuals who have left the armed forces. I have said enough to reveal that these are complex legal areas that need to be tidied up.
Before I sit down, I wish to make a more general point about the armed forces, a subject in which I take a great interest as chairman of the Conservative party’s Back-Bench defence and foreign affairs committee. I hope that you will forgive me, Mr Speaker, if I use this opportunity to say that I am worried about the number of personnel in our armed forces and what is happening to our armed forces. I am now ranging a bit wide of the narrow point we are discussing. It has been a turbulent time in the Ministry of Defence, with a report due on the Defence Reform Bill at the end of October. A budget cut of 1.9% for 2015 will add to the large-scale cuts that have already been taking place, including recent reductions in the number of senior military officers. Many critics have voiced fears that such reductions could leave the UK with a smaller than adequate armed service.
Sir Edward Leigh
I know I was being cheeky, Mr Speaker, but I could not resist the opportunity to try to expound on what is happening to our armed forces. I will not say any more about total defence spending, but, on personnel, I will make the following point. As of 2012, there were 750 non-UK citizens serving in the Royal Navy, which is relatively few of the 33,190 trained personnel; 7,640 non-UK citizens were serving in the Army, out of a total of 94,000 trained personnel; and only 120 non-UK citizens were serving in the Royal Air Force, which is a very small proportion of the 38,000. Intake of black and minority ethnic personnel at the higher levels of the UK regular forces is incredibly low, with only 20 officers joining in 2011 out of a total of 1,070. In the context of the wider armed forces debate, this is an opportunity for the Minister to talk about recruitment and his policy on attracting—or not attracting—people from Commonwealth countries to join the armed forces.
I also hope that the Minister will say a bit about that context and how the Bill will affect the immigration debate in total. I suspect that that is what lay behind the interventions made by my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch. Granting of UK citizenship in the year ending June 2013 was at a five-year high, with 204,541 applications having been accepted, with the figure having risen steadily to an average of an extra 7,000 successful applications a year. I know that the Minister cannot give too wide a discourse on the whole immigration debate, but it is important that we reassure people watching this debate that we are very conscious of not only the need to remove discrimination against the armed forces, but the wider immigration debate in this country. There has to be a balance.
Mr Chope
Will my hon. Friend comment on the concern, which I certainly have, that one of the perverse consequence of this legislation might be to encourage the armed forces to do more overseas and foreign recruiting, rather than concentrating on trying to recruit at home? We know that it is difficult to recruit reservists at the moment—the Government are hard up against the issue of how they will meet the target on reservists—but it seems that this could be an agenda whereby we will fill our armed forces with people from overseas instead of from our own country.
Sir Edward Leigh
As is often the case, my hon. Friend makes an intervention that just needs to be answered; we do need to reassure people. We value tremendously the men and women who are not UK citizens but who serve in our armed forces, with the Gurkhas being the most famous case, but he is making a fair point. I hope that the Minister will reassure my hon. Friend, me and those watching this debate that nothing in the Bill encompasses an attitude of, “It is difficult to recruit here in the UK and therefore the proportion of non-UK citizens serving in our armed forces is going to have to rise.” I suspect that my constituents would not necessarily welcome such a position. That is not to make any criticism of those serving or to disagree in any way, shape or form about the huge sacrifices made in the past century—mention has been made of the first world war—but I know that the Minister will understand the point being made in that intervention and will want to reply to it.
Let us leave aside those wider worries about the level of recruitment in the armed forces and the wider debate about concerns about the level of immigration into this country. The year ending June 2013 did see a 14% rise in the number of non-British persons granted citizenship compared with the same period for the previous year.
Finance (No. 4) Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Chope
The hon. Lady is absolutely right: that is another of the behavioural consequences, the full implications of which are not yet apparent.
One has to ask why we are going down this road. The justification for it—the avowed policy objective—is this:
“In order to address the fiscal deficit, the Government believes that it is right to ask those on higher incomes to contribute more.”
The Government’s proposal, however, asks those on higher incomes with families and children to contribute more, while those on higher incomes without children are not asked to contribute more. I do not see how that can be fair.
In case anyone thinks this is an issue discussed only among academics, let me say that it certainly goes very close to the heart of many of my constituents. I shall quote briefly from a letter that I received since the Budget from a constituent living in Christchurch. He starts off:
“I am writing to express my utter disgust and outrage at your party’s stance on child allowance announced in the budget last week.”
He explains that he and his wife choose to work hard, believing that they have a responsibility
“to look after ourselves and to help to generate wealth for the wider community”
by contributing their utmost to industry. He says that he has an income of £60,000 and that his wife earns £12,000, providing a combined income of £72,000. As he puts it:
“under your disgusting new Tax rules we will lose the child benefit for our two children. However, in a household with two working parents earning £40,000 each, combined income of significantly more…that family gets to keep their benefit.”
Mr Chope
Before I give way to my hon. Friend, let me read the last paragraph:
“I ask for your commitment to continue your fight against this latest most disgusting taxation scheme on child allowance and rally your fellow back benchers against the current disgraceful and unethical budget.”
Committee on Members’ Allowances
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mr Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)
I apologise, Madam Deputy Speaker, for not having been here at the outset, but I was chairing Westminster Hall and it was not possible to get a substitute as quickly as I had hoped.
I hear from my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Adam Afriyie) that much progress has been made during this short debate. I am certainly pleased to hear that. There is a lesson here: if the Government table motions on the Order Paper that are inconsistent with a resolution of the House agreed to as a result of a Back-Bench debate and do not discuss their reasons for tabling the motion, it creates a climate of suspicion. That climate of suspicion was confirmed yesterday, when the Committee of Selection was set up to confirm the membership of the Committee on Members’ Allowances but at the last minute did not deal with the business at hand. I understand that it has been confirmed during this debate that there will be a special meeting today of the Committee of Selection to set up the Committee so that the latter can organise itself to meet next week. I do not know whether that interpretation is correct, but I understand that that is what has been agreed.
Why did we have to go through all this? It is regrettable that this adversarial attitude has been created over an issue that everybody on both sides of the House takes very seriously—IPSA’s administration of our allowances system. Yesterday, I went on to the IPSA website to make a claim for the past month—it was my first claim for a month—and I found that four previous items that I claimed for had been sent back. I will not go into the details except to say that after more than an hour on the telephone all those matters were resolved. However, it should never have taken so long. It was a matter of process dominating common sense and reality. The person from IPSA wasted more than an hour on the telephone. I had to waste more than an hour on the telephone. There were lots of delays and as a result one member of my staff was not paid as quickly as they should have been. That is why it is important that this Committee is set up with the terms of reference that we are debating this afternoon.
Mr Leigh
My hon. Friend can be reassured because we have had a categorical reassurance from the Deputy Leader of the House that there will be absolutely no restriction on what the Committee can decide or recommend. I have the greatest faith in our Front-Bench team—as far as I am concerned, their word is their bond.
Mr Chope
I am sure that my hon. Friend is right. I hope that when the Committee of Selection meets, he will be selected as a member of the Committee, with my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor as its Chairman. With those two on the Committee, I have little doubt that it can do some effective work. However, I still do not understand why it has taken so long to set it up. It was resolved on 12 May that it should be set up, but it is now almost 12 July.
I see that quite a few members of the Treasury Bench are in their places. I hope that they will learn a lesson from this—that we should be much more open with each other about these issues instead of creating or facilitating a climate of suspicion. It is possibly only because today’s business collapsed more than two hours early that we have had the chance to have this open and frank discussion on the Floor of the House on this important issue. When the report—or reports—come back from the Committee, I hope that the Government will again be open and frank, and allow us to ensure that the recommendations are debated and carried into action. That way, there will be no need to spend even more parliamentary time trying to get the Government to do what was agreed by the Prime Minister as long ago as before last December, as I recall, when he made it clear that if something did not happen by April, he would ensure that pressure would be put on IPSA to get its act together.
All’s well that ends well—I hope. In that respect, I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor for briefing me on what transpired earlier in the debate. I hope that it will be confirmed in the response to this debate that the members of the Committee will be appointed by the Committee of Selection today, so that they can get down to their work first thing next week.
Finance Bill
Debate between Edward Leigh and Christopher Chope(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Chope
It is a matter of seeing what the countervailing benefits would be, because obviously, if as a result of my hon. Friend’s new clause a lot more people who are not contributing anything towards the cost of their health care started to do so, thereby reducing the burden on the NHS, the dead-weight cost that my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) mentions would be exceeded by the overall benefits, and a reduction in the overall burden of taxation. More people who are getting health care in this country would be paying for it, or contributing to its cost, rather than relying on the state and the taxpayer to do so.
Mr Leigh
The dead-weight cost argument is always used against ideas such as school vouchers or tax relief for health insurance, but does my hon. Friend agree that the whole point of such proposals is to help the people in the middle? Quite rightly, Parliament is concerned about the people at the bottom of the heap, and the rich can always buy their way out, but this part of the Conservative party should help the people who struggle all their lives, and pay tax all their lives.
Mr Chope
Of course, the original scheme was brought in on the basis that it would apply to everyone over the age of 60, and initially would give full tax relief to higher-rate taxpayers, so the figures would be nothing like as high under the new clause, because its proposals would apply only to people over 65, and would give only 20% in tax relief.
Mr Leigh
Is my hon. Friend not being very moderate? Surely there is an argument for giving everyone tax relief, which is how we would move to a continental-type system with much better health outcomes, and blur the boundaries between the private and public sectors. That is what we, as Conservatives, should believe in.
Mr Chope
I absolutely agree, but I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley, who tabled the new clauses, is a gradualist by nature; that goes back to his time as leader of Wandsworth council, when he was preparing for his time in Parliament and knew that things could not be done immediately but must be done gradually. He can speak for himself when he contributes to the debate, but perhaps that gradualism is part of his thinking.
I will finish soon, because many Members wish to contribute, but let us first put this suggestion in perspective by thinking about roughly how much it would cost. Let us suppose that an average health premium is about £2,000, which a pensioner or pensioner family would be faced with paying, and which previously their employer had paid as part of a contributory or non-contributory occupational scheme. Many pensioners would not pay that, but if we gave them the tax relief, which would amount to more than £400, I submit that many of them would carry on paying for their insurance, thereby contributing towards the cost of the health service, which would be a benefit.
The last time I spoke in a debate on a Finance Bill on Report it was about insurance premium tax. The insurance premiums paid for health insurance are already subject to tax, which the Treasury keeps increasing, so an alternative way forward might be to abolish the insurance premium tax paid on health insurance contributions. That is a separate argument and not the subject of this group of new clauses, but it serves as an example. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury would obviously say that we could not afford that—but does he realise that if we increased the number of people taking out health insurance, the Treasury would receive a lot more in insurance premium tax? I am sure that he will take that into account when he—in due course, having done the proper research—tells us the costs and benefits of the proposals in the new clauses.
We should not forget that the dynamic effect of these taxation changes could deliver great benefits and dividends. It is important to send a strong message to those who can afford to contribute towards their health care costs but who currently do not do so, that this would enable them to contribute at a lower cost than would otherwise be the case. I think that it is a well-rounded and sensible proposal, and I am delighted that it is getting so much support from colleagues on the Government side of the House.
Mr Chope
If there is a defect in the wording of the new clause and it fails to recognise everything that the Prime Minister said—he certainly referred specifically to civil partnerships—the hon. Gentleman may have a point about that, but he does not have a point about much else, in my submission.
Mr Leigh
I am happy to make the concession to the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), who spoke at some length on this point, that if the new clause is defective, I am happy to withdraw it and for the Government to bring back a new clause that includes civil partnerships. I make it absolutely clear that we have nothing against civil partnerships.
Mr Chope
My final point is that there is a read-across between the new clause and the conundrum that the Government face in the debate about the withdrawal of child benefit from families that comprise at least one higher rate taxpayer. That issue is causing a lot of angst among our constituents, particularly for parents in single income households in which one parent stays at home to look after the children. As I have said in correspondence with the Minister, in some cases one parent stays at home to look after a disabled child. If there is one parent who is the breadwinner and he is a higher rate taxpayer on an income of about £45,000 or £50,000, he will be above the threshold and will be deprived of his child benefit.