European Union (Approvals) Bill

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I do not intend to detain the House for long, but I wanted to support my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), who, yet again, has done a great service to this House. I rather fancy that the Government hoped to sneak this Bill through without any real scrutiny; they hoped it would be nodded through without anybody looking at the detail. Of course, my eagle-eyed hon. Friend has spotted some of the nasty parts of this Bill that the Government were hoping to sneak through, and he has done us a great service by highlighting them.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I am shocked at my hon. Friend’s suggestion that such an important Bill could have crept through this House without being carefully scrutinised. Many of us spoke on Second Reading and have considered the Bill carefully, as it is a sensible advancement of the European Union Act 2011.

[Philip Davies]

While my hon. Friends the Members for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and for Christchurch are in the House, I can be confident that legislation will be properly scrutinised. Without their services, I cannot always be so confident, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude for the work they do.

My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch is absolutely right about the Fundamental Rights Agency, and I hope that the Minister will make it clear where the Government stand on this issue. Bizarrely, we face enacting something and, in doing so, supporting a wholly unnecessary agency. It is unnecessary because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, it does the work that the Council of Europe already does. We are already signed up to the European convention on human rights, which is bad enough—if I had my way, we would not be signed up to that—but now it appears that the Government want us to have an EU version of exactly the same thing.