European Union Agency for Asylum
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(8 years ago)
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The Chair
Does a member of the European Scrutiny Committee wish to make a brief explanatory statement?
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Mr Rosindell, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship bright and early on this Tuesday morning.
The documents are at the heart of the EU’s response to the migration and refugee crisis. According to the EU treaties, EU asylum polices should be governed by the principle of solidarity and fair sharing of responsibility. In practice, the so-called Dublin rules, which allocate responsibility for examining asylum applications made within the EU, place a heavy burden on a small number of front-line member states. The inability of those states to cope has resulted in large-scale secondary movements, prompting some member states to build fences while others have brought back internal border controls to stem the flow of irregular migrants.
The reforms proposed by the Commission are intended to ensure quicker access to an asylum procedure and to discourage secondary movements. They are also intended to make the Dublin system fairer through the introduction of a new corrective allocation or fairness mechanism, which would redistribute asylum seekers from overburdened member states. Participation in the new fairness mechanism is optional, but opting out comes at a price—€250,000 for each relocated asylum seeker that a member state refuses to accept.
Other elements of the reform package are the EU’s asylum database, Eurodac, and the proposed transformation of the existing European Asylum Support Office into a new EU asylum agency. Under the Commission’s proposals, Eurodac would be developed into a broader migration management tool to assist with the return of irregular migrants, while the EU asylum agency would have a stronger mandate to monitor the application of EU asylum rules and provide operational and technical assistance to members whose asylum and reception systems were experiencing disproportionate pressure.
The UK participates in all the measures that the proposals would replace, but will be bound by only the latest proposals if the Government decide to opt in. The Government have the option to wait and see how negotiations progress and, if they are happy with the outcome, to seek to opt in at the end of the process, once the regulations have been formally adopted. But if the UK wants to have a direct influence on the negotiations and to vote on the outcome, it has to opt in during the initial three-month opt-in period.
The Government appear to have agonised over the opt-in decision. Today’s debate was initially scheduled for 7 December and then postponed. The Government submitted their debate motion to the Public Bill Office only last Friday, giving the House minimal notice of their intentions. The delay has meant that the opt-in deadline of 30 September for the EU asylum agency regulation has already passed, pre-empting any opportunity for Parliament to debate and inform the Government’s position. The Government have taken us to the wire on the proposed Dublin and Eurodac regulations, the opt-in deadline for both of which is 18 November. The European Scrutiny Committee recommended that the proposals be debated on the Floor of the House, because they raise important questions about the functioning of the UK’s asylum system.
The Government support the principles underpinning the Dublin system and consider the system to be of significant benefit to the UK. Responding to an urgent question on the Dublin system in May, the former Immigration Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), made it clear that the Government would oppose any new redistribution mechanism, but he also indicated that there was no risk that we would lose our existing powers to return people to other EU member states, as the Commission has stated explicitly that we can continue to uphold and operate the existing Dublin arrangements if we decide not to opt in to the new measures.
Can the Minister give a categorical assurance that the UK will be able to remain part of the current Dublin system if it does not opt in to the Commission’s Dublin reforms? Is there not a real possibility that the UK could be thrown out of Dublin altogether and, if it were, how could the UK remain in Eurodac, given that that is an integral part of the Dublin system? The Government have decided not to opt in to the proposed new EU asylum agency, so can the Minister tell us whether the UK will continue to participate in the European Asylum Support Office and whether the office will cease to exist once the new agency is created? Do the Government intend, as the motion hints, to participate in negotiations on the new agency with a view to opting in post-adoption? Given the importance of those questions, perhaps the Minister will explain why they do not merit the exposure and scrutiny of a debate on the Floor of the House.
Finally, the Government’s opt-in decisions have also to be considered in light of the referendum outcome. Do the Government want the UK to continue to participate in the Dublin system once it has left the EU? Would the UK still be able to participate in Eurodac following its withdrawal from the EU, and at what cost? Once the UK has left the EU, how will its co-operation with the new EU asylum agency differ from when it was a member?
I look forward to a lively debate and to the Minister’s full response.
The Chair
We now have until 9.55 am for questions to the Minister. I remind Members that those should be brief. It is open to a Member, subject to my discretion, to ask related supplementary questions. I call Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I have three questions. First, will the Government continue to participate in the European Asylum Support Office or will it cease to exist once the agency is created? Secondly, will the Government seek to participate in Eurodac once we have left the European Union? Thirdly, what will happen to the Dublin system once we have left, and are there existing international treaties that provide the same effect of returning asylum seekers to the first safe country of entry?
Mr Goodwill
I thank my hon. Friend for his questions. The first—on whether the UK will continue to participate in EASO when we exit the EU—is one I can provide an answer to. How the UK supports the EU on asylum and wider migration matters will be considered in due course. However, we remain committed to supporting member states as necessary. Member states participating in EASO who do not participate in the EU agency for asylum would remain bound by the current EASO regulations, unless ejected in line with article 4 of protocol 21 of the treaty. EASO will continue to exist when the agency is set up, so as long as we are a member of the EU, we will be able to participate in the two in parallel.
My hon. Friend also asked about the continuation of the Dublin III regulations and Eurodac when we leave. The operation of a system whereby people can be identified through their biometrics will be important post-Brexit. No doubt that will be part of those negotiations, about which I will not speculate. Countries that are not currently members of the European Union can participate in Dublin III, so a precedent may well be set there. It would not be helpful to speculate on any of our negotiating positions or on what may be the concluding position of negotiations. Be in no doubt, though, that we see these as very important issues that should be addressed during our negotiations once article 50 has been triggered, which I am told will be before the end of March.
Mr Goodwill
They will be part of the figures. That is how the net migration figures are gleaned. They are based on a survey. As I said, we should not hear any suggestion that we are not stepping up to the mark as regards our international obligations on asylum. That should not be affected by the target to reduce net migration. Indeed, we have unilaterally put the schemes I have just described into place to bring people across from the region and reduce one of those big pull factors. One of the big problems with people drowning on that perilous journey across to Greece or Italy is that the people smugglers see their customers—if you can call them that—being able to get to Europe and be looked after there. We need to make sure we help people in the region, removing that pull factor.
This is over and above our long-standing obligations through the gateway and mandate systems. In terms of our wider help, from the financial point of view, the UK remains one of the largest member state contributors to Greece’s efforts to implement the EU-Turkey agreement, offering 75 personnel, of whom 58 are on station. The UK has deployed a Border Force search and rescue cutter in the Aegean, as well as contributing assets to the NATO mission. HMS Mersey, our offshore patrol vessel, is on station too.
Funding of £2 million was made available for the assisted voluntary returns project through the International Organisation for Migration in Greece from January 2014 to May 2016. The UK has also allocated up to £34 million to the humanitarian response in Greece, including £8 million to the UNHCR.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Are these figures part of our overall net contribution to the EU budget or are they supplementary to it?
Mr Goodwill
These figures have come from the UK as part of our overseas development budget. I can give my hon. Friend some clarification on whether any of that money has been channelled via the EU, but as far as I am aware, this is money from the UK Exchequer, not European money.
Start Network non-governmental organisations were given £11.5 million, £1 million was given to the IOM and more than £1.8 million of essential supplies were provided. They included 3,100 tents for over 15,600 people, 60,000 blankets, 8,000 sleeping bags and other basic items, including direct support for the German Government with returns and donating 40 ex-Ministry of Defence Land Rovers to the Bulgarian border police to help them patrol the green border with Turkey.
The key message on Dublin is that the Government maintain their position: we support the existing principles of the Dublin regulations, but do not agree to a mandatory redistribution mechanism as part of a revised Dublin regulation. I am still slightly confused about the Labour party’s position on that. Indeed, Dublin is important, as it prevents asylum shopping and reinforces the first safe country principle; redistribution does not.
Investigatory Powers Bill
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(8 years ago)
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Mr Speaker
Before we come to the first group of amendments, may I say that, as the House knows, there are 377 Lords amendments to the Investigatory Powers Bill, which were passed to this House yesterday evening? I must inform the House that none of the Lords amendments is certified—it says here “are certified”, but that is quite wrong; “none” takes the singular—under the EVEL Standing Orders. The Scottish Parliament passed a legislative consent motion on 6 October, copies of which are available with the Bill documents online and in the Vote Office. I must also inform the House that two of the Lords amendments—270 and 271—engage Commons financial privilege. If they are agreed to, I will cause the customary entry waiving Commons financial privilege to be entered in the Journal.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You have made reference to the Sewel convention and to the legislative consent motion being available in the Vote Office. The legislative consent motion from the Scottish Parliament is dated 6 October. Amendment 15—one of the most important amendments we will consider—was passed on 11 October and deals with a matter referred to by the noble Lord Howe as being outside the ordinary ambit of the Bill and a considerable advance from what was in the rest of the text. I am concerned, therefore, that amendment 15 by their lordships is not approved by the Sewel convention or covered by the legislative consent motion that we have received from the Scottish Parliament. I know that, strictly speaking, this is a matter for the Government, not the House of Commons itself, but I fear that the House would be doing a discourtesy to the Scottish Parliament if we were to proceed to legislate on a devolved matter, which media policy is. It would be helpful to have your guidance, and perhaps ruling, on where we should go with the Sewel convention, and perhaps for the Government to clarify their position.
Mr Speaker
I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for advance notice of his point of order. Might I just mention in passing that his exegesis of the legislation, and his courtesy and regard for the principle of courtesy in respect of other Parliaments, are impeccable, as is invariably the case.
As the hon. Gentleman will know—I welcome this opportunity to clarify the position, and it does require clarification—section 2 of the Scotland Act 2016 enshrined in legislation the statement that:
“the Parliament of the United Kingdom will not normally legislate with regard to devolved matters without the consent of the Scottish Parliament.”
That does not prevent the House from considering amendments that the Scottish Parliament has not consented to.
We are just about to come to the first debate on a group of Lords amendments that, as the hon. Gentleman rightly observes, includes Lords amendment 15, and it is, I believe, with that that he is overwhelmingly concerned. The Government have given notice of their intention to disagree with Lords amendment 15, among others. We will have to wait to learn from the debate why the Minister takes that view. I am giving due notice that the House will certainly expect an explanation on that matter—whether the House as a whole does, I feel absolutely certain that the hon. Member for North East Somerset will.
If the hon. Gentleman’s thought about Scottish consent had not already occurred to Ministers, or those advising them, I surmise from the attentive attitudes of right hon. and hon. Members on the Front Bench, including much nodding of heads and expressions of sagacity, that it will have done so now. I hope that will do at least for now. I thank the hon. Member for North East Somerset because he has done the House a service. These conventions matter, and he has reminded us of that point.
Clause 8
Civil liability for certain unlawful interceptions
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend makes a crucially important point. If SNP Members do not require the Sewel consents to be given, then implicitly, as we have an unwritten constitution and operate by convention, they would be giving media policy back to the United Kingdom Parliament.
Mr Wallace
I think we can debate Zippy another time.
This is about an important issue of principle. Throughout all the Bills I have ever been involved in, we in this House have gone out of our way to make sure that we seek the up-front approval of the Scottish Parliament in an LCM before we start down the path of picking and choosing what we do or do not support.
Mr Rees-Mogg
What the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) said may well be true, but this is our last opportunity to approve or reject the amendment. If it goes back to the House of Lords, and all the other amendments that we make are agreed to, there will be no further opportunity to amend the Bill, so legislating now, without consent, would make the law.
Mr Wallace
In the words of the hon. and learned Lady, my head does not zip up the back either. This is an amendment to an accepted amendment. That does not mean that the amendment is accepted in relation to an LCM—we cannot make that assumption. We should reflect on Mr Speaker’s point that this House does not usually legislate on policy that is not agreed to by the Scottish Parliament in advance.
Mr Rees-Mogg
We have developed a fascinating constitutional suggestion that amendments made by SNP Members of this House are senior to legislative consent motions given by the Scottish Parliament. SNP Members seem to be raising their status.
Mr Wallace
I am keen to move on, but merely say that how SNP Members vote today will certainly be a clear sign of whether they are embracing a new principle on how we should choose to legislate on issues in Scotland.
As I said, this clause was never intended to provide a basis for claims against newspapers for voicemail interception—so-called phone hacking. Civil claims can already be brought in respect of such activity. In any case, the Bill makes such activity a criminal offence, as is surely right for such egregious interferences with privacy.
If there is a problem to be addressed, this is not the way to do it, and this is not the Bill in which to do it. This is the wrong amendment in the wrong Bill at the wrong time. Governance of the press is an important issue, and it is right that such an issue is subject to full consultation and dedicated scrutiny and consideration. It should not just be tacked on to one of the most important cross-party Bills that this House has debated. This Bill is about the security of the nation. It is a Bill to keep all our constituents safe. Members should ask themselves whether it is appropriate to jeopardise this Bill for the sake of opportunism in the other place.
Ms Abbott
We are not attempting to hold up the Bill; all the Government have to do is accept the amendments.
Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act remains unimplemented, despite widespread support in principle from Members on both sides of the House, including Front Benchers. The amendment, which the Government want to vote down, was tabled in the Lords by a Cross Bencher, Baroness Hollins, and overwhelmingly passed by 282 votes to 180. That is one of the reasons that I am shocked that the Minister regards it as blackmail. It would implement, as my colleagues have said, the same provisions as those contained in section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act in relation to claims against media organisations over phone hacking and other unlawful interception.
The amendment goes further. Unlike section 40, it would not require ministerial approval, which we regard as an improvement, so it would automatically implement section 40 in relation to phone hacking claims. That would restate the very clear intention of Parliament, as previously expressed in 2013. I repeat that the amendment would not be necessary if the Government had fulfilled their stated commitment to implementing section 40.
Part 2 of the Leveson inquiry sought to investigate the original police investigation and corrupt payments to police officers and to consider the implications for the relationships between journalists, politicians and the police. We are therefore going to have to undergo further weeks of consultation. Previously, Ministers had said that part 2 would begin after the criminal cases relating to phone hacking had concluded. Then they said that they would make a decision on whether it would begin once all the criminal cases had concluded.
If we look at the provisions affecting journalists and the press in this Bill, we will see that there is no protection of journalistic sources. Law Officers may act on their own cognisance to access data, collect and retain them for 12 months, and share them with other bodies, including overseas agencies. It would be a simple matter to establish the identity of a whistleblower in any public or other body by trawling the journalist’s internet history. That would be detrimental to all of society and to fundamental press freedoms. The contradiction here is that there is a free-for-all in ignoring the thinking behind Leveson, and yet there is a failure to implement section 40. Some of the most irresponsible practices of the press go unchecked, and there is no recourse for anyone except the ultra-rich and those who can afford libel lawyers.
To function properly, the press should be able to hold all who are in power to account and unearth important wrongdoing. That is wholly in the public interest. But the Government stand accused of allowing muck-raking, savage attacks on the vulnerable and the defamation of those who cannot afford to defend themselves legally, while proper journalism in the public interest—holding the powerful to account, giving an outlet to whistleblowers and investigating matters in the public interest—is to be fatally undermined. The proposals, in their current shape, run the risk of being seen as a charter against valuable and public interest journalism, but for the worst journalistic excesses.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I want to focus on several aspects of Lords amendment 15. First, I want to focus on what it is designed to do, in which I think it is fundamentally wrong-headed. It provides for an increase in the penalty that will be applied to newspapers where an accusation of phone hacking is made in a case that is brought against them. That is difficult, because in the ordinary course of events, a newspaper will want to protect its sources. A newspaper that tried to protect its source for a story would not be able to prove the negative that phone hacking had not been involved, even when it had not been.
The immediate risk will be that newspapers will be reluctant to print investigative stories because they will be unable to avoid the double penalty of extra costs, even in the event that their story was true. The particular outrage of amendment 15 is that the press could report a story accurately, fairly and honestly but still find that, if they were taken to court by an aggressive litigant, they would have to pay the litigant’s costs. That is an absolute charter for the very rich to bully the press into not publishing stories about them. It will not help the poorest in society, who will not be able to afford the initial fees to get a case going, but anybody with any funds will be able to use it as an opportunity to bully the press into not printing anything disagreeable about them.
Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech, as always. Does he agree that the regional press, which does not have the necessary resources, will be particularly vulnerable to such claims by the people he has described?
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The regional press and local newspapers will simply not be able to print stories that are critical of almost anybody. Perhaps MPs do not want any critical stories to be printed about them. We would be able to bully the local papers in our constituencies by saying, “We will bring a court action against you, and, by the way, we think that you might have been hacking our telephone,” and they would risk double costs. That is absolutely ruinous to a free press at a local and national level, because such costs run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Even the biggest newspaper groups find that level of cost very difficult to absorb. The amendment will therefore get rid of the free press. Our press will be afraid to go after the rich and the powerful. It will be afraid to go after leading politicians whose friends can lend them the money to start a case off. It will be a supine press.
Dr Murrison
As ever, I am listening to my hon. Friend’s comments with a great deal of interest. I fear, however, that he may be over-egging things a little bit. There are, of course, very large organisations behind the apparently small media outlets that he refers to. He probably received a note this morning, as I did, from News Media Association, pressing the case of smaller newspapers. In truth, it represents a smokescreen for the interests of larger press organisations. Does he not share my concern that we need to disentangle the very small press outlets that we heard about earlier from regional press, which tends to be controlled by larger operations?
Mr Rees-Mogg
That is not what the amendment does. It includes all the press, so the Midsomer Norton, Radstock and District Journal will be included, as will the Farrington Gurney parish magazine. Every single publication will be included and will be under this threat.
Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)
I hesitate to criticise the wisdom of my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), but, from a journalistic perspective, I humbly submit that nobody in the modern media world feels as though they are working in an enormous environment with oodles of cash swimming about the place. This will have a chilling effect across national, local and regional media.
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is right. Although some newspapers are part of bigger media groups, those media groups will not be willing to fund indefinitely loss-making newspapers. The journalism that is the core of not only the print media but most of what people get online, which is not covered by the measure anyway, comes from a narrowly profitable print media. If that ceases to have any chance of being profitable, where will all the internet content that people read for nothing come from? Where are the resources to provide us with investigations into wrongdoing? Wrongdoing—not only of politicians, but of institutions—is revealed year in, year out. Great footballing institutions were investigated by The Sunday Times. How will the newspaper be able to do that if it gets sued and has to pay double damages on merely the allegation that hacking has taken place? This is a real threat to press freedom.
Press freedom is of the greatest possible value, and it is one of the reasons why the United Kingdom is such a stable polity. The press shines a light on corruption, on criminality and on wrongdoing. It holds people to account. It brings them to book. Why do we give an absolute protection to whatever is said in the House, so that it cannot be contested in any court outside Parliament? We give ourselves that protection because we so value freedom of speech. We should be extending that protection as widely as possible—not holding it narrowly to ourselves, but allowing the country at large to enjoy the same benefit.
The chippy speeches made by those in the other place, and unfortunately in this House too, who have come under the spotlight of the press and had a rude story printed about them that they did not like—about a big scandal, a little scandal, something that caused offence or something that upset their spouse—ought not to be used to take away a fundamental constitutional protection of the greatest importance. That should not be done by the back door, by tacking something on to a completely different Bill in a hissy fit because the Secretary of State has not done it under existing legislation. That is quite a wrong way to proceed.
That brings me on to the second part of what I want to say. The first part is of overwhelming importance: the freedom of the press is an absolute, and it is much, much better to have a free and irresponsible press than it is to have a responsible but Government-controlled press. As my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare) would like me to say, the principle of England free rather than England sober should be at the heart of our understanding of the press.
The constitutional aspects of how we legislate are also important, however. In this House we have very strict rules, which are implemented fairly by the Clerks and the Speaker, about the scope of Bills, and we cannot tack on random things that we feel it would be nice to have. The House of Lords, being a self-governing House, can tack things on. Its Members have lost the self-restraint that they used to have of following constitutional norms in relation to legislation. They showed that in the last Session of Parliament in relation to boundaries, and they are doing so again now. I am concerned that the SNP is not more worried about the Sewel convention.
Joanna Cherry
I hesitate to give the hon. Gentleman a lecture on constitutional procedure, but I can give him full comfort on the points he has raised if he cares to consult the devolution guidance note 10. It states:
“During the passage of legislation, departments should approach the Scottish Executive about Government amendments changing or introducing provisions…or any other such amendments which the Government is minded to accept… No consultation is required for other amendments tabled. Ministers resisting non-Government amendments should not rest solely on the argument that they lack the consent of the Scottish Parliament unless there is advice to that effect from the Scottish Executive.”
The note goes on to explain what happens in such a situation:
“The Scottish Executive can be expected to deal swiftly with issues which arise during the passage of a Bill”.
With great humility, I want to say that on this occasion the hon. Gentleman is mistaken.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I will cover that point, and then swiftly come to a conclusion. The amendment was passed on 11 October, but there has been no response to it, and this is the very last opportunity to decide whether this provision should pass into law. If it passes into law, the Scottish Parliament will have had no opportunity to give its consent to what, in effect, is the repatriation of a power from the Scottish Parliament to the UK Parliament. It is quite right that the Government have not asked for such consent, because the change has not been made on a Government amendment, but SNP Members might well have wanted to seek the guidance of their friends in the Scottish Government to determine whether this was acceptable and to get their consent.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I will leave the hon. and learned Lady to come back to this point in her own speech.
These forms are very important. I would not pretend that I am anything other than a Unionist, but I believe that the Union will do well if we observe the norms and the courtesies between the various Parliaments. This Parliament must be exceptionally careful about overriding things that have been devolved, as media policy clearly has been, and we should therefore tread on such areas lightly.
The SNP should be cautious about using this in a politically opportunistic way, however convenient that may be. There will come a time when it is politically convenient for those on the Treasury Bench not to use the Sewel convention, but to get a Back Bencher to table an amendment that will go through without needing the Government to ask for consent at a very late stage in the proceedings, perhaps even as an amendment to a Lords amendment, and such an amendment will go through, with the Sewel convention brushed aside. If SNP Members say that that is perfectly all right and that that is the way to do it, that will leave such conventions in disrepute and will lead to rows between the constituent Parliaments. Basically, disrespect will be shown by one Parliament of another, which will become very serious constitutionally. For a one-day win, they may be risking a constitutional imbroglio.
Joanna Cherry
I rise to give the Scottish National party’s support to this group of Lords amendments.
Much was promised of the Lords when the Bill left this House—many Members had deep concerns about the Bill’s intrusion on civil liberties and about the security of data—but I regret, although I am not surprised, to say that the Lords amendments as a whole have not lived up to the expectations that some of us had. Although there have undoubtedly been some improvements in the safeguards afforded by the Bill, which we intend to support later—they are the result of Government amendments in the Lords that largely arose from suggestions made by the opposition and the Intelligence and Security Committee—we do not think those Lords amendment go far enough, and I will give specific examples of that later.
At the moment, we are dealing with the group of Lords amendments that some people, for convenience, have called the Leveson amendments. I want to knock firmly on the head any suggestion that Scottish National party Members or the Scottish Government are making any concessions in relation to the Sewel convention. Hon. Members would no doubt be very surprised if we did, but we are not doing so. Unlike the Minister, we are following the proper procedure, as laid down in devolution guidance note 10 on “Post-Devolution Primary Legislation affecting Scotland”. As I have already said, the note specifically comments on such amendments. In paragraphs 18 and 19, which I will read in full because this is very important, the note states:
“During the passage of legislation, departments should approach the Scottish Executive”—
or the Scottish Government, as they now are—
“about Government amendments changing or introducing provisions requiring consent, or any other such amendments which the Government is minded to accept.”
Clearly, Lords amendment 15 is not a Government amendment, and the Government are not minded to accept it. In such a situation, paragraph 18 says:
“It will be for the Scottish Executive to indicate the view of the Scottish Parliament.”
Very importantly, it goes on:
“No consultation is required for other amendments tabled.”
It is not therefore incumbent on the UK Government to consult the Scottish Government about opposition amendments. It goes on:
“Ministers resisting non-Government amendments should not rest solely on the argument that they lack the consent of the Scottish Parliament unless there is advice to that effect from the Scottish Executive.”
I know as a matter of fact that there is no advice to that effect from the Scottish Government, because I spoke to the Minister concerned about that at the weekend. Paragraph 19 says:
“The Scottish Executive can be expected to deal swiftly with issues which arise during the passage of a Bill, and to recognise the exigencies of legislative timetables (eg when forced to consider accepting amendments at short notice). Nevertheless since the last opportunity for amendment is at Third Reading in the Lords or Report Stage in the Commons the absence of consent should not be a bar to proceeding with the Bill in the interim.”
That is what the guidance note states, so the point made by the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) is fallacious. This is not a Government amendment or an amendment that the Government are minded to accept; it is an opposition amendment. It is perfectly open to SNP Members to support the Lords amendment at this stage without making any concession. Only in the event that the amendment is passed by this House will it be incumbent on the Government to go to the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament to get a legislative consent motion. This point is a complete red herring.
Mr Rees-Mogg
In the event that such a legislative consent motion were refused, would the hon. and learned Lady expect the Queen to refuse to give Royal Assent to the Bill, because that would be the only way to stop the Bill becoming law?
Joanna Cherry
I assure the hon. Gentleman that it would not come to that, because if the amendment is passed by the House, the Scottish Government will grant a legislative consent motion. The SNP, which is in opposition in Westminster and the Government in Scotland, has discussed this issue in detail over the weekend—I discussed it with the Scottish Government Minister—and we have a position on Lords amendment 15. I will now set out our position, but I am very conscious of the time, so I will be as brief as possible.
As I said earlier, Lords amendment 15 rides on the back of clause 8, and I am very proud to say that it arose from an SNP suggestion in Committee for such an amendment. We have heard about the effect of the Lords amendment. In my respectful submission, the effect will be good: no newspaper should be involved in telephone hacking, and if one is, it should face the consequences. I want to make the SNP position clear.
Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act, about which we have heard much today, was passed in March 2013. It was part of implementing the Leveson inquiry recommendation that any new regulator set up by the press should be accredited as independent and effective. The purpose of section 40 is to provide costs protection for claimants and Leveson-regulated newspaper publishers. It was passed in this House with cross-party agreement, including the support of SNP MPs. There were rather fewer SNP MPs then than there are now, but my colleagues supported the then Bill. As has already been said, the UK Government have reneged on implementing section 40 on many occasions. Today’s announcement of a consultation kicks its implementation further into the long grass.
As has correctly been said, section 40 extends to England and Wales only, because the regulation of print media is devolved to the Scottish Parliament. The Scottish Parliament has provided cross-party support for the UK Government’s actions to implement the royal charter. The Scottish Government will continue to monitor the current press regulations and work with other parties in Scotland and at Westminster to ensure effective regulation of the media on a non-political basis.
The majority of the press, and in particular the regional press in Scotland, were not involved in the sort of malpractice that prompted the Leveson recommendations. It is therefore the view of the Scottish Government and the Scottish National party that any policy in this area in Scotland must be proportionate and must balance the freedom of the press with the public desire for high standards, accuracy and transparency.
That said, the protection afforded by section 40 when brought into force would be available to Scottish litigants who chose to sue newspapers based in England and Wales. Regrettably, a number of major newspapers based in England were involved in the sort of malpractice that prompted Leveson, and it is therefore right that such protection should be afforded. The limited amendments that we are discussing will not affect small or regional newspapers adversely at all, because they have not been involved in phone hacking, and, I assume, do not have any plans to become involved in it.
Scottish National party MPs are going to support the Lords amendments to provide costs protection across the UK for claimants and Leveson-regulated news publishers in claims for unlawful interception of communications, including phone hacking. I hope that as a result of the amendments some good, at least, will come of this Bill’s passage through Parliament, in the event that this House is minded to support them. I will be crystal clear that nothing I have said involves any concession whatever about the primacy and importance of the Sewel convention, which is now enshrined in legislation. If anyone is in any doubt on that, they should go away and read carefully the guidance note from which I have quoted at some length this afternoon.
Chris Bryant
Well, I do not think the hon. Gentleman will be allowed to make a very long speech, as we do not have much more time. He is completely and utterly wrong. He has dragged himself into a hermeneutic circle and he will never get out of it.
When the amendment—which was carried by 530 votes to 13 to become section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013—was tabled, the then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) said:
“Today marks a turning point. We can move on from simply talking about Lord Justice Leveson’s report to start acting on it, with a new package...The package includes a new royal charter, as announced by the Prime Minister earlier; a new costs and damages package that seeks to maximise incentives for relevant publishers to be part of the new press self-regulator; and one short clause reinforcing the point that politicians cannot tamper with the new press royal charter, which is the subject of debate in the other place.”—[Official Report, 18 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 698.]
Why was there an all-party deal? Because the Leveson inquiry exposed real failings both in the press and in the regulatory system. Many of us felt that we, the elected politicians of this country, had failed. Whether out of partisan ambition, deference, cowardice or a genuine determination to do everything in our power to protect the freedom of the press, we had nonetheless failed. We had developed relationships with the press and the media that were so cosy that the people no longer trusted us to make the best decisions on these issues in the national interest. We were on trial as much as the press itself. That is why we all agreed that we had to find a better way forward.
Above all, we knew there had to be a genuinely independent system of redress. I do not often agree with the hon. Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale), but he said that it could not just be
“an updated version of the Press Complaints Commission. God forbid that it is”—[Official Report, 18 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 662.]—
because that would be doomed to failure. But without the commencement of section 40, that is precisely what we have got. IPSO is the Press Complaints Commission in all but name. It is not independent in terms of its finances, the membership of its board or the decisions it makes. It is entirely compromised, as recent decisions have shown. The press marks its own homework and, surprise, surprise, it always gives itself gold stars. Five hundred and thirty Members wanted it to be independent of government and independent of the press, too.
Mr Rees-Mogg
If the hon. Gentleman does not like IPSO, how can he think that IMPRESS is any better? It is approved by the state, and it is funded by one irritated celebrity.
Chris Bryant
It is not my business to decide which of the two is better. The whole point is that we set up—through a royal charter that can be changed only by a two thirds majority here and a two thirds majority in the other place—a body that would take the decision at arm’s length from us. My anxiety about today’s decision by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Media and Sport is that she is bringing this matter right back into her inbox, which I think is wholly mistaken. The press would be best advised not to encourage that.
Since that day in 2013, Conservative Ministers have repeated their commitment to the package time and again: the right hon. Member for Basingstoke on 18 March 2013; David Cameron and Viscount Younger of Leckie on that same day; the right hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) on 10 April 2013; the right hon. Member for Basingstoke again, six times, on 16 April 2013; the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Sir Oliver Letwin) on 16 April 2013; the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), now the Attorney General, on 25 April 2013; Lord Gardiner of Kimble on 3 July 2013; the right hon. Member for Wantage—again—on 4 December 2013; David Cameron in The Spectator on Boxing day 2013—a nice little Christmas present; Lord Gardiner again on 2 April 2014; the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), then Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, now the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, on 20 January 2015; and indeed, the Government did so as late as 26 June 2015. All these people constantly reaffirmed that they were in favour of the commencement of section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013. No wonder, then, that some Members in this House are impatient; no wonder there are Members in the House of Lords who are impatient and want the Government to get on with it. That is precisely why the amendments were tabled.
Relocation of Migrants in need of International Protection (Opt-in Decision)
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
James Brokenshire
My right hon. Friend has highlighted what might be described as secondary movement, and we remain conscious of that. Obviously, there is secondary movement within the Schengen area, but we maintain our own border controls and visa requirements. Practical issues with the scheme have been highlighted; to date, only about 160 people have been relocated under the measures thus far.
Rather than relocating those arriving in Europe, the Government have made clear that our policy is to focus our efforts on resettling vulnerable people in need of international protection. We continue to make the case that this is not just an EU problem but an international issue requiring concerted action from a whole range of international parties.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is not the problem on secondary movement the fact that once migrants have become citizens of an EU member state, the free movement of people means that they are entitled to go anywhere? Even under our own laws, asylum seekers go to the head of the queue in getting nationality.
James Brokenshire
My hon. Friend makes an important point in respect of rights and entitlement to citizenship, but he will know that there are certain tests that we adopt—good character requirements, for example—and other steps that we take to assure ourselves in respect of those who may be granted citizenship, and that that process is conducted over a number of years before someone would be so entitled. Citizenship is certainly not automatic. I underline the point that I made—we maintain our own visa and border requirements in respect of those who come here, and adhere to them clearly for those who are not EU citizens.
Sir William Cash
The reality is that there are declared jihadists who have been in Syria and other parts of the middle east. Jihadi John, as he was described, is a very good example of a declared jihadist who came from the United Kingdom, but I was not making a point about the United Kingdom, although I do perceive the danger. I was referring to the fact that there is no doubt that citizens—admittedly, they were French—who had been to Syria and come back via routes that enabled them to get to Paris contributed to the carnage. People can dispute that if they wish, but the facts are clear. The reality is that real problems have to be addressed, and that is an extremely important part of this debate. People can have differing views, but the reality is that there are real dangers.
I am also bound to say another thing with respect to the manner in which the Government have dealt with the issue. I want to make this point briefly, but it is important. The Minister passed very briefly over this and made a slight apology for what happened, but, with regard to override, I am going to put it in stronger terms. Scheduling a debate after the Government have reached an opt-in decision makes a mockery of their own commitment to enhanced scrutiny of their opt-in decisions and to provide full transparency and accountability to Parliament. The Government have provided no explanation, even this evening, for their failure to schedule an opt-in debate during a September sitting of Parliament, when the House could have expressed a view on the merits of opting into the first two relocation proposals, or an opt-in debate before the expiry of the opt-in deadline of 8 December on the proposed amending regulation.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Would my hon. Friend be more sympathetic to Her Majesty’s Government, as I might be, if it were not true that it was nearly three years ago, in January 2013, that the European Scrutiny Committee requested a debate on the Floor of the House on the free movement of people? Their failure to schedule debates is long standing.
Sir William Cash
It is indeed. I always want to encourage the Government to do better, but on this occasion they have done a lot worse. The delay in scheduling opt-in debates is inconsistent with the letter and spirt of the commitments made to Parliament by the Minister for Europe. I would be grateful if the Minister for Immigration would deal with that, because he owes not only the European Scrutiny Committee, but, much more importantly, the House and this country’s voters an apology for the way in which it has been dealt with. I am sure he will give that apology; perhaps he would like to do so now. Is there a chance that he might? Is he listening to what I am saying?
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am actually going to support the Government today, too. There seem to be amazing levels of support, which is always quite dangerous, but it is refreshing that the Scottish National party is here in force to ensure that these matters are properly debated and scrutiny is carried out effectively.
The reason I support the Government is partly that the European Union has made an absolute hash of it. I phrase myself slightly more bluntly than the hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) who, in glorious understatement, said that the scheme of the European Union was not working as anticipated. Well, I thought that was on a par with the late Emperor of Japan, who at the end of the war said:
“The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”
When we think that, according to the Daily Express, 184 people out of 160,000 have been relocated, it is a failure even by the terms of the European Union. It introduced a plan that was hotly opposed by elected Governments. It imposed it by qualified majority voting. We, fortunately, had an opt-out, which we used. But what underlies this policy is, to my mind, also so wrong.
Here I disagree with the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant), who made a very powerful speech about the duty we have to mankind in general. I very much accept that. The duty to refugees is fundamental. It is tremendously important and is something the United Kingdom has done for centuries. The question then is how to do it well, how to do it effectively, and how to preserve life so that we actually save people. It seems to me that what the European Union has done has made the situation worse for the refugees themselves. Of over 900,000 who have come by boat to the shores of the European Union in 2015, 3,671 have either died or gone missing. The terrible events in the Mediterranean in 2014 led the Holy Father to say:
“We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast graveyard.”
The reason this happened is the pious but failed hopes of the European Union’s refugee policy: the idea that as soon as people get into the boundaries of the European Union they will get citizenship, but if they cannot get here there is nothing that will be done for them. That seems to me to encourage people to take these crazy risks that have led to the tragedies. The EU’s policy is itself creating dangers for refugees.
The refugees who come are not the halt and the lame, but the fittest and the most able to take the risks involved in trying to cross the sea to come to the European Union. We have seen that 70% of the refugees who have come to the European Union are in fact men, primarily young men. A system has been set up that creates incentives and leads people to take foolish risks to come here in the first place. The people who are most at risk—the children, the elderly and the frail—are left behind, because if they apply from their risky country, the forces of the EU will not let them in.
Her Majesty’s Government have got this right, but the numbers are hopeless. The 20,000 over five years is absolutely a step in the right direction, but of course we should do more. We should think of how many we take from the European Union under the free movement of people. In the year to March 2015, we took 183,000 economic migrants from the European Union; 183,000 people who were safe in their own country and not at risk of persecution. They were not in fear of their lives. They wanted to come here for the most noble and honourable reason—to improve the condition of themselves and their families. They moved halfway across a continent to do it and that is something I admire hugely. That is a very Conservative thing to do—to wish to better oneself and to take that risk. That is what entrepreneurs do. However, they are economic migrants, not refugees. And because we take so many people from the European Union under the guise of the free movement of people, when it comes to taking those who are genuinely at risk of their life we take 4,000 a year. We take 4,000 a year from the camps in Syria who may die if they do not escape, and we take 183,000 because we believe in the principle of European citizenship and that anyone who wants to come here from the EU should be free to waltz in, wherever they have waltzed from.
This is not only undesirable in domestic political terms: it is undesirable in moral terms. We are not helping those who are most in need; we are helping those who do not in fact need our help and support. We are helping those who are safe, rather than being generous to those who are at risk. This seems to me a fundamental failing of the European Union, because—instead of giving aid to refugees—it encourages people to take unwarranted risks, and gives benefits to those who are already safe.
Why do I stick to this number of 183,000 and what is the context? The context is that there is a limit to the numbers any country will take in any one year, not because free movement is a bad thing in itself but because the societies to which people move cannot cope with the influx above a certain level. There is not the infrastructure, there are not the schools or hospitals, and the society lacks the capacity to absorb large numbers at one point. Their arrival needs to be staggered over a much longer period. If we have so many coming from safe countries, inevitably we have to be mean with the numbers we can control because they do not benefit from the European treaties and free movement with the EU.
The EU’s whole approach is wrong, and we, in our renegotiation, are unutterably feeble; all we are doing is muddling about with a few benefits, which is not why people come anyway. As I said earlier, they come for that noble, inspirational reason: they want to improve their lives and those of their families. They do not come because they are benefits cheats, yet we grub around on that, rather than thinking about the real problem—the scale of immigration from the EU. As the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) pointed out, free-for-all immigration does not work for our democracy. Our people—our voters, our electors—do not want it, they reject it, and yet the Government do not even ask to get this back under domestic control. Instead, they do not opt in to one part of things with many parts, but it will not have any great effect.
I will support the Government tonight, but what was the best reason we heard for why the 800,000 Mrs Merkel is welcoming in will not come here? Apparently, our ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Germany has reported to Ministers that we do not need to worry about them coming here because the Germans are slow at processing citizenship applications. Well, isn’t that lucky? They are slow. I always thought German bureaucracy was efficient, but clearly not; when it comes to processing citizenship applications, they might take 10 years. So we will not get 800,000 today or tomorrow. But we will get them the election after next. That, I am afraid, is where the Government are failing and letting down the British people. They have opted out of one thing, but they have left the big, the real, the major problem at the centre—
Mr Rees-Mogg
The amount of immigration to this country from the EU shows that we are a great magnet. Everyone seems to want to come to the UK, including to the glories of Scotland. It is extraordinary the draw we are. In a way, I am proud of this. I love the fact that people all around the world think the best place to live is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It should give us a glow of pride about the success of our nation under this glorious Conservative Government, who are bringing us peace and prosperity.
Alison Thewliss
Does the hon. Gentleman not accept that part of the benefit of being in the EU and having those open borders is that British citizens can go and live in Europe and that as many of them go and live there as come here?
Mr Rees-Mogg
No, I do not accept that. The reason the British go and live abroad and are welcomed abroad is that most of the British who go abroad are quite well off and mainly retired, and therefore they take a lot of income into poorer European countries that happen to have a little more sunshine. I quite understand. It is the Florida effect. People want to go to the southern European countries, but they take wealth with them, which would be welcomed even if we were not members of the EU, because poor countries always want to attract rich migrants. Rich countries cannot take an unlimited number of poor migrants, which is why we should focus on the most needy —the real refugees, the ones in Syria and the camps—and cut back on the 183,000 economic migrants coming from the EU. When the Government do that, they will deserve much more support than the support they will get today.
Serious and Organised Crime: Prüm Convention
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Andy Burnham
I reiterate that security comes first. The first responsibility of any Government is to secure the people who live here by taking reasonable measures to reduce the risks to them, because from that foundation of security come all our traditions, our laws and our liberties. That is why co-operation in this field is a good thing, given that the nature of crime now is international. If we fail to understand that, our own legal system will never be able to respond to the changing nature of crime that we face.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I agree with the point that the right hon. Gentleman is making, which is that it is sensible to co-operate, but does this co-operation need the institutions of the European Union?
Andy Burnham
Why should it not, if the co-operation is improved by those institutions? The hon. Gentleman is putting an in-built dislike and distrust of them ahead of the actual issue before us. That is what some Conservative Members are doing, but they should judge this on its merits. Surely the better we can facilitate that co-operation, the more benefits it will bring back to the police and security services. I would imagine that co-operation will be enhanced by working with established institutions, as opposed to making ad hoc arrangements, Government to Government. That is the benefit of the European Union, although I know he probably does not accept that.
The Government have come to the right decision, albeit in a roundabout way, but I wish to press the Home Secretary on a few points of detail, the first of which is on the cost. She said that in the original assessment the cost of opting into Prüm was put at £31 million, but she now says it is £13 million. We are prepared to accept that at face value, but can she say what is responsible for such a significant reduction in the cost? The business and implementation case says that the estimate is based on “high level requirements”, which implies that it is based not on a fully fledged implementation of Prüm but just on the “high level requirements”. Will she say more about that? What are the “downstream operational running costs” to which the business case refers? How much will it cost every year to run the system, set against the benefits that she said it would bring? My next point may be of interest to those who have signed the amendment. Will the Home Secretary say what the UK will be liable to pay back to the EU if the House does not back this decision this evening? I understand that it is a significant sum, and perhaps it would help the House to know what it is.
I now wish to deal with the safeguards. We welcome the appointment of the oversight board, although there is concern that extradition should not be possible under a European arrest warrant purely on the basis of a DNA or fingerprint match. I think this was the point that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) was raising earlier. The point was that other corroborating evidence should always be required before extradition can be granted. I think the Home Secretary was confirming that was the case, but it would help the House if she or one of her Ministers could say a little more on that at some point.
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
It is becoming something of an annual event that the Home Office should bring forward a further passing of powers to the European Union. Just over a year ago, we had the arrest warrant and all that went with it, and now we have Prüm, or Proom depending on one’s preferred pronunciation.
I must confess that this is a grave disappointment, because one had begun to read briefings in the press that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary was going to become the Boadicea of the Leave campaign, and on her winged chariot she was going to be putting the case for why we should have less Europe rather than more. Instead, we get this order brought before us today on the grounds of necessity. She says that it is the only way in which we can co-operate with our friends in Europe—countries that wish to assist us and that we wish to assist.
The arguments for the order are, superficially, very attractive. There is no one in this House who wants to aid terrorists or stop them being arrested. There is no one who wants rapists to go free, or who wants petrol smuggled between Northern and southern Ireland. We want the law to be obeyed and the wrongdoers to be arrested. We want them to be caught and put in prison. That is all true, and we want efficient systems to be put in place that ensure that that happens. There is absolute unanimity in this House, and probably—except among the criminal fraternity—in the country at large. Then we hear why it can be done only this one way, which is more Europe, with the Commission and the European Court of Justice.
Interpol, according to my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and others who have spoken, sounds as though it is run by Inspector Clouseau and uses cleft sticks to carry messages between countries. It is so incompetent and slow that it is hard to understand why it exists at all. If it is quite so incompetent at gathering information and quite so lazy and idle at passing it around the world, why are we contributing to its upkeep? Is there not a case for fundamental reform of Interpol? Should we not do something about it to ensure that, internationally and not just in the narrow European sphere, there is a means, a method and an ability to transmit information relating to these dangerous criminals? But oh, no, we will not bother with that. That might be hard work. It might mean that something has to be done, that it will upset the nice, expanding, imperial European Union that has of course to have more powers gathered to itself. No, the only thing that can be done is to use the full mechanism of the European Union; there is no other way.
We assume that if we offered bilateral intergovernmental agreements, they would be refused. The Home Office states that they would be refused; that that would be too difficult because there is another mechanism within the European Union. But that makes the assumption that our friends, our partners, our allies in Europe are so wedded to the idea of the European Union that they will not do something that they themselves wish to do because we will not agree to their specific structures for doing it. Therefore, we must accept the structures rather than negotiating with them over what those structures may be.
This strikes me as perverse. We know that our friends in France are keen to have this exchange of information. Is the Home Secretary really saying that the French would not agree to an intergovernmental bilateral agreement that we would give them information and they would give us information because it did not meet the highfalutin European ideal? Is that really what Her Majesty’s Government are saying? Is that the case with Germany, Italy and Spain? Are they all saying that they attach so much importance to the European Union that, even though they wish to share information with us, even though they think it is important, even though they think that it would cut crime, they are not willing to do so?
Sir William Cash
We must also take into account the decision taken by Denmark only a few days ago in this enormous description of the kaleidoscope of European unity.
Mr Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is right. The Danish question is one of the greatest importance. Denmark had a referendum, having trusted their people, which I believe we may be doing at some point. But of course we are not trusting them on this measure, because it is instrumental to catching terrorists, and the people cannot be trusted to decide whether they want to do that or not. No, this must be done by the Government after a three-hour debate—though lucky us to get even a three-hour debate. Last year we did not get a debate on the European arrest warrant. We had it on something else.
Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman appears to be suggesting that we have a series of bilateral agreements with 20-something EU member states, but is that not essentially what is being done tonight, albeit in a more efficient way?
Mr Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is only partly right—a bit of a curate’s egg, if I may say so, but it is regrettably rotten in parts. If the agreement is done in this way, it comes under the competence of the European Court of Justice and infraction proceedings can be brought by the European Commission. Why is that important? I accept that protections are built into Prüm, and that there are limits on the application of what the ECJ can do, but it needs to be seen as part of a whole package. We are agreeing today that the investigatory function in relation to data held by Governments should be centralised at a European level. We agreed a year ago that the arrest function should be centralised with a European competence. So we have investigation, we have arrest, and we have a proposal from the European Commission for a European public prosecutor—so far, resisted, but this measure was resisted a year ago, and the European arrest warrant was not Conservative party policy until a year ago.
I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman sees where I am going. This is part of a package of creating a European criminal justice system. It comes one by one and bit by bit. On every occasion, the measure is said to be essential and we are told that there is no opportunity of doing it differently, but if there is no opportunity of doing it differently, why is my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister racing around European capitals trying to organise a renegotiation? If there is never any other possibility, is that not banging our head against a brick wall? Surely we should be saying—the Government intimated this a year ago, but there has been no delivery at all—that we will make the European arrest warrant and all that goes with it part of the renegotiation. We would go back to the status quo ante—where we were prior to the Lisbon treaty: that we do these things on an intergovernmental basis.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Stone—I am sorry, I mean hon. Friend; he ought to be right honourable; it is extraordinary that Her Majesty has not yet asked him to join the Privy Council—pointed me in the direction of Denmark. Denmark has said no. Denmark will want to make arrangements with fellow European Union states to exchange data with their friends and allies, and we could make arrangements with our friends and allies to exchange data and do all the sensible things of which everyone in this House is in favour. It is the right thing for us to do, but it is better than that. If we did it on an intergovernmental basis we might decide that there are some EU member states whose criminal justice systems are not up to it. That is an important point. My hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) referred to his constituent and the disgraceful way in which he was treated in a country where we do not have the same confidence in the criminal justice processes that we have in, for example, Germany and France, or, for that matter, the United States and Canada. Such an arrangement would give us greater flexibility, and there are a number of ways in which it could be done. We could have intergovernmental agreements with the European Union as a body. The EU has legal personality, so it is possible to do it on that basis, but maintain control and keep the rights that we enjoy, and stop the rush—that is perhaps an exaggeration, as the last debate was a year ago, but it is a rush in European terms—to establish a single criminal justice system.
It is worrying that a Government who portray themselves in election campaigns, propaganda and statements as Eurosceptic, when it comes to the details of what they are doing, turn out to think that the answer is more Europe. They then say that this has to be done because we are in danger if we do not do it. The only reason we are in danger is that we assume that the EU and its member states are not rational in their dealings with us, so we must always give in to them. One of the greatest Prime Ministers that this country ever saw, William Pitt, said:
“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
This argument is dependent on the necessity. I do not wish this Government to be tyrannical, nor do I wish to be a slave.
Chief Constable Dismissal Procedures
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(9 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am grateful for this opportunity to raise in an Adjournment debate the issue of the role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the police and crime commissioner in chief constable dismissal procedures. Inevitably, this relates to the recent experience of the Avon and Somerset constabulary and of its former chief constable, Nick Gargan.
The Avon and Somerset constabulary has a wonderful history and reputation. It is a fine police force, if not one of the finest in the country, and it deserves the best possible leadership. It has now been without a chief constable since May 2014, and there are concerns that more than £500,000 has been spent, and that the inquiry has been mishandled, in the ultimate removal of Mr Gargan.
The story started with a slew of lurid, even criminal, allegations. Although my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West (Charlotte Leslie) will cover in detail the failings of the IPCC, it is worth noting that it did nothing to stop rumours abounding. It continued to pretend that criminal charges were being considered when they were not, and used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to investigate. One of the team examining the issues was the support commissioner, a Mrs Williams, who was not necessarily impartial as she herself was the subject of an earlier unrelated complaint from Mr Gargan.
Although in some ways the police and crime commissioner may have been a victim of the process, Mrs Sue Mountstevens is not herself without blame. She has an elected mandate to oversee the police force in Avon and Somerset. She used this, shortly after her initial election, to remove the previous chief constable and was then instrumental in appointing Mr Gargan. When the report on Mr Gargan was ultimately produced, recommending eight written warnings for misconduct, her initial reaction was to accept it, but she later changed her mind and applied under section 38 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 to force the chief constable to resign.
This change of mind came about because of letters from superintendents and from the Police Federation indicating their lack of confidence in the chief constable. However, that correspondence must have been predicated on the IPCC report, and on leaked information pertaining to it, that we now know to be fundamentally flawed. So the lack of confidence in the chief constable was based on rumour and error, not on facts. This led to the removal of a second chief constable during this police and crime commissioner’s term of office, but it was done essentially because of the PCC’s willingness to bow to pressure, and not because of a mature considered judgment.
This leads me to the issue of the section 38 powers and how they were used. I have corresponded with Sir Thomas Winsor about this, and he has sent me a thoughtful letter and a copy of a valuable lecture that he gave in relation to these powers. In his letter, he says that the use of the powers in this instance does not involve double jeopardy and that
“the chief constable was therefore not dismissed for the misconduct of which he was found guilty; as said, he could not have been, because there was no finding of gross misconduct”.
That is to say that Mr Gargan was not fired for misconduct because it had not been gross misconduct. That is intelligent sophistry, but it is none the less sophistical. I disagree with it because the loss of confidence was instrumentally caused by the misconduct allegations and the punishment for misconduct. Additionally, a number of leaks relating to criminal activity and to some of the material found on Mr Gargan’s telephone led people to think that much more serious things had happened than were in fact proved.
Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)
In short, is not what we have seen trial by media and smear, resulting in an irresistible pressure on a public servant to resign before the facts of the case were ultimately known or due weight and consideration were given to those offences?
Mr Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend, as so often, hits the nail on the head. The one block that there should have been to this, the police and crime commissioner, turned out to be weak in the face of this trial by media and this public pressure. That is deeply unsatisfactory, because it means that the loss of confidence in somebody who has been found not guilty may be sufficient to remove them from the job, so if someone throws enough mud and a little bit of it sticks then that could justify a lack of confidence, and thus leak, rumour and gossip replace hard fact, which risks the independence of the constabulary. In his own lecture, Sir Thomas Winsor said that
“sufficient security of tenure is essential to safeguard those aspects of a Chief Constable’s role that relate to operational independence. Operational independence would be seriously compromised by a power for a Police and Crime Commissioner to dismiss the Chief Constable at will.”
At the heart of our concern is the fact that a flawed process, a weak police and crime commissioner and the power of gossip allowed a chief constable to be dismissed. That must undermine the ability in future of chief constables to take difficult decisions if they know that unfounded or minor misdemeanours may be used to force them out.
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)
It is even worse than that. The chief superintendent’s letter did the damage. The man who signed it was Chief Superintendent Wylie, who suddenly then became promoted to commander in Somerset. I am sorry, but that is too much of a coincidence. This is worse than anything that Chief Constable Gargan did. This is completely out of hand.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol North West will make some remarks in relation to the vested interests that emerged through the course of this process, which we should be concerned about. We should note that the no confidence in the chief constable arose before the final publication of the report, so it had to be based on rumour and not on fact.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Yes, and smear. It has been a damaging process for confidence in the police service. It has been damaging to the Avon and Somerset constabulary. It has obviously been particularly damaging for Mr Gargan. It is against a long-standing tradition of English justice—this is the most important point—that somebody should be tried for the same offence twice. I know that Mr Gargan would like to meet the Police Minister to discuss these matters, so that Her Majesty’s Government are fully informed about all that has gone wrong in this process. That would be helpful. Furthermore, a more general review of section 38 powers is needed, and the role of the IPCC needs to be examined and the backbone of police and crime commissioners X-rayed to see what, if anything, they are made of. That may help to ensure that such a serious problem does not arise again.
Mr Hayes
Smear and innuendo are never acceptable in any aspect of public service, and my right hon. Friend is right that the system must be robust in guarding against vexatious and unhappy claims. As I have said, I will not comment on the specifics of the case, but as a matter of principle he is, of course, right that the system needs to be sufficiently well designed to ensure that complaints that have merit are dealt with properly.
We have heard today, particularly from my right hon. Friend, about what might be described as “double jeopardy”—the time-honoured principle that people are not tried twice for the same thing—and it has been suggested that it should not be open to a PCC to call upon their chief constable to resign or retire when they have been subject to misconduct proceedings.
I think that it is important to note that the process of misconduct hearings, and the sanctions that may result, are rightly different and separate from the process set down in section 38 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, which enables the PCC to call upon a chief constable to retire or resign. The PCC holds the chief constable to account on behalf of the public. They are best placed to make decisions on both the appointment and dismissal of a chief constable. We have set out a clear process that must be followed, and I shall come to it momentarily.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that clarification, but in this case the section 38 process followed immediately from the report into the misconduct allegations, so the two were intimately and intricately linked.
Mr Hayes
With the precision and eloquence for which he is renowned, my hon. Friend has put that on the record.
The Government recognise that the decision to call upon a chief constable to resign or retire is significant and should not be taken lightly, and in that regard I take the point made by my right hon. Friend a moment ago. That is why we have established detailed procedures that must be followed whenever a PCC might wish to invoke their section 38 powers, and we remain satisfied that sufficient safeguards are in place with regard to the power of PCCs to dismiss chief constables.
These issues have, of course, been debated in this House previously, most notably during the passage of the 2011 Act. It is worth noting that the IPCC has no role within the section 38 process, although it is equally important to note that the PCC is obliged to have regard to the views of Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary and to seek the views of the relevant police and crime panel, as well as providing the chief constable with the opportunity to make representations. The process is detailed and requires the PCC to take into account independent views. The final decision will remain that of the PCC, but I remain confident that the process offers sufficient checks and balances and that the interests of the people and communities who elect PCCs are properly served in this way.
EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Mrs May
The fact I quoted is absolutely correct: net migration is down by a quarter from its peak under the last Labour Government. Furthermore, net migration from outside the EU is down to the levels of the late 1990s—something that never happened under the last Labour Government and has only happened because of the action taken by this Government to control immigration.
I welcome the opportunity to reiterate the Government’s support for the package of 35 measures, including the arrest warrant, which help us to tackle serious crime and keep this country safe. I think that the right hon. Lady’s commitment to the arrest warrant would carry more weight if, when in government, she and her party had taken action to address the concern that many people raised about how it was being operated—concerns that were eroding the public’s trust in this important measure.
Since 2010, we have made the important reforms that the Opposition failed to make in the previous eight years, and our law enforcement and prosecution agencies, the devolved Administrations, the Extradition Law Committee in the House of Lords and other experts, including the Lord Chief Justice, all wish us to continue to use the arrest warrant to bring offenders to justice and keep our country safe. That is not the arrest warrant bequeathed to us by Labour, but the arrest warrant that now has proper protection for those wanted for extradition, including British citizens. We have taken positive action to address the issues that have caused people such concern.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
How confident is my right hon. Friend that after 1 December, when the Court of Justice of the European Union will decide whether an arrest warrant issued by another member state is valid, the protections brought into domestic British law will prove to be robust?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend has raised two important points. I will address both of them. He refers to the temporary transitional extension. The option that is proposed to extend that transitional period for a significant time would require secondary legislation to override the primary treaty right of the UK to opt out of measures and would effectively override the opt-out itself. That is a precedent that no one would want to set. A transitional decision is proposed by the European Commission. We have no vote on its adoption. We would have no power to amend the drafting of the decision and it could extend to all 135 measures and make them subject to ECJ jurisdiction to boot. That would effectively hand over our power on this matter to Brussels, which would determine it for us. I think that that would run entirely counter to our aim of bringing powers back from Brussels.
The other point is that it has been clear in discussions we have been having with the European Commission that the purpose of the transition arrangement was, for a very limited period, potentially to ensure that while the process of opting in was taking place there was no operational gap, so that we would make sure there was no point at which it was possible for somebody to claim that an arrest warrant, for example, was no longer operational as a result of the decisions we had taken.
In relation to the suggestion that we could have negotiated a separate treaty with the European Commission, reference is often made to the Danish position on that, but in fact that is different as the Danes have no alternative option for participating in the JHA measures. Protocol 36, the opting-out decision protocol, sets out our ability to opt out and to rejoin these JHA measures, so it puts us in a different position. The EC argues that that provides us with an adequate ability to go into these measures, and therefore renders a third-country agreement unnecessary.
Given my hon. Friend’s interest in European Court of Justice jurisdiction, the other point I would make is that in all the measures Denmark has negotiated separate arrangements on with the EC, it has been required to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the ECJ. That has been the price of getting the negotiated agreement with the European Commission, so I really do not think it is an option that resolves the issues my hon. Friend and others have concerns about.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend’s speech is taking a long time because it is so interesting and important. Following on from the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), I wanted to say that there are three points the Home Secretary has just mentioned where Her Majesty’s Government have negotiated with the Commission and have accepted the Commission’s no as authoritative without really pushing. This does not bode particularly well for an attempt to renegotiate the treaties after the next election.
Mrs May
The fact is that we have been able to go into the negotiation with the European Commission and other member states, wanting to rejoin 35 measures, and the package we have brought back is rejoining 35 measures and not more measures. Many people said to us, “You will not be able to negotiate 35 measures. The European Commission and other member states will require you to join more measures.” They have not done so. The negotiation in that sense was successful, and contrary to what my hon. Friend says, I think that bodes well for the future.
I want to say a little more about some of the other 35 measures. I have mentioned already that they include important tools such as SIS II, the second generation Schengen information system. We are scheduled to join it shortly. It further strengthens our ability to detect foreign criminals at the border, including individuals wanted in their own countries for serious crimes such as rape and murder.
When the UK connects to the system, we will gain access to 51 million alerts, including on individuals who pose a very real security risk, such as foreign fighters who have travelled to Syria and Iraq and who could pose a serious risk to this country on their return. It is a tool that I am sure the whole House will want us to have at our disposal.
The package of measures also includes the Council decision on child pornography, which ensures that international co-operation to tackle this abhorrent crime is prioritised and that collective pressure is put on internet companies to tackle the disgusting crime of online child sex abuse wherever it takes place.
The package also includes Europol, which does excellent work to tackle cross-border crimes—under its British director, Rob Wainwright—and Eurojust, which often operates hand and glove with Europol, such as during the horsemeat scandal early last year. As I have already said, the package includes the European criminal record information system—ECRIS—as well, which has dramatically increased the number of criminal record checks on foreign nationals, and also the prisoner transfer framework decision, which helps us to remove foreign criminals from British jails.
The package also includes joint investigation teams, which allow our police and their European counterparts to co-operate in cross-border operations, such as Operation Birkhill which saw five criminals sentenced to a total of 36 years’ imprisonment this summer for their involvement in the degrading trafficking of over 120 women from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland into the UK.
These are all vital measures which the Government were clear we should remain part of in the national interest. We have exercised the opt-out, which the Labour party negotiated but voted against using. We have brought back some 100 powers from Brussels which the Labour party gave away. We have negotiated a good deal to remain part of a much smaller package of 35 measures in the national interest, despite being told by the Labour party that we should have sought “guarantees” that they did not bother to negotiate into the Lisbon treaty.
It is this Government who are providing leadership on European issues. We have cut the EU’s budget, secured an exemption from the new EU bank bail-out fund, vetoed a new treaty and secured a position of real influence in the Commission. That is leadership—an issue I know the Labour party might not want to discuss at the moment. Where this Government are leading, I am happy to see the Opposition follow, so I am glad to have the support of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford today, but given her party’s failure to reform the arrest warrant, her opposition to our exercising the opt-out, her refusal to back the repatriation of powers and her continued efforts to deny the British people their say through an in/out referendum, it is clear that the Labour party can never provide the leadership that this country needs on Europe.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
We have seen Labour at its most opportunistic and cynical. The shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) complained vociferously about the lack of time given to this matter, but it was the Labour Government who negotiated the infamous Lisbon treaty, and did not call for any debate on the Floor of the House. If it had been left up to Labour, there would have been no time at all for a debate on the Floor of the House, and the matter would have been dealt with by an obscure Committee upstairs over a 90-minute period. Yet Labour Members now cynically suggest that there is not enough time, despite having had six opportunities here in the Chamber.
Labour Members have also complained that there has not been enough time for this debate. Last Monday, they used an arcane procedure—it can be found on page 404 of “Erskine May”—to curtail debate. They attempt to convince people that there has been insufficient debate when they have cut hours of it short using an archaic procedure.
Michael Ellis
In a moment, if I may.
This is not a debate about Europe; it is a debate about law and order. I spoke out in the Home Affairs Committee and in the Chamber against the European arrest warrant’s earlier manifestations, but there have been changes, which make a significant difference. For 15 years, before I came to this House, as a barrister in criminal practice, I fought for justice for individuals. It is my hope and intention to continue to do so from this place, but the reality is that the changes that have been made are significant.
Under Labour, British citizens were extradited for disproportionately minor offences. We have changed the law to allow an arrest warrant to be refused in respect of minor offences. Under Labour, people could be extradited for conduct in the UK that was not against the law of this country. We have changed that, too, so that that can no longer happen.
Under Labour, people were detained for long periods overseas before they were charged or stood trial. That was wrong. We have changed the law again to stop that unfairness. Under Labour, people were worried about arrest warrants being issued purely for investigatory purposes, rather than for prosecutions, so we have changed that. Under Labour, people were concerned about the prospect of being charged with offences over and above those specified in their arrest warrant if they chose to consent to extradition, and we have changed that, too. So it is a different creature. It is a different matter altogether.
Many issues have been raised by hon. Members, including eloquently by my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), but they must bear it in mind that over 95% of those extradited are foreign nationals. There are miscarriages of justice, about which it is painful to hear and which I have spent my life fighting against, but there are miscarriages everywhere. It is not the European arrest warrant that is being objected to in those remarks; often, it is extradition itself that people are unhappy with. I remind hon. Members that the Home Secretary has made changes to the extradition process as well—I cite the forum bar in that respect. Therefore, we are talking about different creatures.
Did my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) wish to intervene?
Martin Vickers
That is an intervention that could be made only by my hon. Friend.
I value the sovereignty of Parliament and the supremacy of the courts, so it may surprise Members that I have come to this conclusion, but in recent weeks I have heard and read many fine words, including contributions to the debates today and last week. I have listened with great interest to learned contributions from lawyers and Select Committee Chairmen and to good constitutional arguments and instinctively I tend to support them, but on this occasion, as with everything, it is a question of balance. One of the roles we perform here in this Chamber is to articulate the concerns of those we represent, and on this matter, although I represent an area that is by a large margin Eurosceptic, I am quite certain I am speaking for my constituents, because—[Interruption.] I am speaking for them because this is an arrangement that allows for speedy extradition, and in the modern world the aim must be to protect my constituents from the threats of terrorism and a whole range of serious criminals.
As has already been said in the debate, this is a law and order issue. My reservations are laid to rest when I note the comments of my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary, who said in this House on 7 April:
“We have a sensible package. We have sought to operate in the national interest and to reflect the views of the law enforcement community about what it needs to fight organised crime. I am clear that I do not want, and will not tolerate, the idea of us becoming part of a Europeanised justice system.”—[Official Report, 7 April 2014; Vol. 579, c. 93.]
I share those views, but—[Interruption.] I share those views, but I ask whether it is beneficial to make it easier to tackle cross-border crime, and of course the answer is yes, and whether it is beneficial for our law enforcement agencies to make it easier to bring serious international criminals to justice, and of course the answer is yes.
It is unacceptable that attempts at extradition should go on year after year after year. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
May I begin by thanking the shadow Home Secretary for bringing forward this debate? In a wonderful spirit of bipartisanship, she has spared the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary their honour. Thanks to the right hon. Lady, the Prime Minister’s promise to have a debate on the European arrest warrant has been met. That shows an admirable, broad-minded, good-spiritedness although we are still some time from Christmas. I will not dwell unduly on the procedures, as those were covered quite thoroughly last week, other than to remind the House of what was said in the other place on Monday. The dissatisfaction is not limited to this Chamber. My noble Friend Lord Boswell, who is not a hard-nosed, hatchet-faced Eurosceptic, said:
“The problem now is a handling issue. The Government—particularly the Home Office—seem to be crippled by fear. Instead of encouraging a frank debate and a clear vote on their decision, they have resorted to undignified and ultimately self-defeating procedural dodges.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 November 2014; Vol. 757, c. 333.]
That is an extraordinary statement to be made in their lordships’ House, which is a much less aggressive, more kindly place than this Chamber sometimes.
I want to move on to the substance of the issue. With seven seconds for each of the 35 articles into which we are opting, I will not try to cover every one of them; I feel obliged to stick to the arrest warrant and answer the point that the arrest warrant is not essential to extradition. It is perfectly possible to have extradition arrangements either with the European Union or with individual nation states, as we do with the United States of America. That is then outside the ambit of the European Court of Justice. It is the Court of Justice of the European Union that is at the heart of the matter. Constitutionally, it is the real problem, because all our safeguards are speculative—the Home Secretary admits that herself. It has not yet been judged by the Court of Justice as to whether those safeguards will be upheld, and there is no appetite within Europe for reforming the basis of the arrest warrant. I am glad to see the Home Secretary returning to her place.
In evidence given to the European Scrutiny Committee, it was made clear that efforts to rewrite the details of the arrest warrant to put in some of the protections did not meet with any support. When a representative of the Commission gave evidence to the Lords’ Extradition Law Committee, she said that there was no willingness to transform the arrest warrant to bring in those safeguards. The European Court of Justice, an ambitious court that has historically extended its powers to cover an increasing number of areas, will be in charge of how extradition from this country takes place from 1 December. That is very dangerous, because it risks some of those things that we in this country hold most dear; it risks people being extradited to countries that do not have habeas corpus.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)
Order. The hon. Gentleman will speak briefly so that we can get to the wind-ups. I am afraid that his hon. Friend has shaved a minute off his time; he has 47 seconds.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Habeas corpus is at risk. We also risk bringing in the European public prosecutor, because if that body is created—and it is under discussion—we will find that it can get the member states that join to issue arrest warrants, circumventing the protection that we have in our own law and the referendum lock. Of absolutely crucial importance is this issue of mutual recognition. Once we start with mutual recognition, we then set similar standards, and our justice will have crept away. The arrest warrant is very dangerous; it is against Tory party policy. The procedure has been dreadful and we should defeat it this evening.
Criminal Law
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Yvette Cooper
It might have been helpful if the hon. Gentleman had explained that to some of his fellow Back Benchers—and certainly to us, as we really would have liked to know. We thought we were coming to vote on the European arrest warrant. When we saw the motion on Thursday and Friday last week, I specifically wrote to the Home Secretary to ask for clarity, because it was utterly baffling to us.
Mr Speaker
I have not seen the document in question, although it may be presented at some point. At this stage, all I am saying is that it is not obvious to me that a state paper is at stake or that the hon. Gentleman has suffered any detriment. We will leave it there. I think that the right hon. Lady was about to take an intervention from Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) quite understandably does not read his communications from the Whips Office with care and attention. Had he read section 4 of the document on today’s business, he would have found that it said:
“We then move to a motion to approve the draft Criminal Justice and Data Protection (Protocol No. 36) Regulations, which includes the European arrest warrant.”
I hope I have been able to clear up this matter.
Yvette Cooper
Now that the hon. Members for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) and for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) have referred to this document, it really must be put in the public domain. The hon. Member for North East Somerset has kindly put it in front of the House so that that we can all consider it.
That demonstrates the chaos we are in. You have ruled, Mr Speaker, that this is not a vote on the European arrest warrant, yet communications to Government Back Benchers were very clear that it was.
Let me now give the Home Secretary the opportunity to agree from the Dispatch Box that there will be a vote—an additional vote—on the European arrest warrant before the Rochester and Strood by-election. Let me give way to the Home Secretary so that she can do this. [Hon. Members: “Come on!”] She has not done so, and that is really disappointing. Let me give her one further opportunity to do so, because it is a huge concern for this House if we do not have the opportunity to put the European arrest warrant beyond legal doubt—we know the mischief lawyers will make through judicial reviews. Let us have a chance to give a strong signal that we support all 35 measures, not just the 11 that appear on the Order Paper. [Interruption.] It is no good the Home Secretary saying from a sedentary position that we will do that by voting for this motion, because Mr Speaker has said that it is not a vote on the European arrest warrant. We are therefore acting on advice from the House. I urge the Home Secretary again to stand up and say that she will withdraw this motion and give us the opportunity to vote on the full 35. I will let her do so.
Mrs May
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) appears to have been getting herself into quite a state about this particular issue. I am very happy to explain the position to the House again, very clearly. It is very simple. There is a timetable that we must follow if we are to ensure that we can opt back in to measures by 1 December—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. The matter is, of course, debatable, but what is debatable is whether or not the Question be not now put, rather than the merits of what we have previously been debating.
Mr Speaker
I think that the context is germane to the question of whether the motion be approved, or not approved, as the case may be. I therefore think that an excessively narrow interpretation would be wrong. I think it only right for the Home Secretary, if she wants to speak to the Question that the Question be not now put, to have an opportunity, in an orderly way, to make her case. Let me now hear what I hope will be an orderly account.
Mr Davis
My hon. Friend’s constituent is entirely right. There are many cases of British citizens, such as Andrew Symeou, Deborah Dark and Colin Dines, being badly mistreated. It is not just British citizens, because the leading criminal lawyers in 11 other countries have complained about this procedure in previous years. It is a very serious issue. This House, above all others, should have been in a position to debate it at some length, rather than being faced with this awful choice between accepting the Government’s business untouched and forgoing the debate altogether in the fond hope of having it another day.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
If we accept the motion proposed by the shadow Home Secretary, we will not forgo the debate; we will be allowed a full debate and the Home Secretary will be able to return with a proper motion on the European arrest warrant. The shadow Home Secretary’s motion is much to be commended.
Mr Davis
I have to say that I disagree with my hon. Friend—I very rarely do. I would have liked to have had a full-blooded debate with several motions on each component, or at least packages of components of this so-called package, but that was not available to us today, and there is no guarantee that we will get it if the Opposition’s motion succeeds.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that there is no guarantee, should the Opposition’s motion be carried, that we would get the proper debate that so many people are demanding, but the Government, having behaved pretty shamefully today, will be facing huge embarrassment if they do not give in to the clear will of the House, which is that there should be more time for debate. I urge him to support the shadow Home Secretary.
Mr Davis
I am afraid that—I will explain why in a moment—I am not in the business of casting something on the waters and hoping that it comes back. If I hear from both Front Benches that they have agreed to meet all day tomorrow to go through this business again, I will change my view, but I will not take a chance with something quite so invidious as this. Let us remember what we are talking about: taking British citizens, with no prima facie evidence, and sending them off to courts elsewhere in Europe. What we have been asked to debate assumes that those courts all deliver equal justice. Romania does not deliver equal justice. Nor does Bulgaria, Greece or Italy. Some of them have post-Soviet justice systems to which we are sending our constituents.
What is so anti-democratic about the Opposition’s proposal is that it would deny many Members who had intended to speak today the opportunity to do so, and that is a tragedy, because this House’s first responsibility, as I have said, is the delivery of justice for our constituents. We will not have the opportunity to discuss the alternatives, such as having a multiple-negotiated outcome, rather than the European arrest warrant. We will not be able to talk about the other implications of Europol and Eurojust for the actions of the European Court and the ability of the Home Secretary to pass laws that protect us. All in all, I think that this is a very unfortunate outcome for Parliament today—a very clever parliamentary trick, but very poor democracy.
Business of the House (Today)
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
This really is a sorry day for the Government. The motion to allocate time was tabled on the basis either of error or of falsehood. The Whip went round to Conservative Members of Parliament and said that today’s motion would be on regulations including those on the European arrest warrant. My right hon. Friend the Chief Whip is one of the cleverest men in the House of Commons. He has a brain the size of a planet. He is of the highest quality and the most honourable gentleman one could find. I cannot believe that he would make a basic error of this kind.
We have Whips scuttling around the House saying that a vote will be taken tonight that will be indicative of what the House of Commons thinks about the European arrest warrant. That is a procedural absurdity. It is legislative legerdemain. The Government cannot conceivably decide that one vote is indicative of another. What might they decide next? Perhaps that a vote to cut taxes would indicate that we wanted to increase them, or that a vote in favour of longer prison sentences would indicate that we wanted to cut them? This is the way of tyranny, because it takes away the right of the House of Commons to hold the Executive to account.
Mr Kenneth Clarke (Rushcliffe) (Con)
We have heard a wide range political views, but I think that everyone here today is unanimous in believing that we came here expecting to vote on a decision to opt in to 35 measures and that that vote would affect that decision one way or the other. Before we all get too worked up and decide that this is the biggest threat to parliamentary democracy since the gunpowder plot, may I suggest that we allow the Home Secretary to explain how the Government are going to give us the debate and the vote that we all want, even though my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and I do not always see eye to eye and might not vote in the same way?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My right hon. and learned Friend makes a point that is, as always, worth listening to, but he is in error. This matter needs to be debated thoroughly, because it is my contention that this is not accidental. A letter was sent to the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), saying that we would have a vote. The Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury said to this House that there would be a vote. The Lord High Chancellor and the Home Secretary sent a letter to the European Scrutiny Committee promising us that there would be a vote on the European arrest warrant and all the other opt-ins and opt-outs. Now that we come to it, however, it is proposed that there will be a vote, after extra debating time, on a number of relatively obscure measures that require statutory instruments, and that that will be intended to determine the view of the House. That is not proper parliamentary procedure; it is an outrageous abuse of parliamentary procedure.
I often disagree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke)—and with others, including my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary—on European matters, but this debate today is of a degree worse than our disagreements. Our disagreements are polite and they reflect our fiercely held views, which we discuss in an upright and, I hope, proper fashion. This approach and this motion are fundamentally underhand. That is why there is such anger, not only on the Conservative Benches and among Eurosceptics. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), is shocked by this, as are the Scottish nationalists, who think that this is a poor way of behaving.
Mr Redwood
Is my hon. Friend aware of the irony that as we approach the 800th anniversary celebration of Magna Carta, habeas corpus and the rights we have taken from those previous generations should be at the heart of this debate but they are not going to be debated today?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I agree with my right hon. Friend; we should be having the time to debate the issues that really matter, not obscurities.
Martin Horwood
I would not want the hon. Gentleman to leave the Liberal Democrats out of his list. Those of us who support the European arrest warrant would really value the opportunity to argue in favour of it and to vote in favour of it; we want to get the hashtag “Toriessoftoncrime” trending on Twitter and we want to have a real debate. We want that opportunity as well. I do not often agree with the hon. Gentleman on matters European, but on this one I do.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point, because I hope it brings home to those on the Treasury Bench the deep discontent. I was saying earlier how deeply grateful I am to you, Mr Speaker, that you are protecting the rights of the legislature against the Executive by clarifying the terms of this debate. As I look down from here at the Treasury Bench, I want to see something that is solid, but I am worried that it is made of increasingly crooked wood. We want to have it re-solidified and we want this motion withdrawn.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. You have said on a couple of occasions, in response to Members of this House, that you will not call the Home Secretary until later on because others wish to speak. Is there anything to prevent her from speaking before the end of the debate?
Mrs May
If the right hon. Lady will just let me continue, I will explain further to the House. As I have said, there is no requirement to bring any vote to the House. There is a requirement to transpose into UK legislation certain of the 35 measures that we will opt back into. That would normally have been done through the negative statutory instrument procedure in an hour-and-a-half debate upstairs in a Committee, not on the Floor of the House. That would normally have been done after 1 December, so after the date on which the Government had chosen to opt back in, and indeed after we had exercised our opt-in. We did not think that that was right either, which is why we have brought before the House an affirmative measure on a statutory instrument that shows the House the legislative requirements that will need to be made.
However, I have been very clear, the Government have been very clear, and indeed you, Mr Speaker, have been very clear—I am grateful for the clarification in your statement—that the debate we will be having on the motion on the regulations will be wide-ranging and, indeed, will include a debate on the European arrest warrant. I say to Members of the House that it is my intention to speak about the European arrest warrant when that debate takes place. I also say to right hon. and hon. Members that if they vote against this—[Interruption.]
Jacob Rees-Mogg
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am not sure that the Home Secretary was listening earlier when you said that the European arrest warrant can only be mentioned peripherally in the main debate, because she has just said that she intends to speak about it. It might be helpful if you reiterated your earlier advice, in case she had not been listening.
Mr Speaker
I think that I referred to the requirement for Members to deploy some ingenuity, and I gave quite a full explanation of the situation as I saw it. I do not recall using the word “peripherally”—I hesitate to argue with the hon. Gentleman, who is always very precise in his use of words—but I think that the substance of what I was getting at was clear. Let us now hear what the Home Secretary has to say.
The UK’s Justice and Home Affairs Opt-outs
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend makes an extremely valid point. It is the point that I had hoped to illustrate with the case that I set out at the beginning of my speech, which is that the European arrest warrant has given us distinct advantages in our ability to have criminals extradited back to the United Kingdom and, indeed, to extradite people elsewhere when they have committed crimes that warrant that extradition.
Mrs May
I will, if my hon. Friend will wait a moment.
There have, of course, been a number of concerns that we have addressed in our legislation. That is an important point. I was in the middle of setting those out, but before I go on with the list, I will give way to my hon. Friend.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The Government, in their July 2013 Command Paper, said that
“it may be possible to negotiate bilateral treaties…with the EU”.
The EU now has legal personality and I believe that there is legal advice, at least in the Ministry of Justice, that says that a bilateral treaty with the EU would be possible. Why is that avenue not being pursued?
Mrs May
There are two issues in relation to that. First, people often say, “That’s what Denmark has; it is able to negotiate directly because it has a complete opt-out on these matters.” However, Denmark does not have any other legal avenue for opting in to those measures. As the Commission has made clear, given that there is another legal avenue for the United Kingdom—as negotiated by the previous Government—that is what should be pursued, rather than a separate extradition treaty with the EU. Secondly, I say to right hon. and hon. Members who think that some form of bilateral treaty would be a way of getting around the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, that Denmark has been required to submit to the jurisdiction of the ECJ as part of the conditions of agreeing a treaty with the European Union.
Mrs May
As I indicated earlier, the House will introduce its own legislation to ensure that we are able to do what we wish to do in terms of the powers of our law enforcement agencies and our security and intelligence agencies. We must, however, make a choice on some of these measures, and the question is whether we believe that we need such measures to keep the public safe and ensure that people are brought to justice, or not. I believe that with the measures we have negotiated, both I and the Justice Secretary—he has also been working hard on this matter—have recognised those issues and will ensure that our police and law enforcement agencies are able to do the job we want them to do.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am extremely grateful to the Home Secretary and sorry to trouble her a second time. This argument that our whole security depends on the European arrest warrant must be false. An answer was given to the European Scrutiny Committee about how many indictable offences there were in the UK in one year, and the figure was 377,000. In a four-year period, however, there were only 507 requests for us to use a European arrest warrant to the continent. That is 125 a year against 377,000 indictments in this country. Our security is not dependent on the European arrest warrant.
Mrs May
I find my hon. Friend’s argument strange. He says that, simply because a small number of serious criminals such as murderers are extradited on the European arrest warrant compared with the number indicted here in the UK, we should not worry. If somebody has committed a murder and we wish to extradite them from another European member state, we should be able to do so. The EAW, as all those who work with it will recognise and confirm—it has been confirmed in evidence to Select Committees—is a better tool to use because it enables extradition to take place more quickly.
As I have indicated, the Council of Europe arrangements, which were in place previously, had a time limit. Had the European arrest warrant not been in place, we would not have been able to extradite the individual I mentioned earlier, Mr Cullen, back to the UK to face justice, and his victims would not have seen justice done. All the provisions—[Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) mentions the DNA database from a sedentary position. He and I have a different opinion on the database because he would like everybody in the UK to be on it.
All the EAW provisions to which I have referred have been made in UK law and will commence later this month. I believe they will make an important difference in the operation of the arrest warrant. The Labour Government could have made all those changes during the eight years they oversaw the EAW, but they failed to do so. That failure has coloured the views of many in the House and beyond it about the EAW, but it should not cloud the fact that the EAW is a vital tool for ensuring that justice is done in this country and for keeping the British public safe, as has been so clearly impressed on me and Committees of the House in evidence given by the police and prosecutors who use it. I take that responsibility as Home Secretary very seriously, and it underpins everything I say in the debate and the process that has brought us to this point.
It might be helpful to remind hon. Members of the background. When without the promised referendum the previous Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), signed the UK up to the Lisbon treaty, he ceded more powers to the European institutions and gave up our veto over police and criminal justice matters. We got very little in return, but one of the few things we got from that flawed negotiation and imperfect treaty was the option to opt out of all the police and criminal justice measures that were agreed before the Lisbon treaty came into force. However, that opt-out had to be exercised en masse before the end of May 2014. Following votes in both Houses of Parliament last year, that is exactly what the Government did. That decision is irreversible and will come into effect on 1 December 2014. From that date, we must either opt back in to the smaller number of measures that we think are vital for the protection of the British people and other victims of crime, or face an operational gap that will hamper the efforts of our police and law enforcement agencies.
When the Justice Secretary and I came to the House last July, we explained that we had listened carefully to the views of our law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, and concluded that a small number of measures that were subject to the opt-out decision add value in the fight against crime and the pursuit of justice, and that it would therefore be in our national interest to rejoin them. We listened to right hon. and hon. Members, and carefully considered the reports of the European Scrutiny Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the Justice Committee, before opening formal negotiations with the European Commission, the Council and other member states.
Good progress has been made, and I am pleased to be able to report that we have reached an in-principle deal with the Commission on the non-Schengen measures, which fall under its purview, and we have made good progress on the Schengen measures, on which the outline of a possible deal is now clear. I indicated earlier that the matter was discussed at the General Affairs Council on 24 June, but technical reservations remain, and discussions continue with the aim of allowing those reservations to be lifted. Therefore, the negotiations are ongoing, but, as I have said, the Justice Secretary and I have been clear throughout that we will update Parliament as appropriate and give right hon. and hon. Members the opportunity to debate the issue. That is what we are doing today. Last week, we published the Command Paper—Cm 8897—which includes the full list of measures that were discussed at the General Affairs Council, and impact assessments on each of the measures. That fulfils the Government’s commitment to provide those impact assessments and further demonstrates our commitment to parliamentary scrutiny of the matter.
Many were sceptical that a deal could be done, and many believed that the European Commission and other member states would force the UK into measures that we did not want to rejoin, but I am proud to say that we have been able to resist many of the changes demanded by others, and have not been pushed into rejoining a larger number of measures. We are clear that the deal is a good deal for the United Kingdom.
One measure that we have successfully resisted joining is Prüm, a system that allows the police to check DNA, fingerprint and vehicle registration data. I have been clear in the House previously that we have neither the time nor the money to implement Prüm by 1 December. I have said that it will be senseless for us to rejoin it now and risk being infracted. Despite considerable pressure from the Commission and other member states, that remains the case.
All hon. Members want the most serious crimes such as rapes and murders to be solved and their perpetrators brought to justice. In some cases, that will mean the police comparing DNA or fingerprint data with those held by other European forces. Thirty per cent. of those arrested in London are foreign nationals, so it is clear that that is an operational necessity. Therefore, the comparisons already happen, and must do so if we are to solve cross-border crime. I would be negligent in my duty to protect the British public if I did not consider the issue carefully.
Mr Hanson
As the former Minister for policing and counter-terrorism in the last Government, I could spend the next 25 minutes giving the hon. Gentleman a whole lecture about what Interpol does. The key issue is that there is a range of measures. I believe that if he went back to south London this evening and asked his constituents whether they wanted effective co-operation to tackle drug abuse, child trafficking, prostitution and international terrorism, the answer would be a resounding yes. It is something the Home Secretary believes is right; it is something we believe is right.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
May I make the same point to the right hon. Gentleman that I made to the Home Secretary? The figure is only on average 125 people a year. He is making it sound as if the whole country will disappear down a crevasse if we do not have the European arrest warrant, but if 125 people are slightly more difficult to bring back, the world will still go round.
Mr Hanson
The hon. Gentleman is talking about a small level of crimes, but they include crimes that could destroy the centre of London and crimes that involve the murder or death of individuals, along with child trafficking, prostitution and drug abuse. They might be a small number in the overall gamut of crimes in the United Kingdom, but if they require international co-operation to bring people back to justice, prevent those crimes in the first place and ensure that we collect individuals and bring them back here, that is something worth considering.
Mr Hanson
May I just say happy birthday to the right hon. Gentleman? I am an avid reader of The Guardian in the morning and his birthday appeared in that. His contribution supports my argument and that of his right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, so it is a valid point, well made.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The figure given to the European Scrutiny Committee was 507 whom the UK asked for between 2009 and 2013. I am interested in when it benefits the United Kingdom, not when it benefits the continent.
Mr Hanson
The hon. Gentleman should reflect on what he has just said. The removal from the United Kingdom of an individual who has committed a heinous crime in this country to their own country for conviction, sentencing and incarceration benefits the United Kingdom. Equally, if an individual commits a crime abroad that requires them to be brought back to justice here—or if they commit a crime here and flee abroad, as the Home Secretary said—and they are then brought back here, that is beneficial to victims and to justice.
Sir William Cash
That is absolutely right. I have followed these matters with what could be described as a mild degree of interest since the Maastricht treaty, in which we were promised all these pillars, but they have all now collapsed as though Samson had stretched out and pulled them down, bringing the whole of the criminal justice arrangements we had previously enjoyed crashing down with him.
Despite all the promises that were made, during the Lisbon treaty debates my right hon. Friends on the Front Bench and I, who were then in opposition, voted against every single measure. We were completely united as a party, not just as Eurosceptics but as sensible people—rational people, if I may say so to the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson). The bottom line is that we have now completely reversed our position and are in the process of accepting 35 measures that we would not have contemplated when the Lisbon treaty was going through.
Many of the issues that have already been raised and will be raised later during the debate are of deep concern not only to many Conservative Members but, I would say, to many people throughout the country, as the votes in the European elections indicated. I think that this is just another example of our giving in to European measures when there is no real, rational reason for doing so, given that there are criminals—murderers, traffickers and so forth—throughout the rest of the world.
From 1 December 2014—the right hon. Member for Delyn mentioned this, but I want to reaffirm it from this side of the House—the Court of Justice will exercise full jurisdiction over all EU police and criminal justice measures. As a result, the Commission will be able to infract member states—bring them before the Court, because we have allowed it to do so—and request a fine if they fail to implement the measures correctly. National courts will be able to seek preliminary rulings from the Court on their interpretation or validity. That is a matter of grave concern to the United Kingdom. The European Scrutiny, Home Affairs and Justice Committees —the Chairmen of all three are present—were concerned about the 2014 block opt-out decision, and every one of us, including all the members of my Committee, was critical of the Government’s reluctance to engage fully with Parliament. All the Committees’ reports are tagged to this debate.
The history of the issue has not been by any means a happy one. In their response to the reports, the Government stated:
“ For the avoidance of doubt, we reaffirm our commitment to hold a second vote in both Houses of Parliament before making a formal application to rejoin any measures. We continue to believe that in order for this vote to be as informed as possible, it should be held after we have reached an ‘in principle’ agreement on those measures we will seek to rejoin.”
The problem is that this debate—a general debate—is not meeting what we understood would be the case. I remain somewhat surprised that we are engaging in this debate when the timing of and procedure for the real debate have not yet been spelt out. I hope that, when he winds up today’s debate, the Justice Secretary will give us a clear, factual indication of when that vote and that debate will take place, because that is what the Government have committed themselves to doing.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend makes a crucial point. We understood from the Home Secretary that there would be a vote, but we have been given no assurance that there will be a debate prior to that vote. Will my hon. Friend be seeking clarification on that?
Sir William Cash
That is exactly what I have said, and that is exactly what we need to have an answer to. What we do not want is a short debate followed by a vote. We want a comprehensive debate on the Floor of the House of Commons—no ifs and no buts. I am sure that the Justice Secretary will be able to give us that assurance.
A letter written to me by the Home and Justice Secretaries dated 3 July confirmed that an agreement “in principle” had been reached with the Commission on the non-Schengen measures, but not on the overall package. According to the Home Secretary, a number of “technical reservations” remained in regard to the Schengen measures, and the General Affairs Council maintained that position the other day. We must have a further, full debate on the Floor of the House, and a vote, once full agreement has been reached.
I want to put a number of questions to the Government. I should be grateful—as, I think, would the rest of the House—if the Justice Secretary responded to them when he winds up the debate.
We need the Government to explain the reasons for the changes to the 35 measures, and to identify which changes demanded by the Commission and the other member states they were able to resist. We want them to clarify whether these are the measures that the Government themselves wish to seek to rejoin, or whether they are measures that they are compelled to rejoin in order to secure a coherent package that is acceptable to the Commission and the other member states. In a nutshell, was this a deal made behind closed doors and conducted to a great extent, if not entirely, by officials, and to what extent does it reflect coalition politics?
We note that the 35 measures present only part of the picture. We ask the Government to complete the picture by making available to Parliament a list of all the pre-Lisbon measures that were subject to the United Kingdom’s block opt-out as of 1 December 2009, but no longer are because the UK has opted into amending or “repeal and replace” measures.
We should like the Government to explain why the
“solution concerning the Prüm Decisions and the Probation Framework Decision”
which was alluded to in the Council press release issued after the General Affairs Council on 24 June, is not mentioned or explained in Command Paper 8897, in the Minister for Europe’s written ministerial statement of 30 June informing Parliament of the outcome of the Council, or in the letter of 3 July from the Home and Justice Secretaries to me, as Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee. We note that details of the “solution” have emerged through press releases and reports and not through the provision of information to Parliament, and we want to know whether the Government regard that as an appropriate way for them to engage with Parliament.
We seek further information on the content of the deal that has been made, including any processes for consulting Parliament. We want to know how much the UK has invested so far in its preparations for implementing the Prüm decisions, and we ask the Minister and the Secretary of State to set out the Government’s current assessment of the utility of the Prüm and probation framework decisions.
We want to know about the reliability of some of the assumptions underlying the Government’s impact assessments, especially in regard to measures such as the prisoner transfer framework decision, when the capacity to operate the measures may be in doubt in some member states, or when the risk of legal challenge on human rights grounds—based, for example, on article 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights if prison conditions are regarded as inhuman or degrading, or on article 8 if there is interference with the right to respect for family life—could be regarded as significant.
We note that the possibility of adverse rulings by the Court of Justice does not feature among the “key assumptions/sensitivities/risks” in the impact assessments, although concerns about the extension of the Court’s jurisdiction to EU police and criminal justice measures are at the heart of the block opt-out.
We note that the Government claim to have taken into account the views expressed in our report, as well as those of other Committees. We want to know whether they accept the assessment of our Committee that the selection of measures to rejoin
“does not signify any lessening of UK involvement in the key measures governing law enforcement cooperation in the EU” ,
our assessment that many of the measures, because of their inherent significance and impact on individuals, are likely to be more susceptible to adverse judgments of the Court of Justice than the numerically larger number of measures that the Government do not propose to rejoin, and our assessment that there is
“little evidence of a genuine and significant repatriation of powers”.
So we are asking a significant number of questions, and I am putting them on the record now, because we are going to have another debate at a later time. We want to know the significance of the answers to these questions and weigh them up in the light of the general principles I put forward at the beginning, and we need to know about the timing of this debate. We want to know not only when it will take place, but what measures it will cover, as well as receive assurances about the motions that will be tabled. I ask the two Secretaries of State to listen to this very carefully—they are having quite an interesting conversation with one of the Whips at the moment. Would they be good enough to listen carefully? We want to know that the motions will be tabled with sufficient notice to enable Members to prepare amendments, and we reiterate the position on the form of the vote set out in our Committee report: there should be separate motions for each of the measures the Government propose to rejoin.
That is an important practical question about that debate, and I believe it is incumbent on the Government to answers the questions this afternoon so we have a clear picture of the way forward and so we know that this debate will not be just a waste of time, given that we have got another debate and another vote to come when all these measures are going to be finally decided. They are critical measures of great importance not only in terms of criminal justice matters, but also in respect of the whole question of the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and its rule of law.
Keith Vaz
I defer to the knowledge of the hon. Gentleman with all his vast experience of European affairs. Having served as an MEP for so long in the east midlands, he sought asylum here in the House of Commons and he has rightly raised one of the big issues. We can negotiate, but at the end of the day it is an issue that we need to confront. How are we going to persuade the European Commission on these very important matters?
We have heard about the wheelbarrow case—the man accused of stealing a wheelbarrow who was the subject of a European arrest warrant—and those absconding from prisons on day release or those accused of minor drugs offences. There was a man who gave false details on a £200 bank loan that had already been paid off. A warrant was issued, it had to be executed and that cost £20,000. So the Home Secretary is right to give us the headline examples—as the shadow Immigration Minister also did—of people who commit terrible crimes in other parts of Europe and whom we feel obliged to give back as quickly as possible, but many, many examples go the other way and that shows there are still problems with the warrant. The Home Secretary has made big efforts to make these matters more effective by introducing the forum bar and giving more powers to the judges to look at such cases, but that is not enough when European partners are not prepared to reform their judicial systems, where so many warrants are being issued.
The Home Secretary is often reluctant to tell me about her travel plans after she has been to some of these countries but I am sure that, like me, she has been to Poland. I went there with members of the Committee and we talked to prosecutors there. The first question they asked was, “Are you coming to talk about the European arrest warrant?” We said, “Yes we are, because we are really concerned. Why are the Polish judges issuing so many warrants when, in our view, they are not merited?” These warrants undermine the principle of the EAW when they are issued for such trivial reasons as the theft of a wheelbarrow. Obviously, it is extremely important for the person who has lost the wheelbarrow, but in the whole history of the world, to coin a phrase of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), it is not that important—it is certainly not worth £20,000. So more work needs to be done.
Even when that work is done, the Committee is very clear that we must have a separate vote on the EAW. We are happy to have the package as a whole put before the House. I am not sure how many of these 35 measures can go through the House within a parliamentary day, but we draw a line in the sand about the EAW: Parliament is concerned about it and we therefore need a vote.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
We could debate all 35, with a full day’s debate for each one—we are not exactly overwhelmed with business.
Keith Vaz
That is a good point, but luckily I do not have control of the parliamentary day. These are representations we need to make, and we will see what the will of Parliament is. Let us recall some earlier ministerial words:
“I hope that today I have conveyed to the House not only the Government’s full commitment to holding a vote on the 2014 decision in this House and the other place, but the importance that we will accord to Parliament in the process leading up to that vote.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 35.]
It could be that Members want a vote on each of the 35 measures, but the Committee definitely wants a vote on the EAW, because we think it stands out in the business that the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary are currently discussing in the EU.
I welcome what is being proposed on Europol, and the Committee is a great fan of Rob Wainwright, the British head of Europol, who is doing a terrific job. Anyone who has visited Europol will have seen the work being done there, which is impressive and effective, and helps in the fight against organised crime. Europol works well with Interpol, although I know comments were made about Interpol. I and others have visited Interpol, which provides a huge benefit to cross-border action against serious and organised crime, illegal migration, people trafficking and all the other issues about which the House is very concerned. At the moment, there are 3,600 internationally active organised crime gangs operating across Europe. We cannot deal with those on our own, especially as far as cyber-crime is concerned; we have to deal with them through Europol. The Home Secretary is right to opt back in to those proceedings. I am not sure about one or two of the other Europol decisions, but if we are going to have further discussions, we will raise those at that stage.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
It is a particular pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), although I am delighted that the Lord Chancellor will reply to the debate, because I believe he is the one person remaining in the Government who still believes what he believed in opposition. It is reassuring that at least some people do not find the trappings of office take them away from their previous beliefs.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) mentioned, we have already looked at the falsehood that is in the title of this debate. We are meant to be debating the opt-outs, but they were decided a year ago. We are debating the opt-ins. That is all of a piece with the spin and the flimflam around this issue. We are not trying to stick to the facts. We have had bold promises—promises raised by the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz)—about consultation with Parliament and how we would be kept fully informed: a fine promise and constitutionally proper, but regrettably ignored.
We found out some information about the Prüm declarations not from a statement to this House or from evidence given to a Select Committee, but via a website called Statewatch, which reproduces leaked documents. It reproduced a “Limité” document from the European Union. “Limité” documents from the European Union can be shared with the European Scrutiny Committee and we then hold them confidentially. This one was not, perhaps because what it said was rather embarrassing. It stated:
“The UK government has also indicated that in a number of other cases it will set in motion a process towards the subsequent opting in to certain other instruments of particular importance.”
So it is not 35 opt-ins; it is more than 35, which they are not willing to tell us about through proper processes. We find out through leaked documents. Actually, it is not 35 anyway, because 14 were already subject to the block opt-out. So we are starting at 49, not 35, and the spin around it tries to lessen the impact of what is happening.
The failure to inform Parliament is, I think, even worse. There was a Council meeting on 24 June, after which the European Union put out a press release stating that
“the Council noted the conclusion reached between the Commission and the UK on the list of non-Schengen ex-third pillar measures which the UK will seek to rejoin”—
I emphasise “conclusion”. The written statement from the Minister provided to the House about a week later—we should note the delay before we were informed—said that
“the UK Government and the Commission had reached an understanding”.—[Official Report, 30 June 2014; Vol. 583, c. 48WS.]
There is a significant difference between an understanding and a conclusion: one has a finality about it, which does not leave much room for parliamentary consultation, while the other implies a continuing process. We have thus had a series of failures properly to inform Parliament—a failure to be entirely straight with the British people.
The effects are severe. The change from the third pillar to Lisbon is a major transfer of sovereignty, as established by my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, who quoted the Government’s own words in saying that. It is not, however, only the Government and the European Scrutiny Committee that make this clear, as it can be seen in the Home Affairs Select Committee, too. This is important because that Select Committee is not made up of shaven-headed Eurosceptics; it is chaired by a former Minister for Europe who views himself very much as a pro-European. His Committee’s report said:
“If the Government proceeds with the opt-in as proposed, we note that it will not result in any repatriation. Indeed, the increased jurisdiction of the ECJ may result in a net flow of powers in the opposite direction.”
Yet we have heard statements from Ministers saying precisely the reverse. There must be a thin line between on the one hand the point at which Ministers say things that are different from what they say to House of Lords Select Committees and from what reports of respected Committees of this House have said and on the other hand the sin of misleading Parliament. I know we will watch like hawks to ensure that that thin line is never breached.
Of the much-trumpeted opt-outs of nearly 100 items, 43 never applied to the United Kingdom in the first place. I have a list of the remainder. I asked 190 parliamentary questions to establish this list and to find out how many of the items were of any importance. Thirty three have been implemented and will bring no change at all; 12 have been implemented de facto and, again, there will be no change; two have been implemented but never used; and two have not been implemented. That leaves one, the Council Act of 17 June 1998, which has been implemented and will suffer from some change. Excluding Prüm, there is no repatriation of sovereignty at all from any of our opt-outs.
That leads us to the alternatives—those measures that the Government wish to remain within, as is clear from the treaties and from questions of international law. The treaties make it clear that provision is made for transitional arrangements. Hence, there need be no worry about a great chasm opening up on 1 December, when this mass horde of 125 criminals will suddenly appear on our shores, about which we should be terrified. It will not be like that at all because of the transitional arrangements.
Then there is the possibility of bilateral arrangements. The Home Secretary’s response on bilateral arrangements was so feeble: we know she has lost her much-respected special adviser, but I had not realised that the person on work experience was now writing her speeches. Just because the European Union does not like it—the Commission indicated that it would not accept it—are we saying that we should not use our power and influence as one of the great nations of the world and even try to negotiate what we want with an international body? Should we immediately kowtow and give in? What sort of a Home Secretary takes that approach?
Mr Jenkin
It seems from the stance adopted by the Government that we are being invited to believe that the European Union is a deeply unreasonable institution that holds very hard and fast positions on which it is not prepared to compromise even in its own interests, let alone the interests of its member states. Does my hon. Friend not think that we should have tried a bit harder?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That is exactly the point I was making. It bodes ill for any proposal for renegotiation if that is the starting point. The moment the European Union says “We don’t like that very much, chaps” and we say “Oh, we’re frightfully sorry, m’lord”, we are not even going to try. We shall perform the kowtow, that wonderful act performed in front of Chinese emperors, whereby people would abase themselves three times before approaching the throne. That may be appropriate to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, enthroned in splendour as you are, but it is not, I think, the way in which Her Majesty’s Government should behave when dealing with international bodies.
Then there is the European arrest warrant, and the so-called guarantees that we have. As has already been established during the debate, European law trumps Acts of Parliament. So we can say that the European arrest warrant must not apply unless there is dual criminality, but unless the European Union accepts it, that is not the case, and dual criminality does not have to be shown in relation to 32 specified crimes where the arrest warrant applies. What the Prime Minister said to my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North during Prime Minister’s Question Time yesterday was, I am sorry to say, not factually accurate.
As for the numbers, I have banged on about them because of the hysteria that we hear from the proponents of the arrest warrant, who claim that our whole nation’s security is dependent on it. On average, 125 people are brought back to this country each year to face trial. In that context, the arrest warrant is to our benefit and in our interest. The people whom we expel we ought to be able to expel under our own law, and would be able to if only we had the gumption to pass our own laws. As was said earlier, we are now willing to sacrifice the fundamental principle of Magna Carta: that no one will be imprisoned, fined or held against their will without the judgment of a court. We are now willing to allow that principle to be abrogated by a Polish magistrate. Surely, wise and good though Polish magistrates may be, it is not worth the theft of a wheelbarrow to undermine something that has been our protector for 799 years.
I want to deal with the politics of this as well, for where does it leave not only the Government but the Conservative party, which had, until a few weeks ago, a really sensible, logical, well-thought-through position on the European Union. It had a strong and sound and firm position, which was to go for renegotiation and repatriate powers. Repatriate powers? When we have just surrendered them? Wave the white flag, and then, two hours later, put up the Union Jack at half mast? Will anyone believe that we have a hope of repatriating powers if we surrender them now? Will anyone think that opting into 35 measures, 49 measures, and a few more secretly, is the beginning of a renegotiation? Will anyone believe the promises made by politicians or the policies on which we stood at the last election—as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North revealed to us—or the soaring oratory of our Prime Minister, who in 2002, in opposing the European arrest warrant, said:
“If someone came before him who had committed an offence that was not a crime in this country, according to the district judge, the Home Secretary would have to say, ‘I am sorry. You may spend time rotting in a Greek or Spanish jail…But there is nothing I can do about it.’”—[Official Report, 9 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 109.]
So, in 2002, the Prime Minister was worried that this would lead to people rotting in Spanish or Greek jails. Now he thinks that rotting in Spanish or Greek jails seems to be a good thing. I do not see the logic in that, but I equally do not see how anyone can rely on what politicians say if in opposition they have backbone and in government they are jellyfish. It is an entirely hopeless way of attempting to run the country.
Let me end with a reminder of Sir Robert Peel, a great Prime Minister and a distinguished man, one of the most intellectual figures ever to hold that office —and he was Home Secretary as well. When he did his final papers—they were vivas, not papers—so clever was he, so intelligent was he, that the public went to listen to him answering the questions, and he got a first-class degree in classics and mathematics. In 1846, he split the Conservative party. He got through a measure that the Conservatives loathed on the back of Opposition votes—something that may happen with the European arrest warrant—but he stood boldly at the Dispatch Box and said, yes, he had changed his mind, yes, what he now thought was different from what he thought before, but it was essential for the good of the nation.
Do we have that from this Front Bench? Do we have an avowal of the importance of this surrender to Europe, or do we have mealy-mouthed words about the difficulties of negotiation and the problems with coalition? There is not a bold, forthright, intellectual case for change, but merely the convenience of office, and it not only risks damaging the Government and splitting the Tory party, but it surrenders our sovereignty to a body from which we want to get it back. So I say to Her Majesty’s Government,
“Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood . . . then imitate the action of the tiger.”
Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out
Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mrs May
Of course, by definition, the Government’s role is negotiating with the parties I have just indicated—the Council, the Commission and the member states—on those measures to which they agree it is possible for us to opt back into. That process, which takes some time, has been put in motion. I will describe where we are a little later but, by definition, the process must be undertaken by the Government. We have been clear that we will come back to Parliament, which will have the opportunity to debate and vote on the package of measures.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) is well aware, we have indicated the measures on which we wish to opt back in. The discussions are in place with the European Commission and the other member states as to their views—whether or not they wish the UK to opt back in—and any other matters they wish to discuss with us as part of that negotiation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
To ensure the fullest engagement with Parliament, ought not it to be the case that we vote on every individual measure and not on a package?
Mrs May
The Government have always seen this clearly as a number of measures, some of which interlink and relate to one another. Therefore, they are part of a package in relation to our ability better to protect the public and ensure that our law enforcement agencies have the powers that we consider they need.
Mrs May
I have made a number of improvements. The most obvious one is the introduction of the forum bar. That was not entirely popular on either side of the Atlantic, but we did it because we felt that it was right. I believe that it is an important safeguard in relation to the extradition of British citizens outside the European Union.
I believe that our reforms will make an important difference to the European arrest warrant. It is, of course, in our national interest to have an effective extradition system, and no other extradition system would be as effective.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Before my right hon. Friend leaves the subject of proportionality, may I ask whether she has seen reports in today’s papers about a meeting of the Council of Ministers at which the French and Germans have indicated that they do not think that the proportionality test meets the requirements of European law?
Mrs May
I am aware of the report in today’s press, but I do not think that it referred to a Council of Ministers meeting. It may have referred to a document that possibly had been leaked from the European Commission. I say to my hon. Friend that, as I have made very clear, there are matters for discussion and matters for negotiation that we have to undertake as we go through this process, but other member states do have within their own systems a greater ability to deal with issues such as proportionality, and I think it is right that we have taken powers ourselves in our own legislation to do that.
Returning to my point, I think it is in our national interest to have an effective extradition system in place and no other extradition system would be as effective. We owe it to the victims of crime, and their families, to return the alleged perpetrators of serious crimes to this country and ensure that they face justice. There are many examples of that, of which I will cite only a few.
The arrest warrant recently helped the British authorities to secure the extradition and conviction of Francis Paul Cullen, a former priest who sexually assaulted seven children before spending more than two decades on the run in Spain. Thanks to the European arrest warrant, he will now swap the Spanish sun for a 15-year term in a British jail.
Our law enforcement agencies are clear that the arrest warrant has helped them to secure the return of dangerous criminals to face justice in the UK—criminals who under the old regime might not have been returned to answer for their crimes, including David Heiss from Germany and Florian Baboi from Romania.
David Heiss viciously murdered a British student, Matthew Pyke—originally from Stowmarket in Suffolk—in Nottingham in September 2008, stabbing him 86 times. Heiss was arrested on a European arrest warrant at his home in Germany a month after the offence and was surrendered to the UK the month after that. He has since been sentenced to a minimum of 18 years in prison. Before the European arrest warrant, Germany did not surrender its own nationals; indeed, there was a constitutional bar to its doing so, so it is clear that in this case the arrest warrant made a real difference.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend has a point, but it is not just about referendums; those on the Government Front Bench do not even want this House to vote on the measures that the Select Committees have proposed.
Yvette Cooper
I cannot resist giving way to the hon. Gentleman, given that he and I ended up agreeing with each other the last time we debated this matter. Let us see whether I agree with him this time.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I hope that the right hon. Lady will agree with me. Does she recall that the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in an answer to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) when reporting on the agreement of the Lisbon treaty, said that his reasons for not giving a referendum were that there was an opt-out to justice and home affairs, and an opt out to the charter of fundamental rights. As the latter opt-out is non-existent and the former opt-out is being given up, is it not now time for a referendum?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman seemed to be opting out and opting in all over the place there. The problem with the opt-out that he wanted is that, by the time we have opted back in to the main measures, it will not really be there at all. Here is what the Prime Minister said about these measures. He described the European arrest warrant as “highly objectionable” and the Home Secretary’s package, which is before us today, as a massive “transfer of powers”.
The Home Secretary said that it was
“the first time in the history of our membership of the European Union that we have taken such a set of powers back from Brussels.”
She described it as
“something that should be celebrated by anybody who cares about national sovereignty, democracy and the role of this place in making the laws of our country.”—[Official Report, 15 July 2013; Vol. 566, c. 770.]
So what does she want us to celebrate today? The truth is that the Home Secretary now wants us to opt back into the important measures again—thank goodness. Finally she has listened to reason. I was delighted to hear her list many of the cases in which the European arrest warrant has been used—rightly used—and needed; in fact, they were many of the examples that Labour Members were putting to her 12 months ago when she was refusing to listen. Finally, she has listened to the police, who have said that many of the measures, if we opt out and stay out of them, would let criminals run free. She has listened to the victims who feared that they would be denied justice. Finally, she has listened on cases such as that of Jason McKay, who was extradited from Poland within two weeks for murdering his partner. Under the old extradition arrangements, it would have taken several years to get him back to face justice for a murdered woman. So yes, she has rightly done a U-turn on the European arrest warrant, joint investigation teams, Schengen information sharing and co-operation over online child abuse.
The Home Secretary is right to admit that we cannot go back to the days when it took 10 years to extradite a terror suspect to France, or when it took 11 years to get Ronnie Knight back from the costa del crime. She is right to support the deportation of thousands of foreign suspects to their home countries to face charges. I agree that co-operation is needed in a whole series of different areas. We are glad, too, that the Home Secretary has accepted the need for the exchange of criminal records, Eurojust, the co-operation to protect personal data and measures on football hooliganism. We cannot go back to the days when foreign criminal gangs were untouchable and criminals were able to seek sanctuary on the continent. I am glad that the Home Secretary has decided to ignore her Back-Bench colleagues and the Fresh Start group and to listen instead to Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the police and victims of crime.
What is left that the Home Secretary wants us to remain opted out from? What is the massive transfer of powers—the historic transfer, the repatriation—that the Home Secretary wants us to celebrate today? We will not be signed up to some joint proceedings on driving licences, but they are not in force and are out of date. We will not be signed up to a directory on international organised crime, but it was closed down two years ago. We will not sign up to the guidance on the payment of informers, but we will carry on following it. We will not sign up to guidelines on working with other countries on drug trafficking, but we will carry on doing that anyway. We will not sign up to measures on cybercrime and mutual legal assistance, because they have all been superseded by other measures to which we have signed up instead. We will not sign up to minimum standards on bribery, but we will still meet them because the Bribery Act 2010 is still in place. We will not sign up to measures to tackle racism, but we will still meet them because we have hate crime legislation in place. We will not sign up to measures on accession, because they never applied to us in the first place. And we will not sign up to receive a directory of specialist counter-terrorism officers, but someone will probably send it to us in the post.
That is it. That is the historic transfer of powers that the Home Secretary boasted about—the great liberation from Europe and the great cause for celebration that she promised us when we last debated these matters. We have the power not to do a whole series of things we plan to carry on doing anyway, the power not to follow guidance we already follow, the power not to take action we already take, the power not to meet standards we already meet, the power not to do things that everyone else has already stopped doing and the power not to do a whole series of things we want to do anyway. This is her historic moment. She said it would be a first in the history of our membership of the EU; she wanted it to be her Churchill moment. Churchill? Only if it is the nodding dog in the back of the car.
This is a political charade. Now that we are playing charades, will the Home Secretary at least reassure us that she is not doing any lasting damage? Can she assure us that, for the sake of a few opt-outs, the warrants will not be lost?
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
In the House, one always “follows the hon. Gentleman”, which often highlights differing views. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) on this occasion. He and I have almost diametrically opposite views when it comes to issues such as this, but I enjoyed his speech nevertheless.
In her opening speech, the Home Secretary produced a list of countries, some of which were of great interest to me, for it is always fascinating to hear about our bilateral relationships with some of our friends in Europe; but she did not refer to one nation that is a bit closer to home. My nation, Scotland, did not receive a single mention. Indeed, not one of the devolved Parliaments and Assemblies was considered important enough for the Secretary of State to mention. It should never be forgotten that we have our own judicial system in Scotland, and that we are responsible for the delivery of justice and home affairs there.
I think it reasonable to say—and I will say it to the Home Secretary, who is still present—that this opt-out is not particularly popular in Scotland. What it has in fact managed to do is unite the Scottish Government, the whole of Scotland’s legal community, all the police enforcement agencies and all the civil rights institutions in opposition. There is probably no issue that has managed to unite all those different and divergent sectors in Scotland ever before. That is how unpopular this opt-out is in Scotland. The bottom line is that we overwhelmingly do not want this opt-out in Scotland and we remain very concerned for the security and safety of our citizens in Scotland if this opt-out is pursued. We are very much concerned about the cavalier attitude of this Government in opting out of this chapter and their hope that they can selectively just opt back into the important measures that help keep people in our respective nations safe. We do not share the Government’s Eurosceptic agenda that informs this political decision and we despair at the self-defeating nonsense of all of this.
Even though we do not want this, however, and even though it is overwhelmingly opposed, Scotland will get it. That is just the way it works. The UK Government decide what they will do on behalf of the rest of the nations and Assemblies in the UK and that is what will happen.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman does not seem to want any of these opt-outs, but is not the great argument for independence in the referendum in Scotland that it means Scotland will leave the EU and opt out of everything?
Pete Wishart
This is the difference between me and the hon. Gentleman: he wants to opt out of Europe and be a little Englander, all self-enclosed in a joyous new future he would propose for his nation, whereas we want to reach out—we want to share with the rest of our fellow citizens across Europe all the wonderful benefits of EU membership and EU entry. That is what we will secure in Scotland and thank goodness we will not be part of the rest of the United Kingdom, pulling in one direction under the UKIP-informed political orthodoxy that is starting to emerge here. We will do it in our own way and we will reflect our own particular political values when it comes to EU membership. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that topic.
We are going to get this measure in Scotland even though we feel it is not in the best interests of the communities we represent, but, as the hon. Gentleman alluded to, this will end soon when we have the referendum in September. No longer will we have our devolved responsibilities dictated by this Government. The Secretary of State will have seen the correspondence from the Scottish Ministers—the screeds of concerns, the evidence from the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee—but she will of course ignore them. That is what happens; we put forward our concerns and they are first ignored and then binned. This is what this Government still laughingly call the respect agenda.
Colleagues in the Scottish Government have stated repeatedly to UK Ministers the value we place on EU police and justice co-operation measures. We have pointed out that we have our own distinct legal system that needs to be dealt with differently, and we have our own processes of bringing serious criminals to justice and our own particular European partnerships for tackling growing levels of cross-border crime.
For us, the measures in the home affairs and justice chapter are extremely important. They are not something to barter in a game of Eurosceptic or Russian roulette with UKIP. They are measures that ensure that people accused of serious crimes are brought to justice quickly and efficiently. Unlike this Government, we very much support the sharing of information between police forces. We want to see improved joint investigations of cross-border crimes. We think it is a good thing to have better identification of people using false documents and the efficient transfer of criminals back to their own countries.
This has been done with no or little consultation. Scottish Ministers have repeatedly written to explain the possible implications of this decision on Scotland’s devolved justice system and to state clearly their very strong preference to remain fully opted into these measures, but the Government simply brought forward their intention to proceed with this opt-out without even a cursory discussion with the devolved institutions. That just is not good enough any more.
The lack of real discussion and the failure to listen to the devolved Administrations demonstrate this Government’s Eurosceptic arrogance at its worst. We all know why they are doing this. It is all because of the threat of UKIP at the polls, so they have got to be seen to be doing something—anything—about the big Brussels bogeyman.
It would be as well just to have Nigel Farage on the Front Bench trying to get this through. Of course UKIP has not got a Member in the House, but it pulls the strings in the House all the time, and this Government just respond by taking that agenda up. I do not know who will win the battle of the Eurosceptics, but it looks as though UKIP is going to win the battle of the European election polls in May. The point is that you cannot out-UKIP UKIP; they are the masters of Euroscepticism. This Government will never beat them in their race to the bottom to try and be harder on Europe and try to scare people out of Europe more and more. We do not do UKIP in Scotland—we barely do Tory; we have only one Tory Member of Parliament—yet we are going to be dragged into this Euro race to the bottom as the parties attempt to win Eurosceptic votes in the May elections.
The Government say that they are going to opt out of the home affairs chapter, only to opt back into the important stuff. The stuff that they will not opt back into is mostly dead and never used, as the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, but we could be put into a dangerous period of limbo—a gap during which the important stuff will not apply—that could diminish our security and safety. We have been forced to opt out of everything, including important measures for investigating cross-border crimes and bringing serious, organised criminals to justice.
Those measures include the European arrest warrant, which has been the focus of most of the debate today. Yes, the Government say that they will opt back into the European arrest warrant, but there will almost certainly be a lag period, and that is what concerns us the most. We know that there are those on the Tory Back Benches who do not like the European arrest warrant; we have heard from them today, and they remain disappointed that the Government will seek to opt back into the measure. For them, the warrant is a totem of EU badness—something that sums up Brussels, and must go—whereas to us, it is central to European justice and security, and to the safety of our communities. It has done a great deal to bring dangerous criminals to justice.
I suspect that opposition to the European arrest warrant is based on Euroscepticism, but our experience of it in Scotland is totally different. We have heard today of the example of Moira Jones. The European arrest warrant was instrumental in securing the conviction of her murderer, in that it allowed clothing and other property to be seized before it could be destroyed. That helped to lead to a successful prosecution. The speed with which extraditions take place is important, and long-drawn-out processes can be avoided only by using the warrant. We have none of the issues with the warrant that have been mentioned by other hon. Members. It has been particularly successful in Scotland, and it is something that all our law enforcement agencies welcome.
I shall give the House another example of how the European arrest warrant is working for us in Scotland. In January 2012, Grzegorz Gamla committed a violent attack and murder in Edinburgh. He was arrested within five hours of the issuing of the arrest warrant. That was achieved through the European arrest warrant system, but it was also facilitated by direct contact between Scottish prosecutors and the authorities in Poland under the European judicial network, which the Government say that they will not opt back into. Those two cases show how the ability to act incredibly swiftly using the arrest warrant allowed the criminal process to proceed much more quickly than it would otherwise have done.
There are other important Europe-wide security and policing arrangements from which we might find ourselves excluded for an unspecified period. We have heard about membership of Europol and Eurojust, for example, as well as practical police and judicial co-operation measures and joint investigative teams. The Government have said that they will opt back into most of the important stuff, but they are not seeking to opt back into the European judicial network, which underpins much of the good work of the European arrest warrant. We have been told by Scotland’s police and legal community that that network is invaluable to Scotland, but once again, the concerns expressed by our legal community have been overlooked.
This is all so unnecessary, and it represents a real threat to security and safety in Scotland. We do not share the ingrained Euroscepticism that now infects this Government at the highest level, and we refuse to have our political agenda determined by the threat of UKIP in the polls. The bottom line is that any gap between opt-out and rejoining has to be kept to a minimum. The longer the gaps and transition periods that have to be dealt with, the greater the likelihood of the problems that we have been discussing occurring.
Our preference would have been not to have the opt-out in the first place, but we are part of a UK that barely listens to us and that is pursuing an almost opposite set of political values and a different political agenda from ours. This will be resolved in September when we vote yes overwhelmingly in the independence referendum and Scotland gets what it wants on these issues, at which point we will secure our membership of the European Union on our terms.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
I start by commending my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary for her courage in tackling this problem, which stems from the previous Government’s failure to give the British people their say on whether Britain should sign up to the Lisbon treaty. That were really the background to today’s debate: the previous Government negotiated, in the Lisbon treaty, the potential for Britain to opt out of the justice and home affairs measures, and that is what the Home Secretary made her announcement about last year. The problem is that, as with all EU matters, this goes to the heart of the democratic accountability of the EU and the issues relating to national sovereignty in Britain, which give people in this country so much concern today.
I am one of the co-founders of the Fresh Start project, which was established in 2011 to examine in detail what could make the EU more globally competitive, more democratically accountable and more flexible. The justice and home affairs question profoundly affects issues of democratic accountability and flexibility. We are in a halfway house where we have invoked our opt-out on pre-Lisbon-treaty measures and are now trying to opt back in to 35 of them which we consider very important for British national interests.
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said when she announced that she was going to look at exercising the opt-out that
“we will consider not just opt-ins and opt-outs but the other opportunities and options that are available.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 41.]
She has said:
“First, the Government could apply to rejoin measures within the scope of the 2014 decision”—
which is the block opt-out, and that is indeed what she is doing.
She continued:
“Secondly, the Government believes that in some cases it would be possible to rely on pre-existing Council of Europe Conventions or bilateral treaties….Thirdly, in some cases it may be possible to negotiate bilateral treaties with each Member State or with the EU that would effectively replace the instruments in question…. Fourthly, in some cases there may simply be no need for any such agreement to be in place in order for there to be cooperation.”
The difficult position the UK finds itself in relates to the block opt-out and what happens once we have signed back up to 35 measures. In written evidence supplied at the end of 2012 to the relevant Sub-Committees of the House of Lords European Union Committee, the Government stated that the “practical effect” of the ECJ “gaining full jurisdiction” in the areas of the “re-opted in” measures
“after the transitional period—
from 1 December 2014—
“is that the ECJ may interpret these measures expansively and beyond the scope originally intended. This concern is compounded by the fact that the ECJ has previously ruled in the area of Justice and Home Affairs in unexpected and unhelpful ways from a UK perspective. For example, in 2008 in the Metock case, the Court made a ruling which extends free movement rights to illegal migrants if they are married to an EEA national who is exercising free movement rights. Since the Metock judgment we have seen a steady increase in sham marriages involving EEA nationals.”
It should also be noted that the ECJ would start applying its human rights jurisprudence, drawing on the EU’s charter of fundamental rights, to the UK criminal justice system within the areas falling under EU policing and criminal justice laws that bind the UK. It is, therefore, extraordinarily difficult to decide what exactly Britain should do in its best national interest on these justice and home affairs measures. Of course the Home Secretary has decided that it is in our national interest to opt back in to 35 of them, and I suspect that she has decided that in great part as a result of the clear advice from the House of Lords European Union Committee, which said in 2012:
“We recognise the theoretical possibility for the United Kingdom to conclude multiple bilateral and multilateral agreements with the other Member States, in place of some existing EU measures, and that other Member States would have an interest in putting effective mechanisms in place. But this would be a time-consuming and uncertain process, with the only claimed benefit being tailor-made arrangements excluding the CJEU’s jurisdiction. In some cases new bilateral agreements would be dependent on the legislative timetable of the other Member States, which may accord them a low priority.”
It went on to say:
“We consider that the most effective way for the United Kingdom to cooperate with other Member States is to remain engaged in the existing EU measures in this area.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am hugely enjoying my hon. Friend’s speech. Is she saying that the House of Lords, in its great wisdom, has come to the conclusion that it is better to sacrifice an important part of our constitution for the administrative convenience of our bureaucracy, because to address matters one by one would give it too much work?
Andrea Leadsom
Actually, yes, my hon. Friend is right. I made a similar point to members of the scrutiny Committee. He is right that there is an element of, “This is all too difficult, so we should not embark on it.” I have had such points made to me by other officials in this place, who seem to say that, as this is all so difficult, we should opt back in to existing measures. If that were the case, it would be entirely unacceptable.
Let me quote the European Union Committee:
“If the United Kingdom reverted to Council of Europe Conventions instead of the equivalent EU measures, this would raise legal complications, and could also result in more cumbersome, expensive and weaker procedures. It would also weaken the ability of the United Kingdom’s police and law enforcement authorities to cooperate with the equivalent authorities in other Member States regarding cross-border crime.”
In other words, it concluded that it would be easier and probably more successful for the UK to opt back in to JHA under the current terms, having opted out of all those other measures that Opposition Members have been keen to point out are not terribly important or relevant anyway. That is possibly the right step for the time being, but there are bigger issues at stake: democratic accountability to the British people, and flexibility.
Under the eurozone fiscal crisis, it became very apparent that eurozone members needed to move to greater fiscal integration, European banking union and, potentially, down the road towards a federal states of Europe. Opinion polls, discussions in this House and even Opposition Members have made it clear that Britain’s national sovereignty should remain intact, and that we do not intend at any time soon either to join the euro or to move on to the path of greater fiscal union or, indeed, a federal states of Europe.
With that thought in mind, it seems that the status quo in the EU is simply not an option. Right across the European Union, the democratic legitimacy of the EU is wafer thin. We will see in the European elections in May what European citizens—if there were such a thing, which there is not; it is merely shorthand for the citizens of EU member states—think about the ever closer union in the EU. I suspect that we will find that they also reject the concept of a federal states of Europe. That has profound implications for what we do here in this Chamber. When the Prime Minister comes to look at the fundamental reform that will be in Britain’s much better interest, he should look at the area of justice and home affairs with a view to considering whether we can undertake bilateral or multilateral agreements with EU member states or with the EU as a legal entity, which it is now under the Lisbon treaty. Of course, the advantage of having bilateral treaties with the EU rather than opting into justice and home affairs is that things would be easier for Britain as a uniquely different member state with common law practice rather than a written constitution, even if those agreements were worded in precisely the same terms as the European arrest warrant or the Europol and Eurojust directives, as the European Court of Justice would not have jurisdiction over them and they would not be able to be changed under qualified majority voting without the say so of this House.
The area of justice and home affairs goes to the heart of the democratic accountability of the European Union and ought to be a key focus for the Prime Minister’s review of how Britain can achieve a better settlement within the European Union once our party has won the 2015 general election.
Chris Bryant
No, I am not. The hon. Lady complained that the Government and Members of the House of Lords advanced their argument on the European arrest warrant only because it was more convenient and practical. I am trying to suggest that convenience and practicality are three quarters of the point. In the end, it is in the interests of British people.
I shall take the American point as an example. When the new extradition treaty was agreed between the UK and the United States of America, despite the fact that the American Government—the President—had negotiated the treaty, it was a significant problem that the legislature had to put it in place. We moved much more quickly in this country to ratify the treaty than the Americans, and there was a period when the provisions were not perfectly equal between the two countries and when people such as the hon. Lady who argued that there was an imbalance were right. That is no longer the case, because both countries have implemented the measure.
My point to the hon. Lady is that long before we had the European arrest warrant, a Conservative Government under Mrs Thatcher were painfully aware of the problems of not having a proper extradition system across the whole European Union, where most British people do most of their travelling. That is why we had Ronnie Biggs and many others stuck on the costa del crime in Spain. Franco would not extradite anyone.
Chris Bryant
I shall give way to the 16th century in a moment.
I wholly support the European arrest warrant on the same basis that Mrs Thatcher supported the European convention on extradition.
Chris Bryant
I cannot give way to the hon. Lady because I have to give way to the 16th century.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The hon. Gentleman is extremely kind. I was going to point out that Ronnie Biggs was in Brazil which, as far as I am aware, has not applied for membership of the European Union.
Chris Bryant
I realised that there might be some clever soul in the Chamber. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, but there were plenty of other British fugitives from justice who only had to go abroad to evade justice in this country, and we needed a better system of extradition to be able to get British nationals back to the UK to face justice and, for that matter, to do something similar for nationals of other countries.
I would say to Members who regularly say that this is about protecting British people from poor judicial systems in other European countries that, in the main, we bring non-UK citizens back to the UK to make sure that there is justice for families who have lost a loved one or who face some form of injustice. I wholly disagree with the ideological position adopted by some Government Members, because it is pragmatic to have a single system that works across the whole of the EU. I also think that it is a triumph that, despite the fact that the Napoleonic code and English common law are completely different systems, we can work, broadly speaking, in a united way.
Chris Bryant
I understand the point that the hon. Lady makes, but the problem for her argument is that that option is not available. For that matter, why would we want to say that members of the European Union, which includes two members of the Commonwealth, can all sit around a table and discuss the European arrest warrant, but we will only be able to sign up to it on a bilateral basis? That makes no sense and it is not a system that other members of the European Union will sign up to.
There is a further point, which is my concern about the process that the Government have adopted: we may get to December and not have any new agreed system in place. I know many members of the European Commission want a new system. Some countries in Europe are so profoundly irritated by the way the United Kingdom has been playing its hand over the past few years and are so concerned about the long-term direction of Conservative members of the Government in particular that they would quite like to punish Britain. I fear that we will not have the opt-ins in place by the time the opt-outs have come into force, and as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, we may well have a substantial period when there is nothing in place. That could raise very significant legal issues about how we would subsequently resolve that, and it would also put us in the difficult and embarrassing position of having to say to our citizens, “We’re sorry. We are not able to extradite back to this country because we opted out and we have not managed to get the opt-in back in place.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The treaty provides for transitional arrangements if an opt-in has not been agreed, so the fear that the hon. Gentleman proposes is not a real one.
Chris Bryant
The provisions on opting back in are not very clear. The one thing that is clear is who has to pay, which is the United Kingdom. That is the one thing that is absolutely clear. We do not even get to decide how much—the costs are decided by the European Commission.
My anxiety is that the Commission could well say, and has effectively said in some of its public pronouncements thus far, “Well, it’s very interesting that you are interested in 35 opt-in measures, but those 35 are contingent upon at least 18 others”—some of which have been listed in the Home Affairs Committee report. The European Commission may at that point come back to us and say, “We’re sorry. It’s 53 or nothing.” Then we will face a difficult problem, especially as we enter a general election.
The main point that I want to make is about process. As I said, it is somewhat ironic that many Government Members have, for understandable reasons, argued the issues surrounding democratic accountability. The problem is that I do not know what the Government are going to allow us to vote on. The Secretary of State said that it would not be legislation, so we know that it is not going to be a Bill that goes through two Houses, and it is not going to be a statutory instrument either. I do not think it is going to be a treaty, unless she brings us a treaty that has already been signed, but that seems extraordinary to me. I therefore presume it will be some kind of motion.
We have already seen what the Government are trying to do in relation to the Queen’s Speech by not allowing the House to consider an amendment other than one tabled by the Leader of the Opposition. I presume that is largely because any other amendment that was tabled might relate to the European Union and a referendum. I am suspicious about what the Government are going to present to us and the timeliness of that.
There is probably broad agreement about the number of measures that we would like to opt back in to. It is probably slightly bigger than the Government’s list—about 45 or 50—but the House should take a view before the Government start their negotiations. The worst of all possible situations would be the Government coming forward with an unamendable motion which we simply voted on, almost like a statutory instrument. That would unite both ends—the people who would like to see more opt-ins and those who would like to see no opt-ins. In a sense, that is exactly what happened after the American war of independence, when the Earl of Shelburne lost the treaty negotiations on the preliminaries for the treaty with the Americans. My anxiety is that then the Government do not have a leg to stand on in their negotiations with the European Union.
I hope that the Government will make it clear that we will have a debate in the House before the summer recess in plenty of time for them to negotiate with the European Union. That would not tie their hands. They should make sure that the motion is amendable, so that if people want to vote on whether the European arrest warrant is in or out, they can do so, or on any of the other measures, perhaps packaged in some way—I do not mind. A clear list should come out of the House. How can we possibly preach to Europe about democratic accountability and the importance of what happens in this House if we have not done properly in this House what we should have done in the first place? I will vote for a longer list than the hon. Member for Bury North. I may vote for the same list as the Lord Chancellor—I am not sure—but certainly for a shorter list than the shadow Lord Chancellor. But in the end that should be a decision for the whole House. It should not be stage-managed and organised in backroom deals by the Whips so that the House cannot make a proper decision.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), who speaks extremely interestingly on these matters and sometimes challenges the Eurosceptics, was, as always, on good form. However, he made a mistake in not wanting to talk about ideology and principles, because we need to start with first principles—what we think of as the idea of the state and the sovereignty that that state has.
For me, the very essence of a state is its ability to maintain law and order. From that, it follows that its justice system and policing are at the heart of what it means to be an independent nation state, and that when those things are given away, the country involved is becoming part of a larger state and no longer maintaining its independence. That is why these opt-ins and opt-outs are of such considerable importance to the sovereignty of this nation and, indeed, to the credibility of the Conservative party as a party that considers itself to be Eurosceptic. They are also important in relation to the promises given in the coalition agreement, which said that
“no further powers should be transferred to Brussels without a referendum”
and that
“we will ensure that there is no further transfer of sovereignty or powers over the course of the next Parliament.”
We now have an area on which we are going to transfer very substantial powers to Europe. There is a debate to be had about what is the status quo as regards the opting out and then opting in. The current situation, however, is that what we have agreed to is not justiciable in the European Court of Justice, nor can enforcement action be taken by the European Commission. Those two important qualifiers mean that what we have agreed to is not part of the acquis communautaire but is a matter entirely in the hands of this country. Under the Lisbon treaty, we had an opt-out from all these measures that has duly been exercised. The Government have argued that the exercise of that opt-out was, in itself, a repatriation of powers, but that is wrong, because in fact these powers had not been ceded. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister who agreed to Lisbon, though he did not sign it, was quite clear about that in the statement that he gave when presenting the treaty to this House. I have already quoted the answer he gave to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley) when explaining that a referendum was not necessary as we had not ceded justice and home affairs powers because they were subject to an opt-out, as was the charter of fundamental rights. Therefore, at the point at which Lisbon was agreed to, he was clear that these powers remained vested in the United Kingdom, and it is only with the opting back in that they are being transferred.
What the Government propose as regards opting back into these 35 measures is a clear breach of the coalition agreement and entirely contra to Conservative party policy. I would go further and say that any effort to renegotiate looks faintly absurd if we are arguing for the repatriation of powers from Europe, and intend to put that to the vote through a referendum, yet immediately before beginning the renegotiation process we have decided that we will cede a major part of our powers to the European Union. As I said at the outset, the heart of the matter is that justice and home affairs—law and order—are part of the vital structure of a state, and if one is not in control of the vital structures of one’s state, one does not have sovereignty.
Bob Stewart
Is my hon. Friend suggesting, or in agreement, that we might give some power to Europe provided that that power enhances our sovereign law?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
If we opt into any of these measures and they are justiciable by the European Court of Justice, we are, through that act itself, ceding sovereignty to the European Union, because it is part of building up a single state.
What does a state have that makes it a state? What is the essence of a state? At least one important part is the ability to control law and order. We are opting back into the things that are most clearly creating the powers of a federal state of the united states of Europe—a single state that is the European Union. That will mean that we are no longer a member of an international organisation like any other, such as the United Nations or NATO, from which it would be easy to withdraw, should we wish, although I am not suggesting for a moment that we do so.
Of the 35 areas that we are asking to opt back into, three illustrate the fundamental importance of the sovereignty issue. The first of those is the European arrest warrant. The decision over who can arrest a nation state’s citizens must be an essential right of that nation state in determining this exceptional power that it gives to its police officers. In our case, the power that constables who hold the Queen’s warrant have to restrict somebody’s freedom comes directly from the Crown as part of the expression of the power of the state. To decide that an arrest can be determined abroad without any of the necessary British legal procedures involved is a move very firmly towards a federal state. Crucially, the question of who is or is not arrested will no longer be determined by a British court but by the European Court of Justice, over which we have no absolute control. We may have one justice there, but it is not a court to which we send ambassadors; it is a court that is independent in its exercise of European law as opposed to British law.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman has fallen into uncharacteristically misleading language. Over what court does he think we do have control? We send to the European Court of Justice judges just like those we have in our own courts, and we do not purport to control them from this House.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My right hon. Friend is fully aware that Parliament can overrule any court in this country by an Act of Parliament. That is how our constitution works; it is the absolute essence of our constitution and our democracy. He, of all people, must know that. We have in this House, and together with the House of Lords, the ability to change the law if there has been a judgment that is alien to our understanding of how the law should be enforced. That is simply not the case as regards the European Court of Justice. It is a court that is outside the control not of Parliament but of the people of the United Kingdom, whose rights are being given up. The arrest warrant would be handed over as part of the creation of a state.
Tied in with this is Europol. Europol, in its current form, is limited, but once we have signed up to this measure, its development will be subject to the qualified majority vote. Europol exists to provide support and assistance to member states in the fight against organised crime and drug trafficking. What are we doing in this regard? Are we setting up the very beginnings of a federal bureau of investigation? Are we starting to say that we will have a police force in Europe with a power that goes across national borders? Are we therefore saying that British subjects may be subject to a law that this country has not agreed to—indeed, we may even vote against it—and that has emanated from a judicial system that is not controlled by the democratic will of the British people?
That ties in with Eurojust, which is about creating mutual legal assistance to aid investigations and prosecutions and how judicial action in a cross-border case should take place. What is happening? We are creating an arrest warrant, the beginnings of a European police force and Eurojust, which will allow co-operation in a judicial and prosecutorial capacity. That is not a million miles away from creating a European public prosecutor, which for some reason is singled out as the one thing that is a bridge too far and that we must never have without a referendum, but everything that is being put in place makes that the next logical step. If we do this, it would be no surprise if a future Government said, “We have the arrest warrant, Europol and Eurojust, so surely we don’t need a referendum to have a public prosecutor, because that is the next thing we should do.” This is further evidence of the creation of a European federal state.
The argument in favour of this measure is that it will help ensure that criminals get caught. Everyone is in favour of that: of course we want criminals to be brought to justice. Is there not, however, an ancient view of British justice that it is better for 100 guilty men to go free—I say “men” deliberately, because women very rarely commit crimes that get them sent to prison, much less so than men, and I do not want to upset any hon. Ladies—than for one innocent man to go to prison? That seems to be at the essence of our understanding of justice. This is about risking our belief in justice for the convenience of the Administration.
Is it not that the worst argument of all that their noble lordships have produced a report saying that public officials are too idle to do their jobs properly for us to have a system of bilateral negotiations? I know that our public officials are among the greatest and hardest working people in the land. When one sees them arrayed in front of us, one knows that they would be willing to burn the midnight oil and act in the nation’s interest to ensure that we have those bilateral agreements. Although it has not yet been done, there is nothing in European law to prevent a member state from having an agreement with the body of the European Union. The European Commission does not want that to happen, but that is a very different question from whether or not it is legal. It could easily be done by a relatively simple treaty change, if it is not provided for in the current treaties.
Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
If we were to take that path, would the resulting international agreement be judiciable in The Hague rather than in the integrationist Court in Luxembourg?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
In my view, it would be judiciable in our own courts and, like any other international agreement, we would be free to withdraw from it. It would not come under the European Communities Act 1972. I do not wish to cede power to the European Court of Justice, because that would be the means by which we would give up our independence as a nation state. If it is not our judges—who are subject to our democratic control—who make decisions, we will not be able to run our own affairs.
I want to continue with the point I was making about the United Kingdom’s understanding of justice. I think we get too tied up with the convenience of the law enforcement bodies. Of course, the views of the police should be taken very seriously, but they ought not to be writing the law of the land—they should be enforcing it as it is determined by this House and their lordships. One of the measures that the Government wish to opt back into is that of mutual recognition of judgments given in absentia. Page 57 of the European Scrutiny Committee’s report notes the Government’s view that the
“Framework Decision ensures that fewer criminals will be able to evade justice by arguing that their conviction was unfair”,
but what if their conviction was unfair? Surely we should not be depriving our fellow citizens of the right to argue that a conviction in absentia was unfair when it could have been. That must be an essential protection for the state to provide its nationals, and to take it away would be a fundamental error.
What we have and have not opted into is a relatively random collection of parts. I agreed with the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), in her mocking of some of the measures we are not opting back into. On the opt-ins, including that of taking account of convictions in EU member states in the course of new criminal proceedings, page 53 of the ESC’s report notes:
“The principle of taking into account overseas convictions in the same way as domestic ones exists in UK domestic law”
already, and:
“The mutual recognition principle it sets out is already recognised in statute and common law in the UK. Opting back in to this EU measure would introduce full Court of Justice jurisdiction into this area of UK criminal law, with unpredictable results.”
What is happening here? We are opting into something that already happens and that can continue to happen. All we are changing is that other European countries do not have to take into account our decisions, but they may if they want to—they are not prevented from doing so. Crucially, however, we are bringing the European Court of Justice into it. Therefore, if a judge were to pass sentence on somebody who had committed a crime abroad and the European Court of Justice deemed that it had not properly taken into account the previous conviction, sentencing in the United Kingdom could end up being a matter for the European Court of Justice. Does Her Majesty’s Government realise that, although some of these things appear superficially to be unnecessary and broadly irrelevant, they are agreeing to major transfers of sovereignty to the European Union?
My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said in her introductory speech that several hundred questions have been tabled. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Immigration has just come into the Chamber, because he, poor man, had to reply to the many dozens of questions that I tabled. I thank him for the diligence with which he replied to my questions about the measures that the Government decided not to opt back into. Of those 95 measures, 43 were irrelevant, so there was no point asking any questions about them. I asked about the remaining 52, of which 24 turned out to be implemented already without any change; 11 had been de facto implemented with no change; two had been implemented and never used; and two had not been implemented. As the shadow Home Secretary rightly said, most of what we are not opting back into is, effectively, unimportant and irrelevant and cannot honestly be described as a reclaim of British sovereignty, because, as I said in my opening remarks, that sovereignty was never ceded in the first place, because the matters remained entirely under the jurisdiction of the British courts, the British House of Commons and their lordships.
I will quote the details of one of those matters in order to give a flavour of what is going on. Council decision 2005/387/JHA on the information exchange, risk-assessment and control of new psychoactive substances has been implemented to the required standard by the UK and, according to the response I received from my hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Immigration:
“Co-operation and information exchange with other member states and EU bodies will not change as a result of opting out of this measure.”—[Official Report, 17 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 823W.]
That has been broadly true of the overwhelming majority of the measures we have opted out of.
We therefore have this opt-out—the previous Labour Government, in a desire to get away from a referendum, negotiated it—which fortunately came to the benefit or aid of this coalition Government, who have used it. They looked at it, but they undoubtedly had a political problem. One part of the coalition is made up of Europhiles red in tooth and claw—although my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) does not necessarily look red in tooth and claw, he adopts that position on the European Union—who want an enlarged European organisation. They may quibble with me about whether it is a single state, but they want to see powers with Europe, because they believe that that is an advantage to the nation. They met the Conservative view—it has now been the Conservative view for a long time—that we do not want more powers to be ceded to the European Union. It was negotiated in the coalition agreement that no further powers would be passed to the European Union.
The time came to exercise the opt-out—it had to be exercised before the end of this year, 1 December 2014—and last year it was duly exercised. We are therefore in the happy position, the paradise, of no longer subscribing to any of the measures. That would be a happy place to stay, but the Government, throwing away the coalition agreement and abandoning what unites the Tory party, have decided to give away the things that most certainly create, build up and advance the federal European state that so many of us wish not to see. That contradicts the Prime Minister’s effort of renegotiation, as well as past statements by Conservative Ministers and politicians throughout the Front and Back Benches. It would be a grave error to opt into all 35 measures. It is against the national interest, and to do it for administrative convenience—because we cannot get officials to do the work—is a shameful way to treat our hard-working and admirable officials, who would all be delighted to do the work to preserve the independence of our country.
Mr Raab
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. He is the Chair of the Justice Committee, which has investigated the measure, but I am still not clear on the public protection shortfall, in empirical terms, if we do not sign up to the European arrest warrant and instead look for alternative arrangements, which I know would be slower. The Home Secretary referred to a case relating to the German constitution, but what is the empirical evaluation of the quantitative size of the public protection shortfall for which the European arrest warrant caters? I am none the wiser. I appreciate that the police would love to have fast-track extradition, but I will not nod police powers through the House that have been requested by the Association of Chief Police Officers, or by anyone else for that matter. In the same way, I would happily join forces with Liberal Democrat colleagues to face down police requests for things such as ID cards or extended powers of pre-charge detention. We need to consider the merits of each proposal.
ACPO’s evidence to the House of Lords European Union Committee has been regularly cited, and that evidence recommends that it is vital to opt back in to only 13 of 135 EU crime and policing measures. I do not suggest that we should take that at face value, but it is extraordinary that only 13 measures are regarded as being of any tangible law enforcement value. That highlights the unthinking way in which the previous Government signed up to EU measures, and they are now saying that the current Government are proposing only to opt out of trivial measures. The real question is why the previous Government signed us up to stuff that is trivial, redundant and irrelevant, not least because the trajectory of EU justice and home affairs is, sooner or later, going to encompass the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, which we know can turn seemingly irrelevant or peripheral measures into something damaging for national democracies. At the other end of the scale, it shows how much pointless legislation comes out of the EU if the police, who are regarded as the most zealous advocates of EU crime and policing, are advocating that we opt back in only to such a small proportion of the measures covered by the Lisbon treaty opt-in.
I pay tribute to the 21st report of the European Scrutiny Committee. I agree with all the points on the risk of giving jurisdiction to the European Court of Justice, because we would end up doing for crime and policing what the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has done for deportation powers and prisoner voting and is looking to do for whole-life tariffs. We should be very cautious about that.
The Home Affairs Committee’s ninth report contains some important analysis of the European arrest warrant, which it describes as “fundamentally flawed.” It is worth noting that that backs up the evidence from Britain’s most senior High Court extradition judge, Lord Justice Thomas, to the independent Baker review of extradition. Lord Justice Thomas said that the European arrest warrant has become “unworkable.” I will read out in full some quotes from Britain’s most senior extradition judge, because this is not a right-wing excursion or some rabid anti-European ideology; it is from someone who considers such cases week in, week out. In his evidence to the Baker review, Lord Justice Thomas said:
“Looking at the 27—I’ve said this to many people—this system becomes unworkable in the end… politically there is a huge problem. There is quite a lot of strong judicial feeling on this subject”—
the European arrest warrant—
“in northern Europe that both the judges and politicians in other countries need to put the resources into their systems to bring them up to standard… We’re all agreed there’s an undoubted problem, as the cases sent in by Fair Trials International illustrate. If you talk to anyone, there’s obviously a problem… One of the problems with the way in which a lot of European criminal justice legislation has emerged is that it presupposes a kind of mutual confidence and common standards that actually don’t exist.”
That is Britain’s most senior extradition judge.
Previous speakers, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), spoke about considering not only a snapshot of current co-operation but the future vision of where EU justice and home affairs co-operation is heading. I entirely agree with that analysis. We need to think of the long term, not just the short term. I know that many hon. Members are rightly fixated on the time lag and the time gap, whether we have enough time to do anything else and whether we will find ourselves, having opted out, not opting back in to measures, but at this juncture we ought to look to a long-term settlement of Britain’s relationship with Europe in the important area of crime and policing.
I fear the creeping supranationalism that is undoubtedly coming. We cannot read the text of the regulations, whether on Europol or Eurojust, not to mention the wider remit of the European Court of Justice, without seeing that that is happening. We would have to be blind not to accept that. There is a new draft regulation that would strengthen Europol’s power to demand that national police forces initiate investigations by whittling away the national right to say no. There is similar strengthening of powers to demand data from national Governments with less ability for those Governments to say no. There is increasing supranational management of the running of Europol. Of course, if we opt back in, all of that is subject to the overriding jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, rather than the British Supreme Court. I always find it fascinating that Opposition Members, including the shadow Justice Secretary, who set up the British Supreme Court, are now so willing and eager to give away its right to have the last word not only on matters affecting law enforcement and public safety but on matters affecting British citizens.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I very much agree with what my hon. Friend is saying. Of course, the matter would also become subject to qualified majority voting and we could therefore be overruled on any future developments.
Mr Raab
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to come on to the other areas of creeping supranationalism.
The same is true of Eurojust. Although Britain will not opt in to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office—I very much welcome the fact that Ministers have made that clear—if one looks at the fine print, which the Deputy Prime Minister always encourages us to do, the new Eurojust regulation encourages close co-operation with the EPPO through the back door. If we opt back in to the Eurojust regulation, we will therefore have a close relationship of support for the EPPO. That is something else that needs to be looked at.
Even here at home, outside the political arena, we have had a timely warning from the High Court, and from Mr Justice Mostyn in particular, about the risks of creeping supranationalism. The last Government, to great fanfare, negotiated the British opt-out from the charter of fundamental rights. However, we found out from a case in the High Court in November 2013 that that counts for nothing. Again, so that I cannot be accused of spinning the language, I will refer directly to what Mr Justice Mostyn said. In respect of the opt-out he said:
“it is absolutely clear that the contracting parties agreed that the Charter did not create one single further justiciable right in our domestic courts. The assertion in the…protocol that no new rights are created seems to me to be a misleading product of political compromise because on any view the Charter enunciates a host of new rights which are not expressly found in the European Convention on Human Rights signed in Rome in 1950.”
He continued:
“However, my view that the effect of the seventh protocol is to prevent any new justiciable rights from being created is not one shared by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg.”
He went on to say:
“The constitutional significance of this decision can hardly be overstated.”
That is a timely warning from another senior British judge about what is actually happening.
If we listen to our colleagues, partners and friends in the European Union, they are telling us the same thing loud and clear. Viviane Reding, the vice-president of the European Commission and the Justice Commissioner, made it very clear in a speech in Brussels on 4 September 2013 that the EU wishes to acquire the powers of a nation state in the rule of law area. She said explicitly that the EU needs a formal justice Minister and stronger powers to police national criminal justice systems, including
“detailed monitoring and sanctioning powers”.
We must not only look at the snapshot of measures that are before us now, but ask whether in five or 10 years’ time we will find ourselves enmeshed in a common pan-European justice system over which we have lost substantial democratic control. On the evidence, the answer is almost certainly yes.
I want to talk about the European arrest warrant in particular because, between the two poles of UKIP, which suggests that we should just opt out en masse, and our Labour and Liberal Democrat colleagues in this House, who suggest that there is nothing wrong with it, there is a common-sense—dare I say it—third way or at least a middle course. That is to have binding treaty relations on extradition, but to ensure that we have safeguards in place to protect British citizens. We must not make the Faustian bargain that was debated by the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset of sacrificing a few innocent people to snag a few guilty fugitives.
If one looks at the data, one finds that the number of European arrest warrants that are received by the UK has trebled since 2004. The latest figures on warrants issued from the first quarter of 2013 showed that the UK receives 33 warrants for every one that it serves. A number of colleagues on the Liberal Democrat and Labour Benches have talked about the lop-sided nature of UK-US extradition, but that is nothing compared with the European arrest warrant, empirically and factually. One cannot take issue with the lack of reciprocity in our extradition relations with the US and not see the same problem in the European arrest warrant. One Briton is surrendered each week. That is up from five per year in 2004.
I accept that we needed a more streamlined process than existed before. I accept that we need a treaty basis for that. We ought to get to a stage where we can talk about reform of the European arrest warrant. I do not think that we will achieve that if we opt back in at this stage.
Mark Reckless
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing that example to the attention of the House. It goes to show that in principle we cannot sign up to the European arrest warrant, because we do not have a sufficient degree of trust in the similarity and protections of all EU 27 judicial and policing systems to allow us to do that. People in our country deserve and have had, over centuries, protections that are greater than those now offered within the European arrest warrant. It is for that reason that I hope and believe it is still possible that we will choose not to opt back into it.
The Home Secretary has given her view, but there are many views in the Conservative party. Those views are held not just on the Back Benches, but, I know, deep in the most senior levels of Government. I ask that we listen to the electorate. Once the electorate, on 22 May, passes its judgment on the “party of in”, and on how weak their arguments are, with the Deputy Prime Minister just recycling arguments he has picked up without giving any liberal thought as to what they are or what the principles should be, we will see that this is not what the people in this country want. Ultimately, we still have the right to make a different decision. What we have seen with the opt-out we have already made is that the opt-ins are still to come. One analogy that Members, at least in my party, may find instructive is with regard to what happened over the AV referendum and the boundary changes. We agreed, in good faith, to give the Liberal Democrats their referendum on AV. In return, they agreed to later give us boundaries that would give fair representation across constituencies. They banked their AV referendum, and then did not give us the boundaries that there was, at the very least, an understanding that they would give.
I would argue that the mass opt-out equates to the AV referendum in that analogy. I do not think that we would have any more reason to agree later to opt in to matters in which we do not believe because of that opt-out than the Liberal Democrats had to give us our boundaries because they secured their AV referendum; and I think that after 22 May, we will be in a different political situation.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend agree that this issue is of such constitutional importance that it might be better to delay it until after a general election? If we did not exercise the opt-ins, and if the Liberal Democrats left the coalition and we had an early election, there would be no great harm in that.
Mark Reckless
My hon. Friend has made a very sensible point. I think that, as we get nearer to the election, we need to differentiate between what we believe in as Conservatives and what we have been forced to agree to by the need to be in harness with the Liberal Democrats. Given that they have not fulfilled their promises to us, and as we discover in the course of our negotiations with our European partners that we may not be able to secure protections in every area in which we would like to secure them, we shall have to consider, in those new circumstances, the balance of the opt-ins that are proposed, and decide whether we, as Conservatives, wish to agree to them.
Chris Grayling
If I may, I shall answer that question by setting out for my hon. Friend where we stand.
The House will be aware that more than 130 justice and home affairs measures were due to come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in December 2014, as a result of the Lisbon treaty signed by the previous Government. It is important to point out to my hon. Friends that this Government have secured the opt-out. Had we not been able to reach agreement on that, we would have been required under the terms of the treaty to participate in all those 130-plus measures. The opt-out has been a significant step—[Interruption.] I hear chuckles from the Opposition Benches, but I have to say that, although we have heard complaints and criticism from them this afternoon, it was the Labour Government who set up the process. They negotiated the opt-out, but they now appear to be trying to disown what they did, and to claim that the process we are now going through is nothing to do with them. It was they who negotiated the process, and it was they who set out the way in which we would have to address these issues. Their arguments on this are therefore completely bankrupt.
The Lisbon treaty clearly paved the way for the creation of a European justice area, and that system is now beginning to take shape. The European Commission is pushing ahead, with the latest justice scorecard just one signal of its intent. My hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) talked about some of the things that the Commissioner had been doing recently. She was explicit earlier this year when she said:
“We need a true political union. To me this means that we need to build a United States of Europe”.
She has set out her ambition to have a common justice area by 2020. Let me be clear: that is not something I want, it is not something the British people want, and with the Conservatives in government, it is not something this country will ever sign up to. Indeed, I trust that no future Government of any political persuasion would take this country down that route, despite the Opposition’s rather mealy-mouthed answers today on where they stand on these matters.
That is why it was important that the Prime Minister exercised our opt-out in July last year to ensure that Britain did not become part of a common European justice system, and that is why we continue to assert our right to opt out when Brussels brings forward new legislation in this area. This Government are protecting our national interest and standing up for Britain, whereas Labour typically just ran up the white flag over many years.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Lord High Chancellor for giving way, not least because we are relying on him, as the last bastion, to stop this happening. The problem seems to be that we have opted out of 98 things that do not matter, and that some of the 35 things that we are opting back into matter enormously. To call that a repatriation of powers is terminological inexactitude.
Chris Grayling
I set out clearly to the House at the start of this process where I believe we stand. We are absolutely set against the creation of a European justice area and against the Europeanisation of our laws, but we also have a duty to our citizens to fight international crime, and I do not want us to be outside the battle against it. Earlier, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary set out clearly the message that she has received from groups involved in fighting organised crime about the need to take the necessary measures to do so. She has clearly and robustly set out what she believes to be in the UK national interest on that front.
The shadow Justice Secretary, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), talked about the challenge posed by foreign national offenders, and I want us to be part of pan-European arrangements to return foreign national offenders as quickly as possible. He said that he hoped I was not going to give the House what I think he called another rant against the ECHR. I would simply draw the House’s attention to one or two recent Court decisions taken under the European Court of Human Rights framework that have actually prevented us from sending prisoners back to other countries. I hope that that situation will change very soon.
Chris Grayling
We have had long discussions across Government about how best to shape the right package for the country. Inevitably, we have had those discussions. We now have a package that provides a sensible balance between a number of different factors and different interests, which is why we have brought that package to the House for consideration. It is why we brought it to the House last summer and why we have set it out in our negotiations on the future of our participation in these measures.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for giving way once again; he is being enormously generous. The Deputy Prime Minister has said that in coalition the issue of collective responsibility has to be treated differently. Accepting that as a new constitutional principle, which I would not normally do, but for these purposes accepting it, will the Lord Chancellor give us his own personal view?
Chris Grayling
Madam Deputy Speaker might deem me to be out of order if I followed too far down that route tonight. No doubt we can have that discussion over a beer some time.
We have a sensible package. We have sought to operate in the national interest and to reflect the views of the law enforcement community about what it needs to fight organised crime. I am clear that I do not want, and will not tolerate, the idea of us becoming part of a Europeanised justice system. I will continue to pursue that in my dealings with the European Union—in our interactions over things such as the justice scorecard. Equally, it is important to understand the task that the Home Office faces in dealing with international crime and in ensuring that it can combat organised crime. I am talking about some of the most abhorrent offences, such as human trafficking, that are a real challenge to all of us across the whole of Europe. We need to have enough protection to enable us to take part in genuine international collaboration on those issues. That is why we have placed this package before the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered the UK’s 2014 justice and home affairs opt-out decision.