Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Monday 7th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

Mitochondrial Transfer (Three-Parent Children)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Westminster Hall

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I was going to come on to that. As an aside, the reason we were able to determine that Richard III’s body was his was through the female line, and because we could establish the continuity of the DNA. I do not believe Government promises of secrecy. They promised that to sperm donors historically. Governments cannot be relied upon, because society becomes more open and so demands greater openness. I have no doubt that if the technique is ultimately used the donors will be identified and people with three or potentially four parents will find out.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

On that point, the worry that occurs immediately to me as I listen to my hon. Friend is that if someone does not know who the third or fourth person who created them is, through sheer chance they may well find themselves marrying their brother or sister.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

That is a risk, and there are others. Already in the United States a different price is charged depending on the educational qualifications of the donor. There are worries about eugenics, a point I was going to come on to.

Housing Benefit (Under-occupancy Penalty)

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am sympathetic to what my hon. Friend says, but I think that people need to be able to take responsibility for themselves and to make choices for themselves. The choice they have is either to maintain the benefit they need for the housing they need, or to stay in housing where they have an extra room and adjust their behaviour accordingly. It is not for the state, putting its expenditure on the backs of hard-pressed taxpayers, to fund indefinitely people’s lifestyle choices, and it is a choice if people decide to have an extra room that they are not actually using; they can choose whether to move to a smaller property or, under this new policy, to find a way of getting the extra income they need.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

If someone living in social housing wishes to downsize and move to a smaller house, I take it—I ask my hon. Friend or the Minister to confirm this—that they would not have to find the costs in their own budget and that they would be helped to move.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Owing to pressure on the availability of larger properties, many social landlords provide significant incentives for people to move.

It is important to remember that the housing market is dynamic. It is not a static market, with people staying in the same house their whole lives, and they should not expect that to be the case. I understand that people move house, on average, every seven years. It is perfectly reasonable that that happens, and that it should continue to happen, because it frees up the properties people need. I intervened on the hon. Member for Dundee East to make that important point.

When a three or four-bedroom property in the social rented sector is freed up, it might well be filled by someone who had been living in the private rented sector, which is more expensive, so they will be moving into the cheaper social rented sector. The person who had been living in the three or four-bedroom property might move back into the private rented sector, which has a higher cost, but there would be a bigger saving because the other person had moved into the social rented sector. That is important, because some of the debate has focused on the inflexibility of the housing market. It has been said, for example, that there are not enough one-bedroom properties in the social rented sector for people to move down to, but there are plenty of properties across the country as a whole. People will move more freely between the private and public rented sectors and will continue to have their rents paid for them unless they choose, as they will be free to do, to earn more money by working a few more hours a week or by taking in a lodger and so on in order to get the extra income.

European Union (Approvals) Bill [Lords]

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Monday 4th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart]

It might not be of much importance that the electronic publication of the Official Journal goes ahead, but I put it to my hon. Friend that it is pretty important how many commissioners are appointed, because that has a direct spin-off in cost terms.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

There are two parts to my hon. Friend’s point. On the first part, I disagree with him. The form in which instructions are sent out is important, and it is right that people should know about it. It is a long-standing principle of our law that ignorance of the law is no excuse. If that is fair, it is also fair that knowledge of the law should be made available to people in a timely and efficient way, because it is something that might affect their lives, and that when a change to the method of notification takes place, that should be debated in this Chamber and passed into law. On the second part, I completely agree that the number of commissioners is significant.

The second point that I raised with my right hon. Friend the Minister is crucially important. It relates to the change from article 308 of the previous treaty to article 352 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union. Article 352 is broader in scope. Had it been assumed that anything previously incorporated under article 308 could be transmuted under article 352, that could have allowed all sorts of laws—my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) went through a number of them—to pass into the body of European Union powers without any further scrutiny by this House. As is often the case, something that is in itself minor has set an important precedent in protecting the rights of this House to scrutinise these matters and to ensure that the interests of our constituents are protected.

I wish briefly to discuss the number of commissioners. I do not have the confidence that some hon. Members have in our commissioners, and I do not feel happy that we have one representing us. Commissioners take an oath that they will act in the best interests of the European Union. Some have argued that that is directly contrary to the oath that they have taken as Privy Counsellors, and we should be concerned about that. They are there, by design, to represent the interests of Europe, not of the United Kingdom. Perhaps because of our history and our civic traditions, our commissioners tend to take that very seriously, whereas commissioners from some other countries may simply represent the nation state that has sent them. I do not have great confidence that the person representing the United Kingdom is waving the Union Jack; they could just as well be waving that awful European Union flag.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Monday 28th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, because it allows me to remind the House that Joseph of Arimathea is thought to have taken our Lord to visit Somerset when he was a young man. Some people maintain that that is mere legend blurring into myth, but I am quite convinced of its veracity.

I think that an established Church is good for the body politic—it is good for us that we can have jubilee celebrations held in St Paul’s cathedral or Westminster abbey, and that we can have that focus of national life through an established Church—but obviously an established Church cannot have as its head somebody who belongs to another Church. That would be logically inconsistent. It would be unfair on the Church of England; it would mean that bishops and archbishops appointed within the Church of England were appointed by somebody who did not share their beliefs and that could not be the right thing to do.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Could we consider having as Supreme Governor of the Church of England the Archbishop of Canterbury, thus taking this away from the sovereign?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point, and that might have been an amendment worthy of consideration. It is not the amendment I tabled. My amendment sought to maintain the supreme governorship of the Church of England in a regency whenever the sovereign was not in communion with the Anglican Church under the Regency Act 1937, which requires the regent to be a Protestant and to meet the terms of the Act of Settlement. I would prefer to keep things that way because the Crown and the headship of the Church of England could come back together when a future sovereign was an Anglican, and my approach would not permanently separate the two. However, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing forward new thoughts on the matter; one of the reasons why it would have been better to have had a longer time for, and longer gaps in, debating this important subject is because then such ideas could have been discussed.

My new clause is extremely simple. It is a recognition—no matter how much I am sometimes reluctant to recognise it—that the modern world is different from the early 18th century. There may have been many glories in the early 18th century, but one of the glories of this modern age is that we are tolerant—we are tolerant of different religions. We believe that people practising other faiths is something to be welcomed and encouraged, and that has made us a stronger nation rather than a weaker one. Therefore there should no longer be a bar on the grounds of faith in respect of the sovereign, as long as we can make provision for the established Church of England, which there is and which I support.

That circle can be squared by providing for a regency. That relatively simple and straightforward proposal deals with a problem that people have recognised in this country for many decades; we have not suddenly woken up and realised that a non-member of the Church of England cannot become sovereign. Bills have been presented to Parliament to deal with that, and this seems the right time to be doing it, as we are legislating on the Crown succession and we are in discussion with the Commonwealth members who also have the Queen as sovereign to see whether they will agree to it.

Succession to the Crown Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 22nd January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I do not agree with that, because when we bring legislation before this House, we are not limited by three or four words. We have it within our power to rewrite the whole of the Act of Settlement. That is why I think that, if we are not going to leave the whole thing alone, we have to make the fundamental change: we have to get rid of the fundamental injustice.

I am not going to hold myself up as a great bastion of political correctness. That is not a creed to which I particularly hold or one for which I have any great concern, but I do think that, broadly speaking, there should be equality of tolerance among the religions people choose to follow in this country, and that statute law should not favour one religion against another within the context of an established Church that provides a backdrop of Christianity for historical reasons and that has been a strength of this nation.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is such a valued Member and knows so much, so does he think that we are about to produce bad law?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Yes, indeed I do. It is the point I have been making at great length all afternoon. In making that point, I would like to thank the Minister for her patient answers to my almost interminable questions. She has done that with great grace and thoughtfulness, for which I am deeply appreciative, but I am still in disagreement. I think this clause would be better left out of the Bill. If we are going to make a change, it needs to be thoroughgoing; otherwise, we simply reinforce the offence of the Act of Settlement and the wording of the Bill of Rights. We need to live, however, with our great and noble history, which is part of what we have grown up with, part of being a subject of the Queen, and part of being a person of the United Kingdom, to put it that way. My preference is for the clause to be removed, but if it is to be included, it should be part of a thoroughgoing reform that allows a Catholic to succeed, but protects the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

European Union (Croatian Accession and Irish Protocol) Bill

Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Bob Stewart

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I wish my hon. Friend would have more confidence in his own great country. We are a little bigger than the Czech Republic and a little more important, even though it is a most highly esteemed country. We make a massive contribution to the European Union budget, and we should be using our power, authority and position to get for the British people what the Irish Government have got for the Irish.

[Bob Stewart]

Would we make an increased contribution to the European Union budget as a result of Croatian accession?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

I was hoping to come to that when we discuss the point at which the Bill comes into force, and it may be best if I hold my fire until then, lest the Chair rule me out of order. I want to focus on the essence of European treaties: every European treaty, whether an accession treaty or the treaty of Lisbon, has exactly the same legal standing. Anything that is added to it has the proper force of an agreement across the European Union and validity in European law. We should never again lose the opportunity to renegotiate the repatriation of powers to this country when a treaty is going through the European Union. There are any number of powers that we wish to recapture—working time directives are a mere start—and we should do that because if Ireland can, so could we.