European Council

James Gray Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Andrea Leadsom]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend about the threat to financial services and the importance of focusing on the City and welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has said that he intends to do precisely that at the summit. None the less, does my hon. Friend agree that there is a subtle risk that he could come back from the summit, waving, Chamberlain-like, a piece of paper in the air and saying, “Haven’t I done well? I have protected a number of things that were under threat in the City of London”—despite having ignored the historic opportunity of the summit and allowed several other things to slip by without repatriating anything at all in the process?

[Andrea Leadsom]

That is an important point, because the Prime Minister will not be just having a chat and getting general agreement; he will want to get a firm assurance and put a marker in the sand saying, “We feel your pain and share your goal and will want to protect Britain’s specific national interest by including our own requirement in the treaty.” There cannot be simply a gentleman’s handshake, so that what is agreed can be watered down later. There must be a firm commitment on all sides that Britain’s national interest will be protected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Horwood]

I do not think that it comes from the fact that we are in a coalition. I do not want to risk my Liberal Democrat credentials by agreeing with the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) as well, but I think that this issue is worthy of a debate on the Floor of the House. I know that his Committee refers matters for scrutiny to departmental Select Committees, and it is not good enough if those Committees are not prepared to scrutinise those matters. They have the expertise and the Committee experts who can make a serious contribution to the scrutiny process. I restrain myself from suggesting that that might remove the necessity for the European Scrutiny Committee, but the point is that we need wider and deeper discussion of European matters in this Parliament, and I entirely agree with that.

One of the healthy things about being in a coalition is that we can bring different points of view on issues such as Europe, as well as others, to the table without actually having to conceal them and pretend to be coming from exactly the same place, which the previous Government had to do. None the less, it is slightly frustrating. I thought that we had settled quite a lot of the issues that are being debated at the moment. When we discussed at inordinate length the European Union Act 2011, which has already been passed, we spent countless hours debating when to hold a referendum and when to look at renegotiation of powers. We came to a conclusion and a settled view, as a coalition and as a Parliament, which was pretty clear. It represented something of a compromise between the Liberal Democrat and the natural Conservative positions, which seemed quite acceptable: a treaty change should be subject to an Act of Parliament, but if that treaty change involves a fundamental and significant shift in powers from the British to the European level of government, then that should be automatically subject to a referendum. Yet now, only a matter of months later, this whole issue seems to have been reopened. That is a problem, because it makes it more difficult—let us put it no more strongly than that—for Ministers to negotiate with confidence, knowing what position they are representing back in this country. We are not so much sending them naked into the debating chamber, as sending them so wrapped up in unrealistic expectations that they cannot move, which is a problem.

Ministers need to focus on the issues at hand in the Council, which are threefold. The eurozone is not the only issue, because there are two other important topics for discussion. On energy, if I can put it in the language of this debate, I speak from a nuclear-sceptic point of view. There is the welcome process of independent scrutiny, at European level, of the safety of European nuclear programmes. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, which will potentially cost the Japanese economy hundreds of billions of pounds, it is incredibly important that the process is ongoing and rigorous. If I have a concern that I would like to be raised at the European Council, it is that the Commission report makes the case for tighter safety rules but does so in a limited way, even though it concedes that many of the regulations that were already in force before the Fukushima disaster in March are still not being applied throughout the European Union. Some states, including the UK, Poland, Slovakia and Belgium, have not updated national legislation in line with a European directive from 2009. At present, there are no common safety standards or criteria for nuclear power plants across the European Union. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) says, from a sedentary position, “Good.” He may have a lot of confidence in British nuclear safety regimes. I hope he has exactly the same confidence in Polish safety regimes and in the safety regimes of other European nations. The bad news for him, I am afraid, is that radioactivity, as we found out after Chernobyl, is no respecter of national boundaries.

[Mr Gray]

Does the hon. Gentleman recall that Chernobyl is in fact in Russia?

[Martin Horwood]

It is not, actually; it is in Ukraine. It was in the Soviet Union at the time, but the point is that it is only quite recently that some farms in Wales have had all restrictions lifted as a result of the radioactivity that swept right across Europe. The point is that the wider we can spread safety regulations on this the better. The European Union is an important vehicle for doing that. I hope that that message about a tighter safety remit and tighter safety monitoring regime has been well taken.