The UK’s Justice and Home Affairs Opt-outs

Julian Smith Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hanson]

I happen to think—it is a matter of debate and it will develop during the afternoon—that this is a far better way of dealing with the problem than we have now.

Today’s debate is one in a series. We have waited and waited; we have had debates and debates; the bus arrives, with not one, but two or three coming at once; yet the Home Secretary has not yet brought the final measures before the House. To be honest, I think that the right hon. Lady would rather be at the dentist having her teeth pulled than be here having the discussion she is having with her right hon. and hon. Friends. She has been brought to this debate by the three Select Committees, which are eventually getting the Home Secretary’s capitulation to common sense and Europe-wide justice and co-operation. It has, I think, hit the right hon. Lady, after looking at the matter in detail, that it is rather useful for our police to have access to criminal records or driving offences for when European lorry drivers tear up the M1 or the M6.

The truth is that the Home Secretary’s opt-out strategy ultimately becomes an opt-in strategy. The measure of the complexity of the negotiations is indicated by the fact that she is now acting in the interests of Britain rather than in the interests of Conservative Back Benchers and the Eurosceptic Members here today. She has promised to garner favour with the Tory right, but she is ultimately opting into measures that we support because she now understands that the police want European co-operation and that criminals are not Eurosceptics. She understands that our ability to bring them to book and to get justice for their victims should not be compromised.

The issue of the transfer of powers is interesting. The right hon. Lady has said what she is opting into, but she has not said what she is opting out of. These are not really significant matters. She has looked at opting out of issues such as signing joint proceedings on driving licences that are not in force and are out of date. We are not signing up to a directive on international organised crime that was closed down two years ago. We are not signing up to guidelines on working with other countries on drug trafficking, but we will carry on doing that anyway. We are not going to sign up to measures on cybercrime or mutual legal assistance because they have been superseded by other measures to which we signed up instead. We are not signing up to minimum standards on bribery because we are meeting them under our own Bribery Act 2010. We are not signing up to measures to tackle racism because we meet them under hate crime legislation that is in place. We are not signing up to measures on accession because they never applied to us in the first place, and we are not signing up to receive a directory of specialist counter-terrorism officers because someone will probably send it to us in the post instead.

The measures that the Home Secretary is signing up to are sensible ones, whereas the ones she is not signing up to are either from the past, superseded, not relevant or not appropriate for us. The right hon. Lady has posed as the great Eurosceptic champion of the Conservative Government when what she has done is to sign up to things that I would sign up to, which many of her hon. Friends would not sign up to. The things that she has not signed up to are things that are, as I say, not relevant, not appropriate and not needed now.

[Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

Does not the right hon. Gentleman agree with me that the Home Secretary and the Home Office have spent hours, days and months working to ensure that the many concerns people had about the European arrest warrant have now been addressed in UK law?

[Mr Hanson]

They have indeed spent many hours, days and months, and I have spent many hours, days and months in Committee dealing with those matters, too. We did not oppose what the Home Secretary brought forward; we supported it. There was no difference between us and the Home Secretary on those matters. It could have made a difference—and, dare I say it, it could make a difference now—if the Home Secretary had brought forward several months ago the measures she has just brought forward now. She could have had an in-principle discussion—