European Council

Liam Fox Excerpts

Monday 22nd February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The hon. Lady makes an important point, which is that Britain has a strong voice in the EU to get these single markets completed. The declaration on competitiveness from the EU Commission is worth reading. She also points out that, if we were not there, not only would the EU continue to exist and have a very big impact on our lives, but it would probably head in a very different and more protectionist direction, and that would affect us, in many ways quite badly.

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend will no doubt have been deluged with advice on EU law during his negotiation, so on the subject of ever closer union, can he give us a concrete example of a single European Court of Justice case that would have had a different outcome if the measures he agreed last week had been in place at the time?

[The Prime Minister]

Ever closer union has been mentioned in a series of judgments by the European Court of Justice, and there are two things in what we have agreed that I think will have an impact. Obviously, the most eye-catching of those is in paragraph 1 on page 10, which states that the substance of the agreements

“will be incorporated into the Treaties at the time of their next revision”

and will

“make it clear that the references to ever closer union do not apply to the United Kingdom.”

That is obviously a carve-out for us, but just as significant—and this is something that many other countries did not want—is the content of the next paragraph, which states:

“The references in the Treaties and their preambles…of creating an ever closer union…do not offer a legal basis for extending the scope of any provision of the Treaties or of EU secondary legislation.”

That redefinition of ever closer union is a fundamental change to the way in which the organisation has worked. One way to think of it is that there have been two threats to our sovereignty. The first came from treaty change passing powers from Britain to Brussels, but that cannot happen now because of our lock. The second is the use of terms such as “ever closer union” to make sure that the EU grows its powers, but that cannot be done now that we have that change. One of the reasons why the deal took 40 hours of all-night negotiations is that not everybody likes it. The deal is not meaningless words; it is words that mean something, that matter and that make a difference. That is why I was so determined to secure it.