European Union Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

Tuesday 26th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

I apologise as I am standing up. Mine is the first name attached to the Clause 3 stand part Motion on the Marshalled List. The Minister gave extremely courteous answers to the questions that I asked. I am very grateful to him for taking my questions seriously, but I have to say that the answers that he gave do not satisfy me. He has not explained the substantive reason why we need Clause 3 as well as Clause 2, nor has he answered my question about why there is no significance test in Clause 2 but only in Clause 3. He and I agree that you cannot use Clause 3 to transfer competence; you can use it only for things that do not transfer competence. The converse is not true. In Clause 2, you could, under the ordinary treaty revision procedure, do things which did not transfer competence. You could do very small things such as changing the number of justices in the Court of Justice. You would have to do that as a treaty change and you would probably, almost certainly given the structure in Brussels and the advice you would want to take from the court, do it with the heavy procedure. Therefore, it seems to me that the significance test ought in logic to apply in Clause 2 unless the Minister’s position is that anything, however insignificant, done under the standard treaty revision procedure will require a mandatory referendum.

The minatory warning of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about the foreigners who read our Hansard is valid as regards bundling. I would add a second—the idea that, as the Minister said, what will happen is that,

“a whole raft of issues requiring attention can be wrapped up and packaged”.—[Official Report, 5/4/11; col. 1670.]

If we are imposing a referendum requirement on that package, it really is an insult to the public. We are asking them to vote on a package, not on the merits of individual measures. It seems to me that the idea of bundling is not just bad practice in Brussels, and not likely to be followed in future in Brussels—people are trying to get away from it—but is also inimical to the idea of a referendum, where the purpose, presumably, is that the people answering the question understand it. If there is a raft of six or eight questions and you get only one yes or no because it is a bundle, that seems to me to be acutely unsatisfactory as a way to proceed.

I also did not hear a satisfactory answer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, about urgency. It is perfectly possible to envisage circumstances where waiting for a year, a year and a half or two years might not be in the UK’s interest. Therefore, it seems to me that the Liddle clause, bringing in urgency and national interest, is an extremely good idea. But even if that were accepted, I cannot see any need to have Clause 3. I will not press my point now and I apologise for burdening the House with my arguments at too great a length, but we will have to come back to this on Report. Will the Minister please read what we have said in this debate and my questions and consider whether they deserve serious answers? Will he also please look back to what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said in his striking speech at the start of our first day in Committee in which, as a member of the Minister’s party, he gave strong advice that there would be many fewer problems with this Bill if there could be some movement on the 48(6) procedure in Clause 3?

[Lord Empey]

My Lords, in the short time that I have been in this House, it has seemed very difficult to have discussions without noble Lords dividing on the basis that they are either for or against the European Union. Virtually every comment seems to boil down to that issue. However, I do not believe that that is right. People should not be put into one box or another; we are in the European Union and these measures—some of which have significant inelegancies, one has to admit—are there for a purpose. When the concept of nations working together is a perfectly good idea, when there is evidence that there is practical advantage in that, how is it that the general population do not share that view? Disillusionment has crept in because over a prolonged period of years Governments of different persuasions have made promises on these matters which they simply have not kept. This has built up a resistance; it has been seized on by red tops and tabloid newspapers and become a very stale and futile argument.

Nevertheless, we have to realise that there are certain practicalities. For instance, no subject is better at bringing Members into their places than a debate on Europe. I looked back and discovered that the largest number of Lords participating in a vote was in the Maastricht treaty debates in the 1990s, when 621 turned up to vote—the largest number that had appeared in this House since 1831. This clearly indicates that there is a huge interest and I suspect that it is because people are still on separate sides of the argument. We have to move away from that. We are in the European Community. I do not see any prospect of us being out of the European Community in the foreseeable future, so the issue is how can we make it more acceptable, more flexible and more answerable to the population?

Some very interesting arguments have been put forward about the measures, and we will have them again at Report. I suspect that their purpose is to try to get away from a position where Ministers make promises which they simply will not keep. That has undermined support for the European Union, from which there are many advantages to be had. For eight years in Brussels I gained experience on a modest organisation, the Committee of the Regions. There are Members on all sides of the House who were on that committee, some of them at the same time as I was. I have to say that it was not a particularly successful part of the European apparatus.

Europe and the bubble in Brussels have become disconnected from the ordinary person and that is a most unfortunate development. I fear that if Clause 3 is removed without this Chamber taking a more comprehensive view on what we should do about this disconnect, and if we go back to the old ways where Ministers make decisions and put them through the House under the Whip, then there can be little confidence about gaining the acceptance of ordinary people. The Minister referred to the danger of people becoming elitist—we say that people do not understand things. However, if we put propositions to people then we should jolly well ensure that they do understand. People are perfectly capable of understanding the significance of certain things. I therefore feel that we should not run scared. If you believe in something and you think that it is worth doing as a Minister and as a Government, you should jolly well go to the people and put it before them and ask for their support.

[Lord Mandelson]

My Lords, I do not want to detain your Lordships so near to the dinner break; I shall make only three observations in relation to Clause 3 and whether it should stand part of the Bill. What we have seen during the course of this debate is a series of false assumptions and non sequiturs advanced to justify the Bill, and in particular this clause, which the Government are bringing forward.

My first observation is that we must be absolutely clear that there is no intention on the part of any Government or any member state in the European Union to claim further powers for the institutions of the European Union at the expense of member states. If anyone can jump up and point to a position, a policy, a statement, a direction of thinking on the part of any member state that would suggest otherwise, I would be perfectly prepared to hear it. Instead, what you have among the 27 member states of the European Union is not a determination to claim more powers—on the contrary. You have a determination, rightly, to better use the existing powers for the EU and its institutions, with a better sense of strategic direction for the European Union, a better set of priorities which really support our long-term economic and other interests in Europe and a better quality of decision-making on the part of the institutions, including the Commission and the European Parliament, as well as the European Council.