European Union Bill

Lord Gilbert Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Gilbert]

Forgive me for being impertinent, but could the noble Lord define his pronouns? He said, “If we were to decide”. Who are the “we” he is referring to?

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

The British Government of the day. My point, in answer to the noble Lord, Lord Lamont of Lerwick, is that when you look at the sort of decisions in Clause 6, they are the kind which the British public are not going to be remotely interested in. The public prosecutor and all that is not referendum stuff. It is therefore particularly difficult to play the Odysseus rationale because everyone knows that you are not going to have that referendum. You are going to block the decision in Brussels in order to postpone sine die the referendum. That will be the effect of what you say.

There is a second possible rationale, which is the one we hear from time to time from the Government Front Bench, usually in the context of the treaty. It is the one that particularly worries me. I think it worries the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and everyone who knows about the way in which opinion in Brussels is moving now. It is the argument that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, comes up with when he says, for example:

“The picture of a dribble of referenda on small issues completely misunderstands the way in which the European process works now or will work in the future, whether this Bill is on our statute book or not. I have obviously explained that insufficiently because the message has not got over, but as we continue our debates I hope to be able to make clear that the pattern will not be dissimilar to the pattern of the big treaty packages in the past”.—[Official Report, 3/5/11; col. 369.]

There is a worrying misunderstanding here. In Brussels, everyone is determined that there should be a discontinuity. Everyone is determined to break with big treaty packages. That has been true for 10 years and it is why the convention invented the passarelle. Why do people want to avoid big treaty packages? If efficiency is your criterion, it is more efficient to make a change when the need arises. It is not very efficient to put the change in a hover and say, “We’ll wait for the next big package”. It is more transparent and democratic to give member states the right to agree or disagree with single specific decisions. It is good to get away from the awful IGC business of trade-offs, where people do a market haggle and things go into treaties which some would say should not be there in order to buy somebody else. The issues should be considered separately and on their merits, and they will be in future. That is why the convention produced the ideas that it did about accelerated methods of treaty reform—and passerelles in relation to decisions that do not require treaty reform.