European Union Bill

Lord Grenfell Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I am afraid that I do not find them very convincing. The drift of all treaty changes, starting in 1972, has been to remove power from the nation states and to pass it to Brussels. Therefore, when we assume that under this clause provisions will come forward that do not transfer power from this country to Brussels, that really is the triumph of hope over experience.

[Lord Grenfell]

The noble Lord keeps referring to removing powers. Would he not accept that there is a principle of pooling powers, which is very different? It means that we share authority so that we can find results for the common good of Europe. Of course, when you pool powers you are not simply saying, “I give up all authority”; you are saying, “Together we will use our individual powers to find a means of pooling it for the common good”.

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[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

The noble Lord brings me nicely on to my next point, which was also raised by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, when he said that we ought to have confidence in the other member states. Of course I accept that under Article 48(6) the Government of the day have the power of veto, but as I understand it, that is not what we are envisaging here. We are envisaging a Government of the day that have not used the power of veto and something has come forward which the British people might not like. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that pretty much anything put in front of the British people on matters European will be voted down in a referendum, and that the supporters of these amendments seem to be very fearful of the judgment of the British people.

When I say that the other member states, Brussels and the whole machine simply cannot be trusted to follow the treaties, I speak with history behind me. I would mention, for instance, Article 308, about which I have regaled your Lordships over many years. This article was put into the treaty to allow the Council of Ministers, by unanimity, to make small adjustments to the original Common Market and so on. I could take noble Lords through the abuse of Article 308 and all the powers that have been passed to Brussels under it, but I will not do so.

Let us take the abuse of Article 122 as recently as June before last. That article, which clearly allows member states to help each other in times of natural disaster, was taken under qualified majority voting—the British Government did not have a hope of stopping it—to force us to sign up to some 14 per cent of £50 billion for the European financial stability mechanism.

I really do not think that those of us on the Eurosceptic spectrum, of whom there are a few in your Lordships’ House, can accept that all this is going to follow properly in the Council of Ministers. I will not respond now to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, about roaming charges, but I think there was another one that had something to do with audio-visual equipment. That was in response to a long line of Questions for Written Answer from my noble friends Lord Tebbit and Lord Vinson. I am afraid I have to stick to my guns. With all due respect to noble Lords who sit on our European Union committees, I really do not think that they have made enough difference over the years to justify their existence.

So there it is. I think that this part of the Bill is reasonable if we envisage a British Government after this Government are no longer with us—this Government can veto anything, and they have said that they are going to, so this is not going to happen for five years —who have agreed to something in the Council of Ministers that ought to be put in front of the British people. I simply do not accept that the treaty will be obeyed, as it has never been obeyed in the past.

[Lord Grenfell]

My Lords, the noble Lord said that the European Union Committee has never made any difference—I declare an interest as I was its chairman for some years. Perhaps I may quote to him one fact. Many years ago, when Mario Monti, the Commissioner, set about a big review of the competition regulation, we got off the mark very quickly. We got hold of the Green Paper and did an extensive inquiry into it. We interviewed the Commissioner and presented our conclusions to Her Majesty's Government before they went in to negotiate in the Council. They said that they thought that what we said was extremely useful. They advanced their arguments, and it had an impact on the final result. So it is a little unfair to say that those 90 Members of your Lordships' House who work week in, week out on those committees do not make an impact—they certainly do.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I really do not mean to offend the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, or any of the other 90 noble Lords who sit on those committees. I merely point out—for instance, on the scrutiny reserve—that successive British Governments have over many years given an undertaking, which unfortunately is not legally binding, that they will not agree to any new piece of Euro-power-grabbing in Brussels if either the Select Committee in your Lordships' House or in the other place is still considering it and if it has not been debated. The latest Written Answer to me on this—I may not have got the statistic quite right—indicates that the scrutiny reserve has been broken no fewer than 434 times in the past five years. That is 434 pieces of European legislation that were under scrutiny by our scrutiny committees when the Government went ahead and signed up to them, because there was not time or because Brussels had moved ahead—all sorts of excuses.

My final word on your Lordships’ European Union Select Committee should be that perhaps one committee and a couple of sub-committees would do the job very well, and the resources could be freed up to do the work in committee which your Lordships' House does extraordinarily well. That is pretty well everything else apart from its European work. I oppose the amendments.

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[Lord Howell of Guildford]

It is simply because the simplified revision procedure involves changes in the treaty. In many cases I have described, particularly where the significant test is applied and is not satisfied under paragraphs (i) and (j) in Clause 4, there would not be referenda here or in many other countries. But in other areas, through the simplified revision procedure and part of what we called the passerelle in our impassioned debates on this issue in the House at the time of the Lisbon treaty, it is possible to generate either transfers of competence or transfers of power. These are things on which there would be a natural incentive for the better use of existing powers in order to achieve certain objectives, like better co-operation over civil nuclear power or one of the other things that has been raised. They would also be matters where a real effort would be made by all countries because of the complexity they all face in pushing through treaty changes of any kind; even some quite small changes would trigger elaborate procedures in other countries. There will be a natural and sensible tendency to avoid changes and developments that involve treaty changes.

We simply do not accept that there is an appetite in the European Union for a further round of treaty change, given the arduousness of the ratification process, let alone one that would transfer further power from the UK to the EU. We certainly do not subscribe to the view that the addition of the simplified revision procedure will launch a new culture of regular treaty changes that seek to transfer power on a single issue. That is not the way the system has worked or will work in the future, as those who have been involved in it will know. My last involvement was many decades ago, but I had my share of it back in the 1970s and 1980s. Nations will know that when they come to deal with these issues, they have political capital to spend and they will spend it carefully, not rush into treaty changes at every opportunity. It is highly improbable that all 27 member states will push to agree a treaty change unless it was considered both urgent and important, such as the European financial stability mechanism, which the noble Lord rightly mentioned. But even then, that urgent treaty is expected to take two years—I repeat, two years—to be approved by all member states. The proposition that tiny little treaty changes would somehow be pushed through and promote a referendum here when they take two years for any country to get through is an absurdity.

I know that this is complex but it is a comprehensive approach to the whole question of the transfer of competences and powers. I beg noble Lords to understand that that is the reality of the position. Otherwise, individual issues are bound to be deferred—this is going to be the natural way; it has worked in the past and it will work again—until a whole raft of issues requiring attention can be wrapped up and packaged. That would ensure one treaty change which would cover a multitude of issues and one ratification process and, where relevant, one vote, as was the case with the Lisbon treaty. We recognise the kind of creature that comes along—it is the Lisbon treaty. That is just the sort of amalgamation of small and large issues, some of which under this Bill would certainly require a referendum, that should be and should have been put to a referendum.

We disagree most strongly with the proposition—this House disagreed with it and I think we carried sensible public opinion with us in doing so—that the Lisbon treaty should be somehow brushed aside and not put to a referendum because of the arguments about whether it did or did not parallel the European constitution beforehand. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, said it would not but he remembers, because he was a doughty campaigner in all those Lisbon debates, that there was a very strong sentiment the other way which remains to this day, enlivened and reinforced by the fact that if you actually read the words in the two documents, the constitution and the Lisbon treaty, they turn out over a broad stage, as the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, knows very well, to be identical. We are not fools, and nor are the public when they are told about this matter.

I see that the noble Lord wants to intervene again.

[Lord Grenfell]

I thank the noble Lord for giving way. Could we please try to get this straight once and for all? The constitution prepared by the EU Constitutional Convention was meant to be a constitution. The Lisbon treaty was in fact a series of amendments to two existing treaties, and the novelty of this was that when it was ratified, the Lisbon treaty disappeared into thin air and did not exist any more. It would have been odd to have a referendum on something that did not exist. What we were left with was amended versions of the two original treaties. That is very different from having a full-blown new constitution.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

I will call the noble Lord my noble friend because he is that. He will recall how we went around and around this debate. It is perfectly true that when the Lisbon treaty was brought forward, its drafters had taken care to change the basis so that it could not be packaged or described as a constitution, but there was an awful weight of evidence, supported by the similarity of wording and by many European leaders such as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. I do not think I am misquoting his words when he said that it was, “identical down to the last comma”. We could argue about that, but let us please not do so again tonight because I seem to remember that we spent many evenings on it. That is the fact of the matter.

In short, including the simplified revision procedure in the scope of the referendum conditions would not unleash frequent trivial referendums. In the same way, we do not accept that there are likely to be regular treaty changes in the future under the ordinary provision procedure. That is one set of reasons why there will be nothing very different from these large treaties coming along on which there is a basic division of view. We say that these things should be put to the British people. Others disagree, including my noble friend sitting further along the Bench. They think that somehow Parliament can continue to be relied upon to be the safeguard to prevent the further ceding of powers and competences. We have considerable doubts about that, and of course the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has even greater and stronger doubts than the Government.

However, we recognise that the simplified revision procedure has been set up to allow for amendments to specific parts of the treaty to be made in a more streamlined way, which is the point just made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle. We recognise that on occasion an Article 48(6) decision might be used to agree a change that might involve a small transfer of power but on which it would not be appropriate to hold a referendum. We have therefore gone one stage further and proposed a mechanism to assess whether certain types of transfer of powers under the simplified revision procedure should be put to a referendum. This is known as the significance test, which we will no doubt debate in further groups of amendments. It applies to any decision that falls under the criteria of either Clause 4(1)(i) or (j), both of which I have mentioned.

If the decision is deemed not to have a significant impact, a referendum need not be held, although an Act of Parliament—and this is a considerable addition to what went on in the past—would still need to be passed in all cases before the UK could approve any treaty change. We have built in this mechanism, the scope of which we will return to, to provide a further safeguard to prevent referendums being held on trivial matters. For example—I am asked for examples all the time—a new power under a future use of the simplified revision procedure that compelled Governments to provide annual statistics to the European Commission would not necessarily be considered significant enough to warrant a referendum, but a new power to compel UK businesses to adhere to further regulation might well be deemed significant and might turn up in some package or treaty that we would have to deal with in a better way than we dealt with the Lisbon treaty when that went rushing through.