European Union (Approval of Treaty Amendment Decision) Bill [Lords]

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts

Monday 10th September 2012 Commons Chamber

I very much hope that the amendment will be rejected. In essence, it is less than honest—it clearly opposes what the Government are proposing, but does so in a technical and bureaucratic way. It worries me that, if it were passed, we could be enshrining in British law a stipulation that what happens in this country depends on what happens in others, as the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) pointed out. It is important for this country not to be the last nation in the European Union to respond. We should play our positive role within a reasonable time scale, as is suggested by the Bill.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

I had not intended to contribute to the debate, but frankly I am astonished by the insouciant comments and complacent remarks of some Opposition Members. They ask, “How can this country have the temerity to make a value judgment on legal proceedings with regard to this mechanism?”

There seems to be a fundamental dichotomy for those unable to see the wood for the trees and who will support any initiative from the European Union. They tell us, “Well, this is just one more signature, treaty or concordat that we need to sign up to for us to be at the top table of Europe, and it may be in the UK’s interests or to the contrary.” Yet they then ask us, how dare we make a value judgment on the Pringle case at the Irish High Court—on which, incidentally, the European Court of Justice constitutional decision may hang?

Whatever happened to subsidiarity? Whatever happened to the autonomy, authority and independence of the 27 EU nation states’ own judicial systems? I am concentrating on the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) in saying that it is absolutely right for us to be certain of our facts and for us to respect the decisions taken by other countries.

I defer to no one in my admiration for the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins), who is the Nostradamus of Eurosceptics. He has ploughed a lonely furrow on the Labour Benches for many years. He has been saying unfashionable things. The unfortunate thing, from the point of the view of the Labour party, is that he is a socialist and can see the catastrophic economic calamity being visited on working people in Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy. For what? For a Franco-German political construct. The lives of millions of our fellow Europeans are being sacrificed for the sake of a dead idea and the creation of a political entity called Europe.

It ill behoves the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) to quote opinion polls. There was an opinion poll on the Lisbon treaty that said that we should have a referendum and give the people their say. That was the policy of her party in the previous Parliament, and her party reneged on it. Opinion polls say consistently, as they have over a number of years, that we should have a plebiscite on giving the British people the right to make a decision as to whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. That decision is coming, because the people’s voices will be heard by the end of this Parliament. Any party, including my own, that disregards the voice of the people and thinks that they know better will pay a very heavy price at the ballot box.

This is about kicking a can down a road. It is about putting the welfare, careers, vision, energy and lives of a plutocratic Euro-elite before the lives of real people. Real people’s lives are being wrecked. Children in Greece are being adopted because their parents cannot afford to feed them. People are going hungry in Greece because of the economy. That is the human cost of the words of a desiccated calculating machine, as Aneurin Bevan put it, that came out of the mouth of the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). It is not just about a political idea; it is about real people. It is time that the House of Commons understood what the European Union is doing to the lives of those people, because we are complicit in that crime in allowing it to go on.

It is time that Her Majesty’s Opposition and the Government understood that this is not an academic issue or a matter of simply saying that it is in our interests to support the continuation of the euro at any price There is a world out there—Latin America, south Asia, the far east. We are a global trading nation, but we are locking ourselves into a sclerotic, backward-looking, high-tax, high-regulation customs union. It is destroying people’s lives, and we have a moral obligation to say that. It is appalling that the Government do not have more courage and determination to say that what is going on in Europe is wrong and we should not be part of it.

[Emma Reynolds]

When EU leaders agreed to set up the permanent bail-out fund, the ESM, the intention was to introduce it earlier this year. Regrettably, the original date has been delayed owing to the constitutional issues mentioned by the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), such as the court cases going on in Ireland and Germany. I agree with him to the extent that he raised some important issues about the EFSF and the EFSM on which I look forward to the Minister’s response. However, while it is important that those constitutional issues are ironed out, they should not in themselves delay the UK’s ratification of the treaty change. As the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) suggested, if each member state were to delay their ratification in order to wait for the ratification of the next member state, we would have a mass stalemate. Ultimately, that would produce an inertia that perhaps the supporters of the amendment would like to produce—but I will not make any judgment on that. I do not want to intrude on the private grief of Conservative Back Benchers and the Minister, but there seems to be a contradiction between saying on the one hand that the Government got a good deal while on the other arguing for a delay. I am sure that the Minister will tackle that.

On the ESM and more widely, it is regrettable that there have been several delays and that there has been a lack of political leadership and inertia and inaction at a European level which has served to deepen the eurozone crisis. As my hon. Friend the Member for Caerphilly (Wayne David) set out, we believe that the stability of the eurozone is in the UK’s national interest and that the ESM will, if used appropriately, contribute to that stability. Any further delay, such as that proposed by the amendment, would act manifestly against that stability and our national interest. It is complacent to suggest that we should not ratify the Bill, so we oppose the amendment.