European Union Committee: 2012-13 (EUC Report)

Lord Judd Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, it is good to follow the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat. He brings to his chairmanship of Sub-Committee C a lifetime in politics and of experience in international affairs, and from across the Floor I have always found him particularly well informed and enlightened. He also brings his considerable experience as a Commissioner of the European Union. He referred to his good fortune; I think that the committee is certainly fortunate to have him in the chair. While I mention the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, I want to join others in paying tribute to the chairmanship of all our committees, and of course to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, for his supreme chairmanship, to which he brings not only an ability that is desperately needed but a commitment which is very challenging. I think that we all deeply appreciate that. I want in personal terms to put on record my appreciation as a member of Sub-Committee F of the outstanding leadership and chairmanship that we consistently have in the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I have known him for many years. He, too, brings vast experience of the world and international affairs, which again illustrates just how well served Parliament is by their leadership in committees and by the experience that that leadership brings.

In thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I would like to say how much I have appreciated the joint work between Sub-Committees F and E the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness. He provides again to the House a real example of integrity and political courage. He speaks for what he believes, and does so not only with passion and emotion, but always on the basis of sound analysis and detailed knowledge. I think that the House should be grateful. I wish my long-standing friend the noble Baroness, Lady Corston, well in her chairmanship. She will have a tough challenge following the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, but I know that she will more than live up to it. I have had the good fortune of serving under her on the Joint Committee on Human Rights and know what a very effective chairman she too can be. I am sure that we all wish her well.

There is another group of people whom we ought to bear in mind and thank in our deliberations. These are the witnesses who provide so much valuable evidence to the committees as the basis for their work. We would not be able to produce our reports unless many people had a put great deal of time into preparing submissions and appearing before the committees, and sharing their insights, experiences and thoughts.

This brings me to something about which the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, was talking. There is one gigantic challenge with the European Union and our approach to it. To the majority of people in the country, certainly a wide cross-section, the European Union is a remote and closed world. It speaks with great deliberation and experience to itself. It is very well informed about the work with which it deals, but to some extent it has lost contact with those who are dependent upon it and have to respond to its initiatives. That underlies a lot of the public anxiety about it and needs to be challenged. It is something to which in our work we could all make an important contribution.

When we are assembling lists of witnesses it is important not to fall into the trap of taking evidence just from those who are already informed about the European Community. We must develop the ability to seek out people who are coping with the consequences of European Union policy, or who have a great deal to say about the challenges to which the European Union should be responding, and to hear their views as well. These are people in the front line of the work with which we deal. When we were doing our report on migration in Sub-Committee F, I was struck by some of the witnesses from this front line, dealing with the issues of migration in our society. As we develop our work we should take this very seriously.

As I understand it, one of the issues with which the Government are concerned in our future relationships with the European Union is that it should be opened up and become more flexible and closer to people. It should be more accountable to the nation and people as a whole. That is a laudable objective. If it is to be fulfilled it is incumbent on the Government to live by example and not just theory. Even after a week, what happened last week was nothing short of a parliamentary disgrace. Here were two committees that had done tremendously detailed work on the implications of opting out and taken evidence from a wide cross-section of witnesses, who had put a great deal of effort and time into what they had to say to the committees. These two committees had listened to those in the front line of work in the context of justice, security and the rest. But what happened? Just hours before the debate on the same day, the Government’s response appeared. How is that opening up the matters of the European Union to the public as a whole? How is that enabling Parliament to do its job as it should? We should all have had time to consider in depth the Government’s response and prepare ourselves for a sensible debate in that context.

We should not hesitate in calling for the Government to do far better on this in the future. At the moment they are not serving the cause of enlightening our country at all by behaving in this way. It is not a totally isolated indication. We must understand what lies behind it and one of the difficulties is that we all know that there is a huge debate going on within the ranks of the coalition. It is not simply between the two formal parties that form the coalition, but even within the ranks of the Conservative Party. I have friends in the Conservative Party with whom it would be very difficult to get a thin sheet of paper regarding their views and mine on Europe. But there are others in the Conservative Party who are very different, committed to a xenophobic, insular and narrow view of where Britain’s future lies, and that is certainly not within the sphere of the European Union, nor even on too many occasions, I fear to say, of international co-operation as a whole.

That will always be a complication when the Government are getting their case together, but it in no way excuses what happened last week. I have been disturbed at the way in which we are repeatedly entertained to what, if it was not so grimly serious, is a charade of on the one hand senior government voices whipping up the sceptics and the critics of the concept of the European Union, and on the other those who are trying to keep the whole show on the rails. I suspect that that includes the Prime Minister.

One of the contentious issues in which emotion has obscured reality is the repatriation of criminals who have completed their sentences and are not British subjects. There is too much evidence that some in the senior ranks of government, who should know better, have been whipping up a view that this is somehow the fault of the European Union or of the European court. If that were case, it would be a very serious matter. Let us establish how great the problem is. In that context, I put down a Question on 3 June, asking on how many occasions in 2012 the Government were prevented from deporting criminals, who were not United Kingdom citizens, following the completion of their sentences by rulings of the United Kingdom courts citing Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

I drew the House’s attention to this last week. I have had approaches from Ministers, who have protested how sorry they are that I have not had a reply and that I must of course have one. I hope he will forgive me, as he is not in the House, but because this is so serious I must say that last night I sent an e-mail to the noble Lord, Lord McNally. I pointed out that today was the last day before the recess. A week had gone by and I had still had no reply.

I was very touched that the noble Lord sits so assiduously by his iPad, because within minutes, I had a reply in which he said that he was shocked that I had not had a reply. I would like to think that that is just innocent incompetence, the machine just not getting a reply together, but I cannot help being concerned lest that reveals something much deeper: that the Home Office is in no hurry to answer the question because the facts might not conveniently fit with the rhetoric and the playing to the gallery, to put it bluntly, which has gone on.

As we consider the future of the European Union, these matters are very grave indeed. We must have a Government displaying to us openly, fairly and straightforwardly the matters central to the issue. That, of course, starts with the Select Committees. I come back to the issue of how totally unsatisfactory—that is putting it in mild language—how totally wrong and insulting it was to produce a report only hours before the debate took place.

I want to say what a great privilege I find it to serve on Select Committees and how much I appreciate all those who make that work possible and so effective. A real tribute must go to the clerks and their support staff, who do a fantastic job for us all. I hope that they will get a decent break this summer, although I fear that in the case of Sub-Committees E and F, that will not be as simple as it sounds because we are going to meet during the recess. That shows the commitment to those issues by a large number of people. Again, I give real thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, for his terrific leadership in this operation.