European Union Bill

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 17th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I think we all understand that Clause 6 is at the heart of the Bill. We have spent considerable time on Clause 6 and we will return to it on Report. No doubt we will have discussions between Committee and Report on aspects of it.

I will just say a few things on Clause 6, how it fits in the Bill, and where it fits in the coalition agreement and so on. The coalition agreement was, of course, a headline agreement, and on that basis the coalition partners negotiated the detail that came out of it. We have seen this evening—and those of you who read the debates in another place will be well aware—that this Bill is a compromise between incompatible positions. It is doing its utmost to draw a line underneath the long argument about keeping competence and centralisation in Brussels, which has run through British and other national politics for a long time.

It is our case, in putting forward this Bill, that the Lisbon treaty provides extensive competencies that we can use. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lea of Crondall, that this is not in any sense an attempt to destroy the Lisbon treaty by the back door. It is based on the understanding that the Lisbon treaty does indeed provide a great deal of headroom for us all to achieve the objectives that we seek. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, was speaking, I had a quick look at Articles 191 and 192 of the Treaty on the European Union, because I wanted to check how much headroom the Lisbon treaty gives us on environmental policy. It is quite clear that EU carbon emissions targets are agreed under existing competencies, and largely under qualified majority voting. All the Bill does is to say that if the UK wants to give up its veto over the environmental matters listed in Article 192(2), including fiscal matters, town planning and the structure of our energy supply—that is to say, if we wish to move from unanimity to qualified majority voting—then we have to bring it back to Parliament, and, if necessary, for a referendum.

We are now going to move on to Articles 7 to 10, which will deal with a range of issues that will not be subject to referendums, where parliamentary scrutiny— parliamentary approval—is set down. That is very much an indication that we have done our utmost to distinguish between sensitive and significant issues and other issues on which we can move. However, I am not persuaded that we need endless flexibility, which we do not have, to be able to achieve the objectives which we as a constructive member of the Union wish to pursue over the next few years. The Lisbon treaty gives us that flexibility.

[Lord Liddle]

The Minister mentioned the coalition agreement, which is obviously a compromise between parties that have different views on Europe, but did not the Liberal Democrat party conceive of what it was signing up for in the coalition agreement in the following way? The Lisbon treaty had gone through and been ratified; the Liberal Democrats had supported that in Parliament. That is why the coalition agreement clearly states that the passerelles should be subject to proper parliamentary approval but not to referenda. The Liberal Democrat view was that the flexibilities contained within the Lisbon treaty should be subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny but not to referenda. New treaties of the conventional type were a different matter where the Liberal Democrats were prepared to accept a case for referenda. I am not speaking for the Liberal Democrats, but it seems to me on any objective reading of the coalition agreement that that is what was intended. However, that is not what this Bill says; this Bill is not what was agreed.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I do not wish to get into a lengthy disquisition either of passerelle or of the coalition agreement. We attempted to negotiate also with the Labour Party. I have no doubt that those negotiations, had they been pursued further, would also have led to a very carefully and painfully crafted coalition agreement with a party which itself has some divisions within it about Europe. I saw a Bruges Group advertisement last week which had Kelvin Hopkins, Mark Seddon and a number of other people speaking on the case for leaving the European Union. Let us all be a little realistic about the political circumstances under which we are all operating. Having answered some of the questions, I encourage the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, not to oppose the clause standing part.

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[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I shall quickly follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies, but I shall not detain the Committee for more than a few moments. I plead particularly to those Members of the Committee who are women. Article 19, the provision to which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, referred, concerns discrimination on the grounds of sex, religion, sexual orientation and so forth. The effect of what we now see in Schedule 1 is that a referendum would be needed to move from unanimity to qualified majority voting. I ask my colleagues to give a moment’s thought to a position where the discriminator is one of the members of the Council.

That was exactly the example in the case of the Czech Republic when it sought to join the European Union. It discriminated viciously against the Roma; in some cases they were assaulted in small Czech towns and, in one or two cases, burnt. The attempt to say to the Czech Republic that discrimination against the Roma must end would have been impossible had there been a requirement for unanimity—in other words, no movement towards qualified majority voting. In those European Union members where there is clearly discrimination against women—Romania is one example of that—it would be possible for that country effectively to veto an attempt to rule out such discrimination. I cannot believe that that is what the Committee wants to see.

Essentially, one of the great achievements of the European Union—one that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, totally fails to recognise—was the extension of human rights and democracy to central and eastern Europe. It is an astonishing achievement. In any country except Britain it would be recognised as such. The consequence of that, in practice, is that the Copenhagen criteria—laid down in 1993 at the European Council meeting in the Danish capital—specifically said that for a country to join the European Union it must meet requirements about human rights, democracy, the independence of the courts and the proper, non-corrupt provision and maintenance of the rule of law, all of which are fundamental pillars of democracy. All of these depended on the wishes of these countries to join the European Union, and the requirement on them to meet those political conditions in order to do so.

The success, in extending democracy to that huge part of Europe, has a great deal to do with the respect that many of us have for the European Union. I spent nine years as the head of an organisation based in Harvard University called Project Liberty, which argued time and again with the Governments of eastern European countries that they could not join the European Union unless they put right laws that were discriminatory and corrupt. I know this because I was involved at first hand. It was an extraordinarily powerful weapon.

I conclude by saying, first, that nobody in this Committee should underestimate the astonishing impact that Europe has had on democracy in this continent and beyond it. Secondly, to try now to limit opposition to discrimination by obliging it to be unanimous would be a huge step back for the European Union, and one for which I, for one, would hate to see my country be responsible.

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, we have heard many fine speeches in this short debate. I shall be brief and focus on what I regard as the central problem with Schedule 1. The Government need to accept that there is a central problem, and they have to agree to some amendment to the Bill that addresses this issue.