European Union (Approvals) Bill [HL]

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle]

My Lords, on these Benches we support the principle that the Bill should come before this House and we support its detailed content. I hope that it will not detain the House for very long in its further stages. We support the principle, because we believe that it is right that Parliament should approve this type of decision, and we support that aspect of the EU Act 2011.

As regards the specific content of this approvals Bill, we support the clarification of the need for the EU to keep a proper archive. As the noble Lord said, this is important for transparency. We also support the Europe for Citizens programme. I should like to ask a couple questions on the first matter and make some comments on the second, particularly in the light of the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Renton.

On the matter of the archive, I do not expect the Minister to be able to answer these questions today, but it would be interesting if he could write to me. I wonder whether that archive will contain the material of real substance that will enable historians to analyse how decisions were taken in the European Union. In my experience, you do not get much of that flavour from the official documents or from the official conclusions of ministerial meetings. A historian would need access to things such as the notes that the secretary of the Commission meeting took about who said what, the correspondence between commissioners and the records of the chef de cabinet meetings. In this way it could be seen how decisions were prepared. Access would also be needed to the verbatim reports that are made of the European Council meetings, rather than simply the conclusions. I would throw in the proceedings of COREPER. Although it is not an official European institution, it played a crucial role over the years.

Will those documents be part of the archive? This is an important point. We have seen in the 60-year development of the European Union that we are moving step by step from a world of secretive diplomacy, where suspicious nation states came together to take the first bold steps towards union, to a much more open democracy. Analysing that process will be very important for the future.

It is on that theme that we support the Europe for Citizens programme. It is right that, as Europeans, we should commemorate things such as the 100th anniversary of the First World War. It is, of course, one of the main reasons why the idea of Europe is still so vital. I always remember reading Mitterrand’s final speech to the European Parliament. My French is appalling, but he reminded everyone that:

“Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre”.

That is one of the fundamentals of Europe. Therefore, we should be commemorating those events.

Even in the United Kingdom, there is a sense that we need to have a cross-border, cross-national debate about the future of the European Union and that we need to engage citizens in it. We, together in the European Union, are part of what political scientists call a community of fate. In other words, what happens in all those countries really matters to us; and what happens in the European Union really matters to us. A classic example is that the British economy has not avoided the consequences of the euro crisis simply because we are outside the euro.

The present Government are coming to terms with the need for debate. The noble Lord, Lord Renton, mentioned the justice opt-outs. More interesting is the decision to opt back in to most of the most important parts of the JHA agenda. That is because the Ministers dealing with this point recognise that we are part of a community of fate—we have to take these decisions together. We can see the same in the single market, where the Government are increasingly emphasising the importance of the single market to our economy.

I do not want to be too sociological about it, but there is a European demos in the making, and the euro crisis has brought it to the fore. We should be looking at this as an opportunity to promote debate between citizens about how they see Europe and the future of the Union.

If the Prime Minister’s plans go ahead—of course, I do not think that he will win the next general election, but were he to do so—and there is a renegotiation in 2016 and a referendum in 2017, I hope that that will be played out against a background of much commemoration of Winston Churchill’s great speeches calling for Europe to unite.