European Union Bill

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I fundamentally disagree with that point. The key point here, which we have come back to day after day on this Bill, is that this is about the process not the policy. The process has been absolutely clear and I still wait to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, on where these are not covered by existing treaties.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Deben, was good enough to mention me in his few remarks and to accuse me of what I think was the impossible and most undesirable dream of the United Kingdom being altogether free of the European Union in all these matters. He is of course correct. However, he then mentioned the common fisheries policy as though that has to be solved by the European Union and as though the EU will not solve the acknowledged disaster which the policy is, environmentally and in every other way, if it is prevented from doing so. Surely, from our point of view, as I have mentioned before, the answer is terribly simple. We simply leave the European common fisheries policy and take back our international waters. Seventy five per cent of the fish which swim in European waters all the year round swim in waters that used to belong entirely to the United Kingdom before we made the mistake of joining the European Union. We then manage our own waters, re-establish our fish stocks and let out any surplus to foreigners.

On energy, the noble Lord again believes that the European Union is essential to solve our energy problems but, surely—

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

I am afraid that the noble Lord is yet again misleading the House. The waters did not belong to Britain before we joined the European Union. We had 12-mile limits in those days and the areas beyond those limits were high seas. The decision to go out to 250 miles was taken by the European Union collectively when we were a member.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Yes, but we should not have gone along with that decision because we should not have been in the policy in the first place. I therefore insist that most of the fish which swim now in European waters and are fished by European boats used to belong to us and they could and should belong to us again. I do not wish to detain the House—

[Lord Deben]

The noble Lord really must not say that. It is not true. Most of our fishing grounds have always been shared with our neighbours—the French, the Belgians and the Germans—and we have always had to come to terms with them. All that the European common fisheries policy does is to have a sensible mechanism. It is not that the policy being common is wrong but that the policy is wrong. You have to have a common policy; otherwise you can only make these decisions with the marlinspike. It is just not true that we had 75 per cent of it before.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

The noble Lord and those of his view have been saying this now for 30 years. It has not happened and it is not going to happen. The solution for this country is to leave the common fisheries policy and take back our waters to the median line and whatever we had before in territorial waters into our own control. Then, when our own fishing industry, which has been decimated by the common fisheries policy, has been rebuilt, we can share any surplus and lease it out to people who want to buy it.

[Lord Davies of Stamford]

I do not know in which amendment the common fisheries policy arises, but I have to tell the noble Lord that if he is interested in that policy, he will rapidly find that the only explanation consistent with the facts is that the common fisheries policy suffered from an excess of member state sovereignty and an insufficiency of federalism. At every stage the European Commission, being the regulatory agency, has proposed quotas that, if they had been accepted, would have preserved the stocks. It is the member states pursuing their own individual interests that have always resisted those proposals on the part of the European Commission. As a result, the quotas have never been sufficiently tight and all these waters have been overfished. Under all circumstances, whether we had our own fisheries policy or not, it would be necessary for us to have regulation, quotas and some effective enforcement mechanism. If we disbanded the European Union, the next day we would need to set up a new common fisheries policy by agreement with a set of quotas and a common enforcement policy.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, when we leave the European Union, we will not do as the noble Lord, Lord Davies, suggests. We will take back those waters that were our waters, take back those fish that were our fish and re-establish our national fishing industry. That is what we will do. As the noble Lord has mentioned, this was not actually in the amendments but as the noble Lord, Lord Deben, mentioned it in connection with me, I thought that I would just touch on it in closing.

The noble Lord assumes, again, that some form of European common energy policy is in any way necessary for this country. We simply rebuild our own energy supplies. We do not let the European Union close down our coal-fired stations, as my noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke has mentioned, but build new ones. We might even consider incineration of landfill. We certainly consider nuclear power. We therefore supply our own energy. If we then wish to go on buying Russian gas through France, which is what we have to do at the moment, then we may be able to, but I entirely agree with my noble friend that this pursuit of wind power is madness of a dimension that only the political class could be guilty of. I think that that covers everything that I had to say to the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and I shall sit down.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

Perhaps your Lordships would welcome it if we began to come to the end of this enormous debate. I agree with my noble friend Lord Lamont that the effect of this debate has been to clarify our differences, particularly the concerns of noble Lords opposite, about the Bill, and the worries that lie at the centre of their anxieties.

I do not want to parody what the noble Lords, Lord Liddle and Lord Triesman, have said again and again. They wish for more flexibility, and by “flexibility” they mean the readiness to agree to or even initiate treaty changes. They further argue that in some of its provisions—notably Article 48(6), but in others as well—the Lisbon treaty provided this flexibility, which somehow the Bill is reversing and putting back in the box. I think that that is a fair summary of where they stand. I question straight away whether they have got the Lisbon treaty quite right. We know that using the passerelle provisions requires a treaty change, and in a life experiment, not a laboratory experiment, we have seen how that is conducted. It is conducted through some very elaborate negotiations on an urgent issue that will not be solved by any immediate policies to hand—namely, the stability of the European financial and monetary system—and, to meet that, a treaty change is winding its way through the system and will take one year and three-quarters to come to fruition and be agreed. So that structure, that passerelle arrangement—which, incidentally, was as noble Lords know very well, an agonising compromise between several other suggestions at the Lisbon treaty negotiations—is certainly not a quick solution, a flexibility device, an emergency provision, which somehow the Bill is negativing. That is not the pattern.

Then we come to the broader question of whether treaty changes generally are synonymous with flexibility. I have considerable difficulty with the line taken by the Opposition. Not only does it take 18 months to two years to work up and elaborate treaty changes and get them agreed between the 27 members, which all have their own procedures for handling these matters, going through their own legislatures and constitutional arrangements and, in many cases their own referenda arrangements as well, but this seems to be a very poor response, a very poor kind of flexibility and a very poor pattern of responding to emergency and difficult issues.

As I understand it, the implication of the amendments, which extend the exemptions to a very wide range of issues, is that it would be nice to be ready to have treaty changes in an enormous list of things. We dealt with banking and financial regulation in the previous group of amendments, and I would be testing the patience of the Committee if I went through that again. However, these amendments deal with climate change, pollution, energy security, migration, cross-border crime, neighbourhood policy, maritime law, piracy and human trafficking, about which my noble friend Lady Williams spoke with such precision, knowledge and telling appeal. In all those areas, as I understand it, the amendments would like to see treaty change. I wonder whether the Opposition realise quite what they are asking for; it seems extremely doubtful that treaty change is the way to solve crises or problems in any of those areas. The amendments appear to have been drafted on the assumption that the Bill is trying to impair the UK’s role and participation in all these areas. They take no account of the fact—and it is a fact—that the existing treaties which extend enormous areas of competence to the EU already afford the European Union ample scope—I shall show in detail why this is so—to legislate in all the specific areas referred to in all the amendments.

If I were to go through that vast list now, we would be here till well after midnight and probably the early hours of the morning, so I cannot do justice to every aspect. But let me try to show how, in many of these areas, the competences are there. The need to plunge into this complicated area of treaty change is minimal; the opportunities for creating a highly effective European posture and policy are available within the existing competences and the existing absolute competence in particular is available to the EU in trade questions. Let me explain some of the points where this is so.

Perhaps I should begin with referenda generally and the concern that a multiple stream of referenda lies ahead if the Bill gets on to the statute book. That, I think we have established, is nonsense. Far ahead, a great new treaty could touch on a number of the issues we are looking at tonight. But the idea of a stream of referenda, which I know noble Lords in many cases dislike intensely, is unrealistic. In two highly eloquent pieces of oratory in two debates, my noble friend Lord Deben has let us know that he does not like referenda at all. That is my impression from listening to his words. He is perfectly entitled not to like referenda at all. However, he must face it: they increasingly creep into modern government, particularly in this internet age when 2 billion people, out of 6 billion on this planet, are on the web every morning. This obviously empowers people and leads to more consultation of public opinion than ever before in many democracies. It goes with parliamentary representative government; it does not undermine it, provided it is handled in a sensible way.