European Union Bill

Lord Pearson of Rannoch Excerpts

Monday 9th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne]

Noble Lords on all sides of the House must now surely recognise that this amendment is a mistake. I feel absolutely sure that it is an honest mistake, but it is a mistake based on a misunderstanding of the rules in the European Union. In order to work well in the European Union, you have to recognise that members come from many different states—as they have always done. In order to draw the members together so that they come to the meetings and all the rest of it, the European Union has different sorts of rules that are designed to attract them, to make absolutely sure that they come to the meetings. There are some very tough rules indeed if you do not turn up, and that is why this amendment is such a mistake. We cannot pass it because it would so gravely handicap United Kingdom Ministers in the Council of Ministers.

This way of working is commonplace throughout the European Union. If you do not turn up when it is a unanimous vote—and many votes are unanimous in different European Union institutions—you will be deemed to have agreed. That is what forces people to come from so many different nations. It is an enormous effort and very expensive for the Union and so on, so there are a number of rules that act like a magnet. This is one of them. Therefore, with the greatest respect, I suggest to noble Lords opposite—to the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, for example, and others—that they should rapidly withdraw this amendment. It is a little embarrassing. If it were to go through, we would be the laughing-stock of the Council of Ministers.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I have a slightly more general question to put about a thread which is running through all our amendments and proceedings. It concerns the Government’s attitude to enhanced co-operation. We have heard much about the general position of Ministers who would find themselves isolated in the Council of Ministers because, although they might support a proposal, they would have to take it to a referendum that they might lose. That is why I ask: how serious is that, really? If nine or more countries wanted to go ahead with a proposal—it used to be eight, but I think it is now nine under the Lisbon treaty—what would be the Government’s attitude to it? How worrying is enhanced co-operation? I imagine that the Government may say that they do not particularly want a two-speed Europe. Of course, some of us would prefer a third speed or gear—a reverse gear. But it would be nice at some point during our proceedings to understand how the Government view enhanced co-operation generally.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I shall respond to the spirit of the probing amendment that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, rightly moved. It is useful to probe on this. I do not think that I can respond to all the points that the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, raised, because they seem to me to stem from a deep conspiratorial assumption about the implicit plot behind the Bill, and I suspect that reasoned argument cannot reach that deep.

I should point out that Articles 235(1) and 238(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union make it clear that abstaining in a decision requiring unanimity is effectively counted as a supportive vote, and so an abstention could be classed as supporting a decision. Those of us who have been involved in any way in Brussels decisions will know that formal voting is not the most common form of decision-making in Brussels. A great many are taken by consensus and the chair taking the sense of the meeting. That is no doubt part of the reason why the previous Government, in their wisdom—I am not saying that they were always wrong, let alone that they pursued conspiracies of their own—put in this phrase “or otherwise support”. That does not mean that a Minister cannot indicate support in principle for a decision if the Minister also gives notice that a vote in favour is subject to approval by Act of Parliament and to the referendum condition being met, if that is required by the decision.

The noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, was determined to get enhanced co-operation into the discussion even though we are not discussing that amendment. Enhanced co-operation is under way. The British Government are indeed involved in the process of enhanced co-operation on patent law. We do not believe that Britain will become more marginal because enhanced co-operation takes place among others. After all, if one looks at what is happening with European co-operation in defence, one will see that the United Kingdom and France are, in effect, leading in defining practical co-operation in that regard. The myth behind the Bill—that we will somehow be pushed to the margin, which the noble Lord thinks is a good thing but the noble Lord, Lord Davies, thinks is a wicked thing—is not the case. In an EU of 27, which is about to be an EU of 28, 29 or 30, it is likely that there will be a number of issues on which smaller groups—which will often including the United Kingdom, though sometimes not—will move ahead on their own through enhanced co-operation. In most cases that will not require treaty change. They will merely be moving ahead because it is not possible for all 27, 28, 29 or 30 to agree. Therefore, that will not be caught by the Bill.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for making that so wonderfully clear.

I hope I have managed to persuade your Lordships that there is no sinister intent behind these words. They are not part of a dreadful right-wing Conservative plot, so there is no need to add the qualification that Amendment 32A would require. May I also say, since the Daily Express has been running a range of quite absurd stories—the latest being that government buildings are being forced to fly the EU flag—that we must recognise that we are operating in a world in which, for many years, previous Governments have failed to stand up to some of the complete nonsense that has spread through the British press. Unfortunately, we now find more and more nonsense spreading, and part of what this coalition Government intend to do is to spell out the advantages to Britain of being in the European Union in order to get back at some of the nonsense put out by the Daily Express, which unfortunately, as noble Lords will know, is no longer part of the Press Complaints Commission process and so the commission has very few controls over what it puts out, but that is another matter.

We will take this matter away and look at it again. However, as I say, the words used in the Lisbon treaty amendment Act were there for a good reason, and the words used here are also here for a good reason. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will be willing to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Before the Minister sits down, may I be allowed to put in a word on behalf of the Daily Express, about which he has not been wholly polite? Millions of people in this country actually welcome the campaign to leave the European Union which the Daily Express has started—it is the first national newspaper to have done so. Whatever noble and Europhile Lords might feel about the Daily Express, I would at least like to put in a word on behalf of the rest of us.

[Lord Tomlinson]

Before the noble Lord sits down, is he aware that these millions of people who follow the Daily Express campaign with such avidity brought such success to UKIP in the local elections?

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[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

My Lords, I should like to start by offering an apology to the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, for something I misheard on our second day in Committee. I was not here on the third day and this is my first opportunity to correct that which I misheard. After I had spoken, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, said:

“Is it not true that none”,

of the judges of the Court of Justice,

“would pass muster as a judge in even the lowest and least distinguished of British courts?”.

I thought that that was an assertion and I did not reply because I did not think that it deserved a reply. But on looking in Hansard I see that it was a question. I apologise for mishearing the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, and for not answering his question. Clearly, the ears of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, are better than mine and he spotted that it was a question. He began his subsequent remarks by saying that,

“the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, is not going to answer”.—[Official Report, 26/4/11; col. 90.]

As a result of what the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, said and that reply, I feel that it is necessary for me to say that my silence did not in any way imply assent. I feel that it is important to put into the record what I think about the judges of the court, of whom I have known about 12 or 14. In this House, there will be some who remember with respect and affection Lord Mackenzie-Stuart. There will be many of us who would wish that Sir David Edward was here with us. The present judge from the UK, Judge Schiemann, is an immensely distinguished jurist with, behind him, I think, nine years in the High Court, eight years in the Appeal Court and seven in the Court of Justice. And all of us will remember the contributions that Lord Slynn of Hadley used to make from these Benches to our debate. These four men have been British justices in the Court of Justice and to none of them, by any stretch of the imagination, could the criticisms made by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, apply.

I greatly admire the imaginative and irrepressible verve that the noble Lord brings to our debates but it is really important that we should not make absurd allegations about a serious institution and serious people. I thought that it was important to set the record straight and to say what I would have said had I not misheard the noble Lord at the time. I hope that the Government Front Bench will confirm now, as I am sure that it would have done had I not misheard, that it agrees with me and not with the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, on the quality of the judges of the Court of Justice.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

I do not know how many of the legal luminaries to which the noble Lord has just referred are present members of the Luxembourg court. I would merely say that those of us of a Eurosceptic bent do not really regard the Luxembourg court as a court of law at all. We regard it as the engine of the treaties, endlessly pursuing, in its judgment, the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe.

I do not think it was the Luxembourg court, but we owe it to the Daily Express, which recently ran a two-page spread complete with colour photographs, to see a summary of the members of the Strasbourg court. I do not think that they pass muster either. Of course, if there is a judge in the Luxembourg court who would pass the muster which I have suggested he may not, then I am happy to apologise to him, or indeed to several of them. But that does not alter my strictures and the strictures of the Eurosceptic movement in this country regarding the Luxembourg court and its proposals over the years. One thinks again of Article 308 as it then was, and other flexibility clauses in the treaty, which it has used and adapted relentlessly to pursue the project of European integration.

Those are my comments and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, for his apology.

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pearson. Unless I misheard again, the noble Lord did not end his remarks with a question, so I am not going to respond except to say that the Strasbourg court is, of course, elected by parliamentarians. I do not think that the Strasbourg court has anything to do with this discussion, which is about the European Court of Justice, but I am grateful for the words of apology from the noble Lord.

I turn to Amendment 30. Here in Clause 6 we are in a different part of the forest. We have abandoned treaty land and treaty amendment by any form, and now we are into decisions of various kinds and the mandatory referendum requirements for those decisions. By definition we have therefore left coalition agreement territory because we are not talking about treaties any more. We are now dealing with the 56 categories of decision on which a mandatory referendum could overturn an Act of Parliament. As the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, pointed out at the start of the Committee, that would be unprecedented. These referenda are entirely unnecessary because a Government, if they wished, could always choose to say no in the Council. The law requiring referenda is particularly unnecessary because, as the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, pointed out during the third day of debate, not having a reference in the Bill to a particular requirement for a referendum does not mean that a Government could not, on the day, choose to say that they wanted to have one. All this does is tie the Government’s hands, which of course some would want to do.

Why have we got into this curious mess in these extraordinarily detailed thickets—and we have not yet looked at Schedule 1 where mandatory requirements are to be imposed? I can think of only two rationales. The first was the one that the noble Lord, Lord Lamont of Lerwick, talked about in a different context during the third Committee day. It might be called the Odysseus rationale. We would have a British Minister, let us say the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, sailing past Brussels and insisting that he be tied to the mast so that he cannot be lured by the siren voices with their seductive song. He wants to be able to say, “Look, guys, I have nothing against what you are saying, but I can’t possibly agree with you. If I did, we would have to have a referendum back home”. It is the wax in the ears and tied to the mast provision—the Odysseus provision. I think that it is very pusillanimous. I would have found it very hard to brief Mrs Thatcher, as Prime Minister, on this point. Mrs Thatcher thought that if you disagreed with something, you disagreed with it. You said no. You did not say, “I am terribly sorry. There is nothing much we can do about this because we would have to have a referendum and we do not want one”.

It is insulting to our negotiating partners to turn up tied to the mast. They expect to do serious business, but the Brits cannot do so because of this Act on the statute book. The Brits therefore cannot take part in negotiations. It will feed the temptation and tendency for people to do things in smaller groups without consulting us because we are such a bore.

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[Lord Dykes]

I entirely accept that. Indeed, no member state is forced to fly the flag. It is interesting that in Germany, France, Italy and other countries, routinely, all or most government buildings fly the European flag as well as the national flag. We know that President Sarkozy, when he has a television interview, always has, alongside the tricolour, the European flag.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Will the noble Lord admit that the absence of the European flag on most of our public buildings reflects the wishes of the British people, if not the wishes of our Europhile political class?

[Lord Dykes]

The British people have not been consulted on that in any way. If they were, they would probably be very much in favour of it. I think that the younger generation, in particular, would like to see the European flag flying alongside the national flag. You can be a patriotic Britisher and a keen European as well, and there are plenty of them.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Lord Dykes]

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I will not give way again at this stage.

The feeling about Clause 6 is mounting that it will have a worse effect than the previous clauses. Yet again, I do not believe that the Government have thought out the dangerous subsections. Any British Government of whatever colour or, in the case of a coalition, whatever combination of parties, could find to their dismay that the communitarian habit of working together by positive and constructive consensus for the greater European benefit and that of the national member states would be stymied by a sudden, brutal UK stop-all on routine matters of state business in the Council of Ministers. We would therefore paralyse ourselves for no good reason other than the propagandistic appeasement of the Daily Mail, the Sun, my noble friend Lord Hamilton and a few other headbangers in the Commons on the Conservative side. I did not mean to say that my noble friend Lord Hamilton was a headbanger; far from it, he is a very respected Peer who succeeded me as chairman of the European Atlantic group, so he must be a very good bloke indeed. We would also bring the whole European Council process to a stop. We recall that in the first section of the coalition agreement on Europe the Government wanted to play a leading role and to be a positive participant in the EU, but this amazingly stupid clause is a funny way of dealing with our aspirations. If it were passed, the Government would henceforth face regular clashes with their partners for no good reason other than to have a clash, and this would come from the member state that insisted on no artificial hurdles and, quite rightly, full QMV for the single market—indeed, full integration in all aspects of the single market.

Lisbon went wider on the machinery of collective decision-making than previous treaties. It included similar techniques to the ones first introduced by the Single European Act, when huge new powers were agreed for the Union without the UK authorities and indeed Mrs Thatcher, in particular, running away, as was alluded to earlier. Why were we so surprised to see other member Governments appreciating our zeal for the Single European Act and wishing to apply its mechanisms to other areas as respectable normative integration between friendly, like-minded and patriotic member countries? Why are we so insecure that we have to agree with Bill Cash and John Redwood on these issues? If the Government were sensibly to accept all or some of the original main amendments in this rather unwieldy and elaborate cluster, they would be doing themselves and Parliament a big favour in sparing us from the agonies that will surely arise under this dotty clause.

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[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords, I wonder whether the noble Lord really means to say that we gave away our parliamentary sovereignty. Surely we have been paying Brussels billions a year to take it from us. We did not give it; we are paying them to take it.

[Lord Stoddart of Swindon]

I am afraid that that was by parliamentary decision. That is precisely what I am trying to say. We gave decision-making in relation to Europe to the European Union which has the last word. We talk about parliamentary democracy but when it comes to the push and we discuss the various amendments that have been made through treaty making, we are told that Parliament cannot make amendments to the treaty. All we can do as a Parliament is accept or not accept the treaty. We are not allowed to alter the treaties because they are made by Governments. The treaty they make is the treaty that matters and Parliament has no power at all to amend any provision of the treaties that have been passed since the European Communities Act 1972. That cannot be denied.

In relation to the transfer of power in each and every treaty, particularly in the Single European Act, the Maastricht treaty and eventually the Lisbon treaty, we have given powers to Europe without Parliament being able to say yea or nay. That is why we are in this position. It is because Parliament has not been able to make decisions about individual matters and the powers that have been transferred. That is why we have reached this decision. Ultimately, because a referendum was promised on the Lisbon treaty and it was not granted, the people are so outraged that they have demanded that something should be done. Let us make no mistake about it. This issue of sovereignty, this issue of who governs Britain, is not a party political matter. It transcends party politics. It is about who governs Britain. Unless that is realised and the people are considered and given the opportunity of speaking, the European Union will sink further into public disapproval than it already has.

I just want to add that we are told all the time that if we do this or that which does not suit the European elite we will be marginalised. Why on earth should a country of 60 million and the fourth—

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[Lord Triesman]

I suspect that the noble Lord has a slightly different experience of political life to mine, if that is the conclusion that he draws. My conclusion is that you can fight either side in a referendum and find that within a short period you did not like the result, whether things have changed or not, and the opportunity to fight it again will occur. It may very well be, for example, that some of those people who thought that the proposal to change the electoral system should not have been defeated as heavily as it fortunately was last Thursday will come back and conclude that they should have another go on another occasion. I shall not be wholly surprised if they decide that that is what they are going to do, even at the cost of having the experience repeated.

The point about reconnecting with the electorate is very critical. The electorate is dismayed with Parliament and parliamentarians on occasions, for a raft of reasons, and I shall not bore your Lordships by going through all those reasons in the recent past. As I said earlier, I do not think that a feeling of greater warmth towards parliamentarians will be achieved by parliamentarians giving up work in some of the areas that would be regarded as being the nitty gritty, not the big constitutional issues at all. I have looked through the list in Clause 6(5)—paragraphs (c), (d), (f), (g) and (h). I mention those because I am an inveterate campaigner on behalf of all sorts of causes, including those of the party I have the privilege to represent. I have thought hard about having any one of those paragraphs, let alone any combination of them, about how the campaign on them would be fought and what the doorstep would be like as you went around trying to do that kind of political work. It is not because of the ignorance or foolishness of the electorate; that is not the reason at all. Yet there is an expectation that many of those issues will have so much fine-grained detail within them that the electorate expects someone to have done a lot of this work, especially if they have elected those people to come here and do it. In our case, we are not elected but they nonetheless have a healthy respect for the work that this House can do because of the knowledge and expertise that we know is in it.

I suspect that, on most of those issues, you would get far greater traction on the doorstep by discussing the Eurovision Song Contest than you would ever get by a serious attempt to discuss some of these issues in detail. As most noble Lords who have campaigned in politics will know, I know that the kinds of discussions you have on the doorstep are real ones: about wider economic issues and a wide variety of issues. However, it is not typically the case that people want to get into a large number of sub-clauses under the arrangements of Article 312(2) of the European constitution. In fact, to my dismay, I have never had that raised with me anywhere. I look forward to the occasion when it might be.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

My Lords—

[Lord Tomlinson]

If you went to Rannoch Moor, they talk of nothing else.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Is the noble Lord not making the mistake commonly made by the political class in this country, which contains many distinguished Members of your Lordships’ House—

[Lord Tomlinson]

Including yourself.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Including myself? That is very generous. The mistake is in taking the line, “Really, the people won’t be interested in this. They shouldn’t be troubled with this as they won’t understand it”. Yet if you take almost any referendum on anything to do with the European public prosecutor's office, that will be of considerable interest to the British people. They do not like it and do not want it in any form whatever. The turnout on the most supremely boring of any imaginable subject—the recent AV referendum—was 43 per cent, which really surprised people. I have to put it to the noble Lord that the British people may not only be fed up with their political class but be beginning to have doubt in our system of representative parliamentary democracy. They may want a much greater say on matters in future, like the Swiss have, for example. What is wrong with that system to reconnect the people? That is the system to reconnect them and not, I am afraid, the approach of the noble Lord.

[Lord Triesman]

It is terribly tempting to go into experiences of Swiss referenda in the cantons. Sadly for the House, I have some experience of them. That is what tells me that I should not retell it here because it is not exactly what the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, thinks it might be. I hope that the House is not misunderstanding my point, which is not that people are unable to grasp complex ideas or are uninterested in them. It is that, in general, I believe they have a sentiment which suggests that the really critical things should be put before them but that there is also a responsibility on parliamentarians to do a high level of detailed work and to get some of that work done.

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[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, that makes the point that I wished to make about the character of the alliances, even in an area that is as sensitive for us as defence. I suspect that most people would conclude that our membership of those alliances has been absolutely fundamental to the security of our country and would not wish to see them shaken. Were there to be some absolutely massive change in the architecture of defence, it might be so substantive as to require a mechanism that is contained in an amendment and has been in past undertakings that we have made. However, it would be a fairly extraordinary event that looked as though it were even more significant than the arrangements that we have under the provisions of the NATO treaty.

[Lord Pearson of Rannoch]

Surely the noble Lord must agree that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said, these other organisations do not make our law. We can leave them tomorrow if we want, with far greater ease than we can leave the European Union. The EU makes our law, which is a difference. We would be in a very different position with an EU army from the one we are in with NATO.

[Lord Triesman]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made the point that the arrangements made under the NATO treaty, about its command structure and the obligations on members, have the effect, whether described as law or not, of determining how we behave in the defence of this country. It is impossible to argue that that is not substantively the case.

As I said earlier, this clause provides, more than anything else, the opportunity for continuous internal division and splits—not harmonisation or bringing people back to political activism and political understanding but rather the alternative. If the argument flows in the other direction—that we will never use it, or that the process of being bound to the mast is not really there and we will sail by without anybody noticing that it is happening—the Government should, out of courtesy to the House, simply make a statement that this is a form of dressing up a political proposal for people who feel disenfranchised in any respect by what has happened in the development of the European Union. They should say that that is what it is for; it is not at all for anything practical. That is really the status of this clause.