National Parliaments (EUC Report)

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Monday 15th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boswell of Aynho (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, this is not just a debate about a Select Committee report, or about internal parliamentary processes. It is also by extension a debate about the future of the European Union and the United Kingdom’s relationship with it, so I am delighted that so many noble Lords are here to debate this vital issue.

Today, Europe faces huge, almost existential problems, and the economic crisis has thrown the deficiencies of the Treaty of Lisbon into stark relief. Growing disenchantment and disillusionment with the EU is evident in the continuing fall in participation in elections to the European Parliament, the rise in extremist parties across Europe, and the lack of trust between elected officials and their electorate. The question of democratic legitimacy now needs serious public debate so that the people of Europe can contribute to finding an answer. This is not just a crisis of public confidence in the Union, it is also a crisis of public confidence in politics more generally. Not every vote for UKIP is in my view necessarily a vote to leave the European Union—often it may simply be a protest vote, a vote for “none of the above”. However, we will never succeed in overcoming the Europe-wide democratic deficit unless we also look at and address our own shortcomings. It is not “their” problem over in Brussels, it is also our problem here in Westminster.

Giving national parliaments a more positive and active role in European affairs is not a panacea, but it is a key component in addressing the European democratic deficit. That view is widely shared across Europe, and I pay particular tribute here to the work of our colleagues in the Dutch Tweede Kamer and the Danish Folketinget, which is highly consonant with our report. The European Commission and the United Kingdom Government have also given their support. The Commission has expressed enthusiasm for better engagement with national parliaments as a natural extension of the existing political dialogue. The new Commission First Vice-President, Frans Timmermans, is particularly supportive, and his enhanced role within the new Commission overseeing relations with national parliaments and the issues of subsidiarity and proportionality, is very much to be welcomed.

The problem is in moving beyond easy generalities and warm words. Underlying the general agreement that national parliaments should have a greater role, there are many different political perspectives. Some in the European Commission may see strengthening national parliaments as a way to increase democratic control of the actions of national Governments in the Council of Ministers. In statements by Her Majesty’s Government, their emphasis on national parliaments sometimes acquires a tinge of slightly Eurosceptic flavour, while at the other end of the spectrum, some in the European Parliament fear that proposals to increase the role of national parliaments may simply undermine their own authority. There are also significant practical organisational problems in mobilising national parliaments to action. Against that backdrop, perhaps it is not surprising that whenever it comes to taking specific and concrete action, everything suddenly seems too difficult.

We on the European Union Committee of your Lordships’ House are acutely aware of these problems as we battle to make progress on several fronts at once. On the domestic front, we confront growing deficiencies in Her Majesty’s Government’s handling of parliamentary scrutiny. There is no point in the Government professing to support an enhanced role for national parliaments if they have neither the will nor the capacity to submit their own actions in Europe to proper parliamentary scrutiny.

Last week, the committee took evidence from the Minister for Europe, David Lidington, and I listed a series of failures by various departments over recent months. I will not repeat myself now, but instead and I hope for the last time, I will touch briefly on parliamentary scrutiny of the United Kingdom’s justice and home affairs opt-out. I described this sorry saga at length during our last debate on 17 November. All that I will add tonight is that the Home Office, having consistently failed to abide by its obligations under the scrutiny process, capped it off last week by refusing our request for an oral Statement explaining the scrutiny overrides that took place on 1 December, and then failing even to publish a proper Written Statement. Instead, the department tried to sneak its explanation in under the radar as an annexe to a Statement on the unrelated Justice and Home Affairs Council on 4 December.

I trust that the Minister, as a former chairman of our Home Affairs Sub-Committee, will understand my concern over those events. Will he confirm in his reply that the first essential step towards strengthening the United Kingdom Parliament’s role in the EU is for the Government to do everything in their power to support effective domestic parliamentary scrutiny of European Union matters? I hope also that he will set out for the House some practical steps that the Cabinet Office, which he represents in this House, is taking to address its own shortcomings, and which have been the subject of further correspondence. Put simply, the Government must get their own house in order first of all.

However, this is not just a government problem. The onus is also on us as a national legislature to make a more effective contribution to developments in Europe. We need to elevate the debate on the European Union, speaking with equal honesty about its benefits and its shortcomings. If we fail to do that, the risks are clear. I suspect that the leaders of the two main parties in this country may now be regretting their refusal to engage in a proper debate about United Kingdom membership of the European Union in the run-up to the European parliamentary elections earlier this year, as by so doing they effectively gifted control of the political agenda to UKIP. I might mention at this point that Her Majesty’s Government still refuse to acknowledge in print the democratic mandate of the European Parliament, even though meetings with individual Ministers suggest that the views of the Government are more nuanced than they are willing to admit publicly.

So much for the political background to tonight’s debate. For the remainder of my time, I shall touch on the efforts we are making in the European Union Committee to make progress in a few specific, targeted areas. The first of these is the reasoned opinion procedure. This is the only formal role in scrutinising European legislation given to national parliaments by the treaties, and as such it has an important symbolic value, but it can work only if there is good will on all sides, particularly within the European Commission. Hitherto, frankly, that good will has been lacking, and the Commission’s recent hasty, legalistic dismissal of the yellow card issued in respect of the proposed European Public Prosecutor’s Office was frankly and simply unacceptable.

We suggest in our report various ways in which the reasoned opinion procedure could be improved, without, we believe, the need for treaty change. These could include, for example, extending the deadline or reducing the threshold necessary for a yellow card to be issued. The essential point is that a yellow card should have a real impact, and be seen to have that impact. If a quarter of national parliaments feel strongly enough about a proposal to lodge reasoned opinions, then the Commission must sit up and take notice. It must undertake, if not formally to withdraw the proposal, then at least to amend it substantially. More generally, the Commission needs to be more open to dialogue with national parliaments. It must be prepared to argue its case and, on occasion, change its mind. The new Commission has publicly undertaken to be more receptive to reasoned opinions, which is good news, but the real test, in practice, has yet to come.

A bigger challenge for national parliaments is to engage upstream, in the early stages of policy development, when there is the greatest potential to exercise influence. That is especially difficult in our system of parliamentary scrutiny as it is predicated on reviewing legislative proposals only after they have been formally adopted by the Commission. In effect, we are stuck in reverse, when what we really want is a forward gear.

The so-called green card, described in paragraphs 55 to 59 of our report, could offer us that forward gear. The idea is straightforward: a group of national parliaments should be able to come together to propose legislation to the Commission, and the Commission should undertake to consider and respond to such proposals.

I emphasise that a green card procedure would not necessarily mean more legislation, or yet more Euro-initiatives. It could mean the amendment or repeal of existing legislation. Indeed, my sense is that the current Commission would be much more likely to respond positively to proposals from national parliaments which supported, for example, its own REFIT programme to simplify European law and reduce regulatory burdens. That is also very much our Committee’s approach. The response to the green card idea has so far been positive. At the COSAC conference—that is, the conference of chairs of committees such as the one I represent in your Lordships’ House—in Rome earlier this month, there was widespread support for the concept.

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

If there was repeal of legislation, could that include the repeal of something in the treaty?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Spicer]

The Minister is making an extremely interesting point about the gap between the demos and the economics, as he put it. Is not the reason for that gap, which will always exist, that the Parliament will permanently be constrained by two things? The first is the European Court and the second is the treaty, which was the subject of a little discussion between me and the noble Lord, Lord Boswell.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Spicer, I was making a slightly different point, which is about the global market and global manufacturing. The fact that, for example, when the French sell an Airbus a third of the value added to that Airbus comes from British manufacturers, and that every time the Germans sell a Mercedes, it contains a large number of British components, means that markets have gone beyond the nation state but legitimacy has not. That is a fundamental, structural problem of the world in which we now live. I will not touch on the migration dimensions of that, but the security dimensions are also extremely difficult. That leaves us with a set of dilemmas which are not solvable and which we have to cope with.

A number of noble Lords made the point about the resources and time required. Resources are needed for scrutiny, as the report suggests. If we are setting up for national parliaments to be more closely in touch with each other, that requires a good deal of travel and time. One noble Lord remarked—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—that, in some ways, a European Parliament that was drawn directly from national parliaments was more appropriate. However, it did not work before 1979, partly because national parliamentarians are elected to serve constituents in their national parliament and the more time we expect them to spend elsewhere, the less time they will have to do their primary job. So there is a set of real problems there.

I noticed, as a member of the Government talking to newly elected MPs—there was a very large turnover in the British Parliament last time—that a great many newly elected MPs coming from outside politics had very little idea of the complexities of international negotiations in which we are engaged with other European parliaments, or of the contacts one needs to have with members of other national parliaments or, indeed, members of the same political family as yours in other Governments. They have learnt, but it takes time. After all, more and more of our parliamentary candidates, I saw in one newspaper at the weekend, are now being drawn from people who have established roots within their local constituency. They are not elected to Parliament because of their international experience and they are unlikely to get re-elected if they spend too much time travelling around Europe and beyond. That is one of the obstacles with which we have to deal.

The new Commission has signalled that it is open to a much more positive dialogue with national Governments. New President Juncker has stated this on a number of occasions; Vice-President Timmermans, as has been remarked, has made it very clear that this is one of his priorities. As a Minister in the Dutch Government beforehand, he was already heavily committed. Closer co-operation among national parliaments was mentioned by many noble Lords. The offices which we now have in Brussels are to be strengthened. It is a very good way of using Brussels as a means of communication that enables you to find out earlier what is going on, examine proposals at an earlier stage and talk among national parliaments about how one might use yellow cards—lowering the threshold. The green card question is a very interesting one which the Government will wish to consider. We are not yet committed. We note the proposal that the coverage of these mechanisms should be extended to cover proportionality as well.

The noble Lord, Lord Bowness, talked about first reading deals. One of the problems that the Government have in responding to that is the sheer complexity of a multilateral negotiating process, with co-decision with the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council of Ministers coming in. The points at which national parliaments insert themselves into that process and how national parliaments keep up with that process is, again, part of the problem with which we all have to deal. Over the past year, as I have struggled with the EU balance of competencies exercise—a fascinating exercise—I have changed my mind on whether it would be useful for this Chamber also to examine other international organisations through which the British Government work. Time and time again in the EU balance of competencies exercise we have had evidence which has said, “We work through the EU on this, and we also work with OECD or the World Health Organization”. Indeed, the EU operates in some respects as a regional member of the World Health Organization in specific areas. Explaining that to the national public, as far as we can, and examining how effective those other international organisations are—most of them are a great deal less effective than the European Union—is perhaps also something which this Government might be able to achieve.

The noble Lord, Lord Judd, remarked that perhaps it would be easier if we explicitly had a confederal Europe rather than a federal Europe. I thought the chapter in this report on economic governance was particularly interesting and difficult because the contradictions of where we have got to with international markets come in because you need some power to decide as soon as you have an integrated single market, let alone a common currency, and when you face a global economic crisis, the legitimacy to decide above the level of the nation state is not there. So we are again stuck with the problem that it is not possible to reconcile the principles of democratic accountability and legitimacy and the need to take these decisions among a range of different actors.