EU: Prime Minister’s Speech

Lord Taverne Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Taverne]

My Lords, I want to address a question to my noble friends in the Conservative Party, and it goes to the root of the whole approach to Europe.

The Conservative Party has traditionally been the party of law and order. It always seemed to me that the Conservative Party was at its best when its approach was pragmatic and not ideological. However, I find it very hard to reconcile that view with the attitude of the Prime Minister and the party to the block opt-out from the justice and home affairs jurisdiction of the European Union.

I hope that my Conservative friends will look at the evidence, because a lot of the evidence given to the Hannay committee has already been published. What emerges from it is that the evidence overwhelmingly rejects the idea of the opt-out. As far as policing is concerned, this is sheer common sense. More and more crime—ordinary crime and terrorism threats—is cross-border, and the answer to that is not national police reactions but cross-border policing. That is very much common sense. Think what we would lose.

The European arrest warrant has resulted in an enormous amount of time-saving and improvement in getting our criminals back from abroad, and criminals in this country back to their own countries. It has had its flaws, but most of them have been cured, as the Scott Baker report showed. We can improve it with further amendments if we are part of it.

Dominic Raab, MP, has said that a bilateral arrangement would be just as good as cross-border policing. Do my noble friends in the Conservative Party really believe that? As regards the European arrest warrant, will we have 26 separate extradition treaties with our colleagues? The whole idea is absurd. What would we lose? We would lose our position in Europol and all the successes that cross-border co-operation has so far achieved.

I therefore hope that they will look at the evidence and will approach the matter pragmatically. It seems to me that the evidence is—and it makes common sense—that the mass opt-out and bilateral approach will be a severe handicap in our fight against crime and terrorism. Is the Conservative Party truly ready to prejudice these aims of fighting against crime and terrorism for the sake of an ideological, visceral dislike of Brussels?