Lord Wallace of Saltaire
Main Page: Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)European Union Bill
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, this has been a vigorous debate—sometimes passionate and often lengthy. On one or two occasions I remembered the time when the noble Lord, Lord Shaw, was just beginning to get to the heart of an argument as he entered the 25th minute of a speech in the Committee stage of an EU Bill. We look forward to an equally vigorous Committee with, I hope, slightly shorter speeches, as we examine the Bill in detail.
As we have discussed the Bill, I have on various occasions said to people, “Please understand that unless I can explain to the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hannay, what exactly this particular clause means, life may be difficult for us”. I hesitate to remind the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, that he has benefited over the years from a great many cigarettes that my wife has given him. I trust that this is no longer a trade that is necessary. At this time of night I need to leave many of the detailed issues until we reach Committee and will deal here with the underlying themes of the debate, which are the political contexts for the Bill, developments in the European Union, the constitutional implications of the Bill and the implications for the UK’s position within the EU.
I expected that my noble friend Lord Howell and I would be fired at from both sides and forced to stand back-to-back like the Gloucester regiment at the Battle of the Nile. I have been surprised to discover in this debate that the concentrated fire has only come from one side. From the other, it has been scattered and rather inaccurate. I wondered if the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, had forgotten he was involved in a battle against the EU Bill and gone off to shoot ducks—or, perhaps, EU pensioners. There were some wonderful flights of fancy. If I understood the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, correctly, there is a danger that Conservatives will fan the flames until they roast the Euro-sceptic penguins. Was that correct?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
You did. I am glad to see that the Labour Front Bench is beginning to enjoy the freedom of opposition. Some weeks ago, a former Labour Minister said to me, “William, opposition is so much more fun than being in government. You get to ask lots of questions and you do not have to give any answers”. We then went on to discuss how mischievous one can be in opposition. The noble Lord, Lord Sewel, agreed that mischief is great fun and that that is what he wants to be engaged in on the Bill, as he was on the AV Bill.
The Bill addresses a problem of public distrust that the coalition Government inherited from their predecessors. The noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, said that we are missing the real issues but popular consent is a real and central issue and cannot be ignored. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle talked about the real world. This Chamber is part of the real world but is not entirely the real world. I remember someone once saying to me, “William, you are much too much of an academic. You do not go to enough football matches”. I have to say that in the past few weeks my wife and I have been to rather too many dinners and other occasions in Yorkshire where the conversation from everyone from businessmen to teachers about what they assumed to be the state of the European Union was horrifying, and made the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, occasionally sound like a moderate.
Popular suspicion of the European Union has risen. In 1997, 35 per cent of the British public thought that British membership of the EU was a good thing; in 2009, that had dropped to 30 per cent. However, on the subject of polls, I should perhaps remind the noble Lords, Lord Pearson, Lord Stoddart and Lord Willoughby de Broke, that in the Daily Mail online poll—perhaps noble Lords have failed to vote so far—on whether there should be an in-out referendum, 71 per cent have said that they were against such a referendum. So there is either some very good lobbying going on or public opinion is not as strong as noble Lords thought.
Under the last Labour Government there was no concerted effort to carry the British public with the Government into a positive engagement with the European Union. I remember the St Malo Franco-British treaty on European defence co-operation. There was still then a degree of co-operation between the Liberal Democrats and the Government on foreign policy and defence, so I was involved in many of the meetings. But as soon as the Daily Mail labelled European defence co-operation as leading to a European army, the Prime Minister went silent.
The British case in Brussels depends, as we know, on steady recruitment of British officials, but the last Labour Government closed down the European fast stream and it is up to the coalition Government now to reopen it. The noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, asked whether the Liberal Democrats were prepared to fight for the European Union. Well, I would say yes—far more than the Labour Government ever did, and I regret that. It is one thing that I deeply regretted about that Government.
Of course, there is a longer history of governmental failure. When John Major became Prime Minister, he said that he wanted to take Britain to the heart of Europe, and he was driven back, and in many ways James Callaghan produced the greatest failure after the success of the 1975 referendum when he said that it was more important to let the wounds within the party heal than to build on that to argue a positive case for long-term European engagement.
The noble Lord, Lord Radice, said that they would like to hear more about what the EU has achieved over the past 20 to 30 years, and he seemed to think that this Government had failed to tell us about that. We would like to have heard that from the Labour Government, too, especially from Gordon Brown and his advisers, who included the young Ed Miliband.
Lord Radice
The noble Lord is being a bit unfair to me. I actually quoted one member of his Government, the Europe Minister, and said that I wanted people like the noble Lord and his colleague on the Front Bench to follow his very good example. That was the point that I was making.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
We shall continue to do so.
I am grateful for the depth of concern for the purity of the Liberal Democrats. It is most touching to hear so much from the Labour Benches. Indeed, it reminded me of the years in which I used to worry about the purity of the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Richard, to the Labour Party as it became Eurosceptic, and how on earth he could manage to stay in the Labour Party through all of its twists and turns on Europe. But we worry about each other.
Lord Richard
Is the noble Lord saying that I became a Eurosceptic? If he is, he knows nothing about me.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I know very well that the noble Lord did not, but I also understand that he made various compromises to stay in his own party.
Lord Tomlinson
Can I just invite the noble Lord, seven minutes into his speech, to get back to the EU Bill? This wander through memory lane might avoid him having to face up to his responsibilities to answer the debate, but the time has come when he ought to do that.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I am talking about the underlying issue that the Bill addresses, which is that of popular consent and distrust and how we rebuild popular consent.
This Bill is the product of the coalition agreement and a compromise between initially very different positions. It is intended to draw the line underneath popular accusations that power is slipping silently and conspiratorially from London to Brussels. To demonstrate to the public that there will be a transparent process of scrutiny, the competences will not creep away but the complex and opaque processes of EU decision-making —sufficiently complex that my wife and I used to make a good living out of trying to explain them—will have to engage with public acceptability and public persuasion.
The European policy of this Government is a product of coalition. It necessarily differs from what a Conservative -only Government would have pursued, under pressures from their own Back-Benchers, and from what a Liberal Democrat-only Government would have achieved. That is democratic politics and constructive compromise. A certain amount has been said about coalition. Indeed, I felt that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was suggesting that this coalition is somehow not entirely legitimate because it has not got an appropriate mandate. Because it is relevant to this, I would remind her again a little about where we were with the previous Government. That was an informal coalition between Brownites and Blairites in which, at one stage, according to Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s party kidnapped a Treasury official from Brussels to Luxembourg in order to try to discover what the Treasury was negotiating on financial concerns.
In the Lords, we now have a Labour alternative team of moderates proposing strong pro-European approaches. I note that it is a very different team to the one we had on AV, rather as one has an attacking and a defending team in American football. We look forward to detailed discussions on this but we start from where we are with the British public. We have their deep mistrust of the European Union. As we talk about the role of Parliament, we also need to remember that we have a mistrust of Parliament and the complex issue of parliamentary sovereignty. The Government, in their programme and policy, are moving to address the causes of that mistrust. The Bill sets out to address the anxieties of the British public.
Several noble Lords have mentioned the position of the press, which is part of the problem. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, that my understanding is that those sections of the press which are the most vigorous defenders of British sovereignty are indeed those which are most preferentially owned by people domiciled outside the United Kingdom. That is one of the many paradoxes of the situation we are now in. Yet the United Kingdom is no longer an exception. If one looks at public opinion in most other EU states, that has also become more sceptical, as have the press there. Part of that—here I address the noble Lord, Lord Liddle—is that the EU itself has changed a great deal. It has become a great deal more complicated and it is therefore much more difficult to explain, particularly to the younger generation, why the EU is a public good which we should expect our public to accept.
The Brussels bubble itself is one in which policy pursues an easy and seductive competence creep. I read a recent Policy Network document which was talking about how to revive social Europe. Indeed, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was its author.
Lord Sewel
Will the Minister give an assurance at this stage in his winding up that he will address the key issue, which is reconciling the concept of popular sovereignty with parliamentary sovereignty?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
I will move to that very briefly.
However, there is a problem of competence creep and that is part of what we need to address in improving the quality of parliamentary scrutiny on the full range of EU legislation. My noble friend Lady Falkner asked about work on the balance of competences, and the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, talked about the problem of competences and the working time directive. I can confirm that, in line with the coalition agreement, work is now being undertaken to look at the issue of competences and at the way in which EU legislation is implemented in the UK, with concerns about overimplementation, and, extending from that, to look at issues of subsidiarity. We take the issue of parliamentary scrutiny of justice and home affairs particularly seriously. As noble Lords will be aware, my noble friend Lord Howell made a Statement last month setting out the Government’s intention to introduce new and strengthened arrangements for parliamentary scrutiny.
On the constitutional implications of the Bill, I am more and more struck as I listen to this debate, just as I was when I listened to the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill debate, by the fuzzy nature both of the British constitution and of the understanding of it in this House. The Bill proposes a triple lock: resolutions in both Houses, Acts of Parliament and referendums. Much of the discussion that we have had today has been on one of these locks, the referendums, but I stress that parliamentary scrutiny and the improvement of it in both Houses is an important part of the Bill.
Lord Dykes
In view of the fact that three-quarters of the Members present in this long debate today spoke strongly and passionately against the Bill’s contents, particularly in Part 1, will my noble friend undertake that, if serious amendments are presented on the main clauses in Part 1, the Government will give them ample consideration and be sympathetic to changes?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, we shall move into an extensive Committee stage. Of course the Government will give full consideration to the various amendments that are tabled.
I was simply going to conclude by saying that much of the determination to improve the time and effort given to parliamentary scrutiny is indeed addressed to the other place more than to this House. The intention is to focus the attention of MPs on the flow of EU business and on UK involvement in that business.
I turn to referendums. Some are against them in principle; some think it likely that the Bill will lead to too many, while others fear that it will not lead to any. I say simply that we think it unlikely that many of the single issues that are listed in Clauses 4 and 6 and in Schedule 1 are likely to come up on their own. We recognise that the EU often moves through package deals and major treaty changes, and that at the next major treaty changes it will be appropriate to have a referendum on the entire package. However, we do not expect there to be any matters for treaty change in this Parliament. When major changes are negotiated and passed, the British Government, having agreed to those changes, will of course recommend a yes and will campaign for it. They will have to persuade, to win over public opinion and to carry the country with them to gain public trust. That is one of the underlying purposes of the Bill.
I move on to Clause 18, about which we have heard a large number of critical comments—
Lord Hannay of Chiswick
My Lords, I ask the Minister not to pursue the road that he is about to go down. I think that it is common ground on all sides of the House that no one wants to see a major reform of the European institutional arrangements in the near future. However, in order to get out of the mess that he has got into with this mass of trivia that can be subjected to individual referendums, he now tells us that we can all relax because we can have a big package that will deal with them as one. Please—please—do not.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
The noble Lord is well aware that we have had major and minor amendments of the treaty, but in each case and on each occasion they have covered a range of issues.
Clause 18 is a declaratory clause. There is nothing wrong with having a declaratory clause; Magna Carta was intended to be a declaration of existing rights of the members of the public in Britain who mattered in those days—the Peers—but it reasserted what they understood to be the existing situation.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Would the Minister respond to the point that, in so far as Clause 18 has any logic, it is a dog whistle to those who want to believe that we will be not at the heart of Europe but in the second tier of a Europe of enhanced co-operation, which could be a disaster for British foreign policy?
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I do not accept that but we will come back to it when we discuss the issue in detail. Several noble Lords, including the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, insisted that the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was simple. I think she said that it was a matter of basic civics. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, said that it was a clear and simple doctrine. I recommend that noble Lords read the debates of the European Scrutiny Committee of the House of Commons between the chair of the committee and a succession of law professors. These became increasingly a matter of anxiety over whether the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was one of absolute sovereignty, a legal doctrine or one in which the courts play a part. That is why we had the argument over the change in the exact phrasing of the Explanatory Notes.
The doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, as we have been in the process of discovering, is not entirely easy to understand. In its declaratory nature, Clause 18 restates an understanding. It draws a line for all to take. It does not introduce any new legislation. We will have to work from that and the courts will work from that. As various noble Lords have said, there are those from various sides who currently question the role of the courts. From my own perspective and that of my party, parliamentary sovereignty in a liberal democracy is part of the balance between the rule of law and popular democracy. That is another issue to which we will need to return on future occasions.
Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean
My Lords, I am now very confused about the noble Lord’s position on Clause 18. The noble Lord has said that it is declaratory. He went so far as to compare it to Magna Carta, which was stretching a point beyond most people’s imaginations. However, his main point was that it was declaratory. He has now gone on to say that it is something more than declaratory; it is something that needed an expression—an explanation—and that clarification is given in the Bill. Which is it? Is it declaratory—something that was clear to everybody already—or is it a further explanation of something that was so unclear that it needs an explanation and clarification, rather than a declaratory principle? The Minister has explained that that was the case in the conversations that took place in another place.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, noble Lords will understand that we do not have a written constitution in this country. We have a number of conventions and common understandings. I will not go further into the recent Policy Exchange pamphlet and a number of papers that attempt, in different ways, to reinterpret where we are. The debates in the Commons scrutiny committee and in the House of Commons have shown that there are a range of different views on the exact definition of parliamentary sovereignty. However, for our purposes in this respect, Clause 18 restates that no Parliament can bind its successor; that EU law is part of the law of the United Kingdom because Parliament has said that that is to be the case; and that, in principle, what one Parliament has introduced another Parliament can undo. That is what it restates; it is quite clear. We will return to that in Committee and no doubt have lengthy arguments.
A number of noble Lords talked about the implications for the UK’s position within the EU and have suggested that we will be pushed by the Bill towards a marginal position. The noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, kindly reminded us that other member states also have their own constitutional arrangements. The Germans in particular have detailed arrangements for parliamentary scrutiny that are sharply overseen by the Federal Constitutional Court. The Danes and the Irish have other arrangements. We can and will manage with this Bill to rebuild popular consent. It will, however, require active engagement by the Government.
I end by reminding noble Lords that the coalition Government are already actively engaged in pursuing a positive European agenda. We placed in the Library today the letter on an EU growth strategy that the Prime Minister, with another eight Heads of Government, has just sent round to the 27 Heads of Government. The letter puts forward a number of positive proposals. We are actively engaged on the climate change agenda—an area where the EU is moving forward faster than most other states or federations across the world. We signed another treaty with the French—this time a bilateral treaty. Britain and France between them account for nearly half the EU’s defence spending. We are opting in to a number of justice and home affairs matters. Today, the Government have announced that we are opting in to the human trafficking directive. We have therefore opted in to nine directives since last May. We are engaged actively on the neighbourhood policy.
I say in particular to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that we are therefore pursuing a positive European agenda, but we have to persuade our sceptical public. Previous Governments have failed to persuade our sceptical public, and the Bill is a step in rebuilding that trust.