European Union Committee Report

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for his six-minute speech. I am conscious that we are past 7.30 pm and I will attempt to be shorter than is usual in a wind-up speech and I will promise to write to noble Lords if I do not cover everything. I should start with a number of regrets. I share the Committee’s regret that the House took a decision to reduce the resources available to the committee. I recognise that this is an issue for the whole House in terms of how many committees the Lords should have and what resources are available. That is part of the wider debate about the future of this Chamber which we tackled and failed to come to a conclusion on earlier this year.

The Government value the work of this committee enormously. I value the work of this committee enormously. I feel that I almost came in at the beginning of it. Michael Wheeler-Booth, the first Clerk of the committee, used to enjoy telling the story of how a young woman who was one of the few experts on the EU outside the Government at the time came to give evidence to one of the first sessions and he gave her a double gin and tonic to stiffen her nerves. That young woman, my wife, was also educating me about the European Union at the time.

When I was chair of one of the sub-committees I was conscious of the very high reputation that our reports have in Brussels. I met last Thursday with a Polish Minister who, in almost his first remark, said how glad he was to be in the House of Lords and how much the Polish Government valued the reports of this committee, so we are maintaining the standard and the reputation.

We are all conscious that the weight of work and the number of Commission proposals and communications —and therefore of Explanatory Memorandums— continues to grow. This committee struggles very well to strike the balance, to which the noble Lord, Lord Boswell referred, of detailed scrutiny and capturing wider issues at an early enough stage to influence the debate. A number of excellent examples of that have been mentioned today

Let me say a little about the Government’s current approach to the European Union and therefore to the role of this committee. Her Majesty’s Government are strongly committed to continued membership of the EU, as my noble friend Lady Warsi repeated in the Chamber today, and to active engagement in the development of European Union policies. This is not from any commitment to a European ideal, let alone, as some Eurosceptic conspiracists claim, to the creation of a European superstate: it is, clearly, that the coalition Government believe that continued membership remains in the UK’s national interest. That is our belief and that is how we have to defend the European Union. As the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, remarked, it matters not whether we are pro or against: we have to look at the hard evidence and see where Britain’s interests lie.

The noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, attacked the European project—the belief in an ever closer union through which power would progressively be transferred from national Governments to Brussels. That is now over, although there are still some within the Commission who cling to that ideal. Generational change has swept away some of the old disillusion with the European state and enthusiasm for Europe instead, but our interests remain engaged with our neighbours across a range of shared concerns.

Of course, the current crisis in the eurozone is forcing changes in the EU’s priorities and structures, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, remarked. The Foreign Secretary, in his speech in Berlin, and the Deputy Prime Minister, in his speech at Chatham House, in the past few weeks have both addressed this broader issue. As the Foreign Secretary said during his recent speech in Berlin, the EU will be stronger if it made more sense to people by acting only where there was clear justification for action at the European level, which is one of the themes that we all need to discuss. The catholic principle of subsidiarity, which to me is similar to the liberal principle, is that decisions should be taken as close to those they affect as possible; that the most democratic politics is local politics. I say in mild criticism that I am not ever sure that grass-roots sport is an appropriate area in which the European Union should interfere.

One should always ask the hard question of whether or not such matters are dealt with by the federal Governments in Australia, Canada and the United States, and if they are not, we should look carefully before we transfer competence, authority, cost and benefit to the far weaker and less democratically accepted institutions of the EU. That is what we are trying to do in the balance of competences exercise. I encourage this committee, as the whole Government wish to encourage it, to get as actively engaged in the balance of competences exercise as possible over the next two years. I speak with some passion on this because I have now been nominated as one of the three Ministers who will play a role in scrutinising this review within government and we are looking for engaged and expert partners on the outside. We will be briefing the committee throughout as fully as possible and I hope that it will respond to calls for evidence. This will help to inform an evidence-based debate within the UK, which is what we now need.

I hope that, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, has said, we are opening up again a wider, rational debate about whether Britain should stay in the EU. I stress “rational” debate, because when I saw the 10-page spread in the Daily Mail last week about common purpose and the conspiracy in the Leveson inquiry, I rapidly went on to Google to see what was behind it and found myself discovering the wider shores of Euroscepticism. One of the articles even told me that Francis Maude is not really a Conservative but is part of the socialist conspiracy to establish a European superstate. This is the world of alternative reality and irrational belief. Mainstream arguments are the ones that we have to address, with, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, the rational Eurosceptics—and there are many. That is what the balance of competences exercise in Britain, but engaging others, wishes to do. We already have some interest from Berlin in contributing to that exercise. Chancellor Merkel has said that less in some areas is a good thing for the European Union, and the leader of my party, the Deputy Prime Minister, when he was an MEP used to talk about the European Union doing less better, which is an entirely sensible approach.

The balance of competences review is very important to us in promoting a debate and therefore, I hope, to your Lordships as a committee. Similarly, the whole question of the JHA opt-in, the Protocol 36 debate, is one in which we hope that the committee will remain actively engaged. The Government have not reached a settled view on the final decision to opt in or opt out. Noble Lords will remember the exact words used in the Statement given to Parliament, which were that the Government’s “current thinking” was to opt out, which meant that a final decision had not yet been taken. It very much depends on active debate in detail on the various proposals made, consultation with other Governments, consideration of national interests and so on. In terms therefore of engagement with Parliament, we are committed to a vote in Parliament when the Division comes up and we wish therefore to maintain active discussion on all these matters—I hope perhaps on the Floor of the Chamber as well as in Grand Committee.

A number of noble Lords, in particular the noble Lord, Lord Roper, talked about co-operation with other national Parliaments. Again, Her Majesty's Government would encourage your Lordships to develop those links as far as we can. I am a member of a European affairs sub-committee of the Cabinet which is about to go to Berlin in early January for its second meeting there and its third meeting overall with our German counterparts. Germany is clearly one of the most important partners that we have to deal with in the world and the most important partner in the European Union. We hope that your committee will perhaps develop a similar bilateral relationship with your German counterpart but also pursue further the ways in which COSAC, COFADS and the various other conferences of your EU Committee chairs can help you to plug into other national debates.

A better awareness of the complexities of national history was what the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, talked about, which of course fits in with another issue that we were discussing last week: the 100th anniversary of World War I. I remind your Lordships of the 300th anniversary of the Hanoverian succession. I trust that the House will plug into all those matters. If I may rapidly put in a plug: I am interested in discovering what your fathers, grandfathers and great uncles did in the First World War. I have so far discovered in this House one whose grandfather fought for the Germans at Tannenberg, another whose father fought for the Austrians at Caporetto and a third whose father was rescued from a torpedoed troop ship by a Japanese destroyer. There must be a lot that will demonstrate to us the complexity of our relations with our European partners in our modern world.

I strongly sympathise with those who have said that the third task of this committee, which is outreach and engagement with wider public needs, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, needs to be thought about further. That perhaps means asking for more time in the Chamber and paying more attention to making sure that reports are fully covered in the media and get on to the “Today” programme, as I know you have succeeded in doing, rather more often.

The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, asked about the mysterious process by which Peers are selected and invited to join committees. That sounds like a subject worthy of in-depth sociological analysis, but perhaps if he were to ask his good Whips they would tell him a little better.

The noble Lord, Lord Jay, asked about representation at the EU peace prize. That has not yet been decided although some interesting and rather imaginative ideas are currently floating around Whitehall.

We need a wider debate in the United Kingdom and across the EU, as the EU now struggles to adapt to the current crisis in the eurozone, to deal with the challenge of further enlargement. We all recognise that enlargement is getting more and more difficult and, with each extra applicant country, there is a lot to contribute. Perhaps the committee would like to invite evidence from Norway and Switzerland. The chairman of the recent massive Norwegian study on the advantages or disadvantages of Norway’s current relationship with the EU—

[Baroness O’Cathain]

I am rather astonished to hear the Minister say that we should go and get evidence from Norway. We have; we do it all the time. There is a disconnect between people in government who are in ministries in positions of power and those who work on the sub-committees. There is a lot of discomfort, too, about the response, both in the Chamber and from the Government, to the very difficult reports on which we have spent hours and weeks collecting evidence. The Government’s response to reports is pathetic and the Minister ought to look at that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I stand corrected. I am not sure whether the justice and home affairs inquiry has yet taken evidence from the Irish Government, who have a clear stake in the question of the opt-out or the opt-in. It may be that the Irish Government—

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

Just to enlighten the noble Lord, as he has effectively asked a question, the call for evidence does address the Irish dimension. It will, of course, be a matter for the Irish Government to decide whether or not to offer evidence. I do not think that we should go around telling other Governments what they should do. It has been made clear to them that evidence would be extremely welcome.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord very much for that. I happen to know that there are those within the Irish Government who are enthusiastic about coming to give evidence, and I look forward to them accepting the invitation that has been made.

The wider issue we all face is the gap between globalisation—internationalisation—and publics who regret the extent to which power is slipping away from local control. Last summer I read an excellent book by Dani Rodrik, the Turkish economist who is now at Harvard, on the limits of globalisation in which he talks about the underlying contradiction between popular desire for stability, local control and understanding what has happened, and the driving forces of a global economy—the global social elite, immigration, et cetera—that appear to be taking power away from the local level and sweeping away autonomy, identity, sovereignty and democratic accountability. That is the tension that we all face. In the United States the American Tea Party takes it out on international law, international organisations and the federal Government. In Britain, by and large, our often disturbed and discontented public take it out on the European Union. Part of what we have to do is address that contradiction to see how far we can persuade our public that some of the regulation that now appears to them to be imposed from the European Union is unavoidable, desirable and necessary, and to persuade the European Union in return that it should not attempt to regulate everything in sight or expand its competences too far.