Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Pete Wishart
The hon. Gentleman is becoming awfully exercised about the Liberal Democrats, but the party about which he should be most concerned is UKIP, because it will probably trounce the Conservatives in the European elections. What will the Conservatives do in that event?
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We do not want to speculate on what will happen in the European elections. We do not want to speculate on whether they will be won by the Liberals or by UKIP. I think that we want to hear about the point of the debate.
Mark Reckless
The debate is about the opt-out, Mr Deputy Speaker, and other Members have spoken at length about what we might opt back into. I merely suggest to the House that, having opted out, we should not opt back into anything. A number of arguments support that view, but I believe that the most important argument is that anything that we opt back into will be judiciable by the European Court of Justice, and will be subject to the decisions and the enforcement of the European Commission. It is for that reason that the Home Affairs Committee concluded unanimously:
“If the Government proceeds with the opt-in as proposed, we note that it will not result in any repatriation of powers. Indeed, the increased jurisdiction of the ECJ may result in a net flow of powers in the opposite direction.”
We in the Conservative party, at least, have set our face against that, because we believe in bringing powers back from the European Union and, ultimately, putting the choice to the British people in a referendum. It would be entirely inconsistent with that if, having exercised this opt-out, we sought to push through opt-ins as a result of which the European Court of Justice and the European Commission took charge of areas that had previously been intergovernmental.
In 1990, our party negotiated the pillar structure of the European Union, but the Lisbon treaty puts an end to those pillars, becoming the “tree” that has stemmed from the earlier Dutch draft. We said that we would change Europe, and that there would be subsidiarity and intergovernmental pillars, but that will end if these opt-ins take place, and the European institutions and integrationists will have won. We have already voted to exercise the mass opt-out. We should leave things as they are, and then let the British people decide.
2014 JHA Opt-out Decision
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle(11 years, 4 months ago)
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
I am grateful to be able to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland). I do not know whether I agree with much of what he concludes on this issue, but he has spoken at short notice so I clear him of the charge of tedious repetition.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I assure the hon. Gentleman that the hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland) was in the Chamber at the beginning of the debate and his name was on the list.
Mark Reckless
So his remarks were also very well prepared, for which I give him credit.
Earlier, the Home Secretary responded to me on the issue of whether the opt-ins under the justice and home affairs provisions—if indeed we have opt-ins now—would trigger a referendum. She shared her view that they would not, but she did not give reasons and I do not believe she spoke to the specifics of the point. The European Union Act 2011 was ably taken through the House by the Minister for Europe, whom I am delighted to see in his place—he may be able to correct or assist me, or perhaps share some of the Government’s legal insight, which has eluded me to date on this issue. Section 4(1) deals with triggers for a referendum, and paragraph (i) refers to
“the conferring on an EU institution or body of power to impose a requirement or obligation on the United Kingdom”.
An even clearer trigger is section 4(1)(j), which refers to
“the conferring on an EU institution or body of new or extended power to impose sanctions on the United Kingdom”.
It strikes me that with those opt-ins, the Commission would have the right to enforcement action, and the European Court of Justice potentially to deliver fines.
Finance Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle(13 years, 4 months ago)
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
On that issue, there is clearly a very large deficit, which we inherited from the hon. Gentleman’s Government. On funding for this proposal, we have seen a 74% increase in our net contribution to the EU, which many Government Members would not like to see paid. The Financial Secretary to the Treasury has made very substantial savings by keeping us out of the Greek bail-out—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I do not think that we will be tempted down that route. We will stick to insurance.
Eurozone Financial Assistance
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle
Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend recall that Madame Lagarde herself, the prospective head of the International Monetary Fund, said on 17 December last year on that very point:
“We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the eurozone”?
She was being very clear and telling the truth.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Before the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) responds, may I warn him that he only has three minutes to go?
Mark Reckless
My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) is quite right.I hear that that lady is a good friend of the Chancellor, but I do not believe that we should put the debtors in charge of the bank. The IMF money, too, or 5% or so of it, is our constituents’ and taxpayers’ money. We should have an emerging market candidate to run the fund, and we should not allow the eurozone to continue to perpetuate a French-led IMF that nods through bail-outs with no restructuring and no devaluation. The markets know, and all of us know in our hearts, that bail-outs will not work.
The eurozone says that there will be a “soft restructuring”. In other words, when Greece, Portugal, Ireland or—who knows?—Spain cannot pay back what it has promised, the eurozone will say, “Oh, don’t worry about it, we’ll just roll it over.” In the City, they call that an extend-and-pretend policy. Such a policy was pursued in Japan for the whole of the 1990s, which then lost two decades of growth instead of dealing with the banks and recognising its insolvency. The European Central Bank should avoid that. Unless and until the ECB deals with that problem and understands that the assets that it has taken supposedly to back the loans are worth far short of what it currently assumes, the banks will not lend, because they do not know to whom it is safe to lend. The ECB should write those assets down and have that reckoning. The extend-and-pretend policy—the patching up and bailing out, and the throwing of good money after bad—is destined to fail.
Why are we supporting a currency that we very wisely did not join, after warning exactly what would happen? I ask Members of this House to stand up for their constituents. We should require—yes, require—the Treasury to vote against the use of the bail-out mechanism. If the EU does not agree to that, we should require the Treasury to use our veto over the permanent bail-out mechanism until we are extracted and removed from all liability. We should never have been liable for that mechanism. We know that it is unlawful and that it is not for our currency.
It is right that we stand up for our taxpayers and our constituents, who look to us as Members of this House to do so. They do not look to us to seek permission from those on the Treasury Bench, or to urge them to do something rather than require them to do something. Surely as Members of the House we are more than that. Surely our country is more than a star on somebody else’s flag. I urge all hon. Members to vote no to the Government-sponsored amendment.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Amendment 151, in clause 28, page 21, line 9, leave out ‘5 or’.
Amendment 152, page 112, line 15, leave out Schedule 5.
Mark Reckless
New clause 6 deals with the police and crime panel and, specifically, the powers that it may or may not have in respect of assessing and setting the precept. Ever since I first considered the issue of elected commissioners and their proper role, I have found the issue of budget setting particularly knotty and difficult. As a strong proponent of elected commissioners, I see a good argument for giving them the power to set the precept and the budget, and just letting them get on with that. I can see the argument that they have the mandate, so surely they should make the decision.
However, I have at least a slight concern about giving such significant budget-setting power over a whole electoral term to one individual. That is why I am attracted to some of the ideas we have heard, including from colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, about the police and crime panel. There has been a very positive, highest common factor rather than a lowest common denominator approach, and the Bill has been improved through the interchange of ideas between Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members.
We have heard about the capping arrangements of the Labour party in recent years. There was capping under previous Conservative Governments but it seemed to become almost standard in Labour’s 13 years in government for Ministers to set a number—it was never quite clear how they determined that number—over which anything, regardless of the circumstances and however low the council tax base, was capped by central Government. That approach seems wrong to me and we have a proposal to deal with it in relation to local government: instead of having a Secretary of State—I assume for Communities and Local Government—capping a council above a certain level, that Secretary of State would have reserve powers to require a local referendum in an area where he considered an increase to be excessive. That strikes me as a reasonably sensible balance, and certainly an improvement on the status quo and the current capping power.
Loans to Ireland Bill
Debate between Mark Reckless and Lindsay Hoyle(13 years, 11 months ago)
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Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
The package is described as a bail-out of Ireland, but it is important that we recognise that Ireland has not asked for the bail-out and that it is not the package that the Irish would have wished. Ireland and the IMF proposed to write down bank senior debt—that is, default on an element of that debt—because they recognised that it would be very difficult, although not impossible, for Ireland to pay back its vast amount of debt. It is not clear to me that adding another €67.5 billion to those debts and subordinating the previous debts to that will help Ireland out of this crisis.
Let us consider why Ireland was pushed into the crisis. The European Central Bank threatened to withdraw finance for the Irish banks. The ECB had extended €130 billion at a 1% interest rate in temporary liquidity support to the Irish banking sector—a courageous and rather risky thing for it to have done. It would prefer that credit to be refinanced on a longer term basis and at a higher interest rate. If the eurozone wishes to do that, that is a matter for it to agree.
What is not clear is what interest we, or indeed Ireland, have in refinancing that eurozone debt into an EU-wide debt. We must consider the funding costs. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor has the proud achievement, for which he deserves significant credit, of reducing the long-term costs of borrowing in the UK. Unfortunately, that has gone into reverse over the last three weeks or so. When he came in, we did not give money to the Greek bail-out. We had a rescue package with €440 billion loans and only €60 billion of the dubious EU facility. Unfortunately, that is now being confused.
My hon. Friend the Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) recognised back in May that this was the beginning of a European debt union, but it was only when I saw how the package was denominated that I began to share that view. Unfortunately, it is rebounding on our credit. The EU puts in €22.5 billion, the eurozone puts in €17 billion and we put in €3.5 billion or so. Rather than this appearing to be a bilateral arrangement that we have properly agreed, because it is in the interests of these islands, and that has been negotiated between the UK and the Republic, we give the markets the impression that we are being sucked into a wider EU package and those markets worry that we will do the same for Portugal or Spain. We have seen the back-up in interest rates in the past few weeks, but I ask the Treasury Front-Bench team to make it as clear as they can that this is a one-off involving Ireland. By doing that, we could at least potentially protect our credit from some of the assumptions that the market has built up in the past few weeks.
On Europe, I commissioned an opinion poll last month of 1,000 representative people in the Republic, and more than a third of that sample said that they would like to leave the euro and return to sterling. The Chancellor says that “I told you so” is not a policy and of course he is right, but he needs to recognise that there is a policy implication that we should not make the same mistake again. I shared with my right hon. Friends the Chancellor and the Foreign Secretary, back in 1998, analysis of what had been happening in Ireland—how bank lending was out of control and how there was going to be a most extraordinary boom and bust that would serve as a vivid lesson to this country. I also shared that analysis with Bertie Ahern, prior to his becoming Taoiseach. Like the Chancellor, he said he understood the analysis and that we might be right, but he wanted to join the euro for political reasons. We saw the impact of that decision in Donegal three weeks ago, where the successor seat of my grandfather, who was the Fianna Fail Member for that area, has now been taken by Sinn Fein.
This is Ireland’s decision, but I hope, in its interests and ours, that we will work together much more closely than we have been. There have been improvements in relations since the Prime Minister’s comments about the Bloody Sunday inquiry and, given what the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) has said and given his very positive and supportive attitude, I believe we should work with Ireland on a bilateral basis to try to put things right and get a long-term sustainable solution for it and us that is better than the Carolingian settlement that is being imposed by the eurozone and the European Union on an Ireland that deserves better.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
The hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) has three minutes, as we must finish at 4 o’clock.