EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer]

That is a fair point, but anyone who had been locked up in Romania or Croatia would not be pleased to hear that the situation will improve at some time in the future. The debate is among British politicians who are pragmatic; the arguments put forward by the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary were powerful, pragmatic arguments about how there would be immediate benefit, but that is not the argument going on in the rest of the European Union.

Like many of the changes in the European Union, acceptance of the European arrest warrant is seen as a way of furthering integration. We are not entering into arrangements for the European prosecutor’s role, but I can almost guarantee—as much as one can guarantee anything in future—that in four, five, six or seven years’ time we will have adopted the European arrest warrant, this country will be in Eurojust and it will not look right if we are not in the European prosecutor system. We may well get a decision from the European Court of Justice that says, in effect, that we have to be in the European prosecutor system.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, through the use of the European arrest warrant, British citizens could be extradited to face charges under the European public prosecutor’s office anyway if prosecuted for those charges?

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and that might be one of the arguments used to drag us into the process. The European Union is a thin-end-of-the-wedge organisation; once it has started, it will move on to further integration.

The right hon. Member for Ashford made a powerful case, as have many Members, for dealing with international crime and keeping terrorism out of the country, which we all want—there is nobody in the House who does not want to deal with international terrorism—but what we have with the European arrest warrant is Hobson’s choice: we must either take what is put before us or have a poorer system, in pragmatic terms, in the short term. If the Government are serious about renegotiating our position in Europe, they should not be giving up negotiating positions like this. We should be asking for a better position, rather than saying, “Yes, we’ll go along with that because there is nothing else available.”

The right hon. Member for Ashford also made the point that many of our crime-fighting agencies, such as the police and the security services, like the European arrest warrant. They do not always follow the rules themselves, but our security services have for some time preferred to have terrorists in London, rather than elsewhere, so that they can watch them. I think that is a bad policy, but I mention it because I do not think that we should always take at face value what is said by police forces and the security services.

I will finish with a powerful point made by the shadow Home Secretary in the previous debate that I think is worthy of an answer. She said that the fact that there have been miscarriages of justice under the European arrest warrant does not mean that we should get rid of it. We do not remove the police’s power of arrest just because they sometimes abuse it. That is absolutely right, but it does not mean that, when opting into something, we should not look for something better than what we are getting from the European arrest warrant.

--- Later in debate ---

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, that certainly was some night last week, wasn’t it? It was the great European arrest warrant debate that never was, and the night we apparently passed something as important as the European arrest warrant by proxy. In my 14 years as a Member of Parliament, there are certain things I thought I would say in the House of Commons, but I thought that asking Mr Speaker that “the Question, That the Question be not now put, be now put” was something belonging to a Monty Python sketch, not to a Hansard report of the House of Commons. I wondered how all that would appear to my constituents, but they loved it. They thought that it was surreal comedy at its finest, to the extent that one of them asked, “Is it like that every night, Pete? If it is, I would never have voted to leave this place.” Here we are: we are all back in our seats—like déjà vu—all over again, only this time we have an actual vote on the European arrest warrant to accompany the debate.

The Tory obsession with European exit has taken us to the very point of withdrawing from a process that ensures the effective transfer of foreign criminals to face justice. Listening to some Conservative Members—I have a great deal of fondness and respect for some of them—it seems to me that anything prefixed with the word “European” is viewed with maximum suspicion, and that anything involving European co-operation and EU nations working together is to be resisted at all costs. Let us be clear that that is what this is all about. This has absolutely nothing to do with the most effective and convenient way of ensuring that criminals are brought to justice, but everything to do with keeping Europe out of any role in the institutional affairs of the United Kingdom.

[Nick de Bois]

May I ask the hon. Gentleman to look through the other end of the telescope? Is not his thirst and love for the EU encouraging him to put the expediency of a process over justice for innocents?

[Pete Wishart]

I want to come on to that point, and I will mention a particular case about the use of the European arrest warrant that concerns me.

What are the Government doing about this growing Euroscepticism? They are in and out of the home affairs chapter as though they were doing the hokey cokey at the UKIP Christmas party—first we are in, then we are out, then we shake it all about like a “kipper” in a Kent by-election. This may or may not be a really good day for the Government to have a debate about the European arrest warrant. We have the Rochester and Strood by-election soon, and, as it looks like the Tories will be overwhelmingly defeated, the rebellion this evening will be minimised. However, this debate will also suggest to Farage, the rest of UKIP and the Euro-exiters that the Government are still in thrall to the European Union.

The Government are doing the right thing tonight in not opposing the motion, and I support them, but I encourage them to take on the “kippers” a bit more than they do, rather than pandering to them. See what pandering to UKIP has done: the Government’s opinion rating has gone down faster than a UKIP comment at an equalities convention. Now this monstrous race to the bottom on EU exit has been joined by the Labour party. It is getting stuck in, too, but all it needs to do is have a look at what has happened to the Conservative party. Do not pander to UKIP; take it on. It is the only way to do it. Our stock is rising in Scotland because we are prepared to take on the anti-European agenda and this nonsense about immigration. Is it not time that the Conservative Government and the Labour party started to take on UKIP rather than pandering to its members?