Subsidiarity and Proportionality

Pat McFadden Excerpts

Monday 7th December 2015 General Committees

[The Chair]

We now have until 5.35 pm for questions to the Minister on his statement. I remind Members that questions should be brief. It is open to a Member, subject to my discretion, to ask related supplementary questions, but there is also an opportunity for these in the subsequent debate.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I would like to ask the Minister one or two questions about his statement. He referred to the letter that the Prime Minister sent, on 10 November, to the President of the European Council. It was a long letter, in which he said:

“I want to enhance the role of national parliaments, by proposing a new arrangement where groups of national parliaments, acting together, can stop unwanted legislative proposals. The precise threshold of national parliaments required will be a matter for the negotiation.”

Will the Minister say a little more about what the Government are pressing for on that question of national Parliaments? The Government talk about the development of a red card—I apologise, Mrs Main, for the multi-coloured cards we always refer to in these discussions. What exactly would the powers of that card be and how many Parliaments would have to come together to wield it? I ask the same question with regard to the green card, which is designed to be a proactive rather than a reactive measure: how many Parliaments would have to come together to wield it? Furthermore, is the development of the green card as much a priority for our renegotiation as that of the red one?

Finally, to complete the colours, I will ask about the use of the yellow card, which the hon. Member for North East Somerset said had been wielded very little. When it was wielded over the European public prosecutor’s office, the proposal was not substantially amended or withdrawn. What proposals do the Government have to strengthen the use of yellow cards, given that this is an unwieldy process and that when Parliaments come together in this way they ought not to be ignored?

[Mr Lidington]

I will try to respond as fully as I can within the constraints of time to the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East.

As the Prime Minister said in his letter, the level of a threshold to trigger a red card that would amount to a block on legislation would be a matter for the negotiation itself. I cannot pre-empt those detailed discussions, but we envisage that at a certain point what is currently a power for national Parliaments to require the Commission to review a particular initiative should become an outright bar to further progress.

As for the yellow card, to my mind a change that would be particularly welcome would be an extension of the timeframe allowed beyond the eight weeks permitted under current law. That would enable national Parliaments to consider proposals more closely and to co-ordinate with one another. I would also like to see such a change to the yellow card take into account the very creative proposal from the Dutch Parliament for what it termed a “late card”, so that in the event of a legislative measure changing significantly during its progress through the various institutions it would be possible for national Parliaments to come back and have another look at it, because at the moment that opportunity is forbidden to them regardless of how far-reaching any amendments might be.

Finally, the Government support the green card, but it is also an initiative that is actively being taken forward by national Parliaments at the moment. Yes, we support it, but if it can be achieved through Parliaments working together in COSAC, persuading the institutions to take that change on board, then we are happy simply to support the work that the Parliaments themselves have initiated.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr McFadden]

I will make a couple of brief points. It is true that the issue of subsidiarity, proportionality and the power of national Parliaments is important, and that view is shared throughout the Chamber. I have already read out what the Prime Minister said in his letter to the President of the Council two weeks ago, so I do not need to repeat it. In our manifesto, Labour stated:

“We will work to strengthen the influence of national parliaments over European legislation, by arguing for a ‘red-card mechanism’ for member states, providing greater parliamentary scrutiny.”

Today, in response to the Prime Minister’s letter, President Donald Tusk said:

“There is also a largely shared view on the importance of the role of national parliaments within the Union as well as strong emphasis on the principle of subsidiarity.”

There will be different views in the House as to whether that constant re-emphasis of the commitment to subsidiarity shows up in the actions of the Commission and the EU institutions, but the question is whether a new spirit has emerged.

The Commission certainly says that there is a new spirit. Some months ago we debated on the Floor of the House the Commission’s work programme, to which many Members referred. Earlier this year in London I attended a speech made by Frans Timmermans, the Vice-President of the Commission—the Minister mentioned him—and he posed the question, why does the ratchet always have to turn in one direction? Why can the Commission and the institutions not look at the existing corpus of legislation and ask whether it is still fit for purpose and necessary, or whether it has had unintended consequences after being in effect for some time? Those seem to be perfectly legitimate questions for the EU institutions, just as they would be for any national Parliament.

Looking around Europe, I wonder whether we are discussing the right exam question overall. At the moment, the EU is coping with huge crises of refugees and of security, but if we constantly view it as an organisation that is determined to interfere in our very way of life, we might not be asking the right question. Perhaps the question is how Europe works more closely together to deal with common challenges instead of always seeing working together as some kind of threat, as we tend to do in this country. The issue of national Parliaments is a legitimate one, but looking at the problems Europe is coping with today, I am not sure that it is the most urgent one facing the EU.

I will not go through again all the different powers of the different card mechanisms that have been outlined. Suffice to say, we will watch with interest how matters are developed in the negotiation that the Prime Minister has set out. The Minister has given us some useful pointers to the Government’s position on the various green, yellow and red card proposals, but it looks as if matters will not be concluded at the December Council. We will hope for more concrete results from the February Council early next year.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am very sympathetic with the point that the right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East makes that this might be the wrong issue to discuss, and that the real issue is how the nations of Europe can co-operate together. My answer is that they should do so through the nation state, because the nation state has validity and the European Commission does not. What we discover in today’s debate is that it is actually all about the validity of the European Commission, and that national Parliaments will be given a bauble here and a bauble there. They will be given a red card, a yellow card and a green card—they will have a three-card trick. They will have a whole deck of cards, but they will not be able to do anything with it because everything goes off to the European Commission, which may—if it is feeling benign—condescend to listen to the national Parliaments.

The Commission may take the Parliaments into account, and it may make proposals. How enormously generous. How thoughtful of somebody unelected, who was appointed against the will of the British Government, who has no mandate and who represents one of the smallest countries in the European Union. It is going to be up to Mr Juncker whether he listens to the German Parliament, the British Parliament or the French Parliament, all of which were elected by millions of people across Europe. One grand panjandrum in Brussels will decide whether he will take any notice of those cards at all.

The Government are great in their way—they push back a bit and say, “Oh, well, we’ve got a backbone, so therefore we’ll be tough and stand up to this. We’re going to put Britain first, the United Kingdom first, and make sure that we have our way.”

[Mr McFadden]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s strength of view, but he is in danger of forgetting the existence of the Council of Ministers, on which sit the elected representatives of all of us—the Prime Ministers and Presidents.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

The right hon. Gentleman is right. The Council of Ministers used to operate by unanimity, so our interests could be protected. At the heart of this is the question of who has the right to initiate legislation, because that is where the real democratic deficit is located; it is not the Council of Ministers but the unelected Commission that does that. That is a most extraordinary power. When one considers the power of this House, one sees that our right to initiate money Bills dates to 1407, and the power of this House grew because of that right of initiation and that right to control finances, which leads to control of the legislative programme.

The Commission’s right of initiation is central to its authority, and how sensitive was the Minister on its behalf when I said that this green card might interfere with that noble right of the Commission to initiate legislation—“No, that could not happen at all. It would upset the Commission too greatly, and the European Parliament might be a bit jealous.” The European Parliament is a body that has modest democratic legitimacy. A few people occasionally vote, but no one feels that it is their Parliament. People occasionally turn out to vote when they have to vote for something else. Even a police commissioner is more exciting to vote for than the European Parliament—well, not by very much, although it is a little more exciting. The democratic deficit is addressed not by the European Parliament, but by national Parliaments that represent individual citizens.

To return to the right hon. Gentleman’s excellent point about how Europe addresses such problems, it addresses such problems if it has validity, and it has validity if it is based on democracy. The European Union is facing problems at the moment because it has become so remote from that democracy. The President of Portugal is saying that a new Government cannot come in because that might upset the European Union, even when, in a coalition, the Portuguese Government have more support than any other nation. [Interruption.] We are saved by the bell.