Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination and Governance

Peter Bone Excerpts

Wednesday 29th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker. Of course, what you say is absolutely true, but you would not have granted this debate unless 100 Members had stood up. My hon. Friend the Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) is absolutely right to say that a lot of Tory Back Benchers have been dying for anything other than the complete vacuum—

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

What rubbish!

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman said so last night to me in the gym. They are dying for anything other than the absolute vacuum that there has been in the business in this, the longest parliamentary Session since the Long Parliament.

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[Emma Reynolds]

Unlike the hon. Gentleman, the Opposition believe that the stability and preservation of the eurozone is in our country’s interests. If those countries took on their former currencies, there could be a disastrous impact on our economy. I do not agree with him.

David Cameron walked out of the negotiation at the—

[Mr Bone]

Who?

[Emma Reynolds]

I am sorry. I meant the Prime Minister. I do apologise.

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[Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)]

I will do my best, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I do not really disagree with some of the points that the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) has just made, but to achieve her aims she will have to find allies. The difficulty is that the Conservative party is perceived as profoundly hostile to European co-operation. It is allied with some very odd gentlemen in the European Parliament, as we know, and it sits with the Russians at the Council of Europe. We represent a democratic political organisation in this Parliament, and we cannot achieve co-operation at a supra-parliamentary level by just telling people what we want and expecting everybody else to agree. Therefore, there has to be a new approach to Europe.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) on securing this debate under Standing Order No. 24. It is absolutely outrageous that we do not have proper debates on Europe in Government time. Indeed, I am sorry that the Leader of the House is not here—I have made that point to his face; I am not saying anything behind his back. It is unfair to ask the Backbench Business Committee, which is generous on a number of issues.

[Mr Bone]

The right hon. Gentleman is making a fair point. The Backbench Business Committee is not given the time in advance to plan any of these debates, so he is absolutely right.

[Mr MacShane]

And it is not as if this place is crammed full of legislation, is it, Mr Deputy Speaker? I really wish that the Government would stop continually hiding behind the Backbench Business Committee’s existence to deny their allocation of time for what are important debates.

The hon. Member for Stone made the interesting observation that the EU institutions could not be used for just a group of EU member states, but of course that is nonsense. They are used if there are rows over Schengen, which does not include us, or if there are rows over fisheries policy, which on the whole does not involve Austria, Hungary or other land-locked nations. Also, there have always been groups or clusters of EU member states with particular concerns which the European institutions have to have some regard for.

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[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) and I agree with every word he said. I shall try to discuss some different issues in my speech.

Let me start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) on achieving a debate under Standing Order No. 24. I want to comment first on its parliamentary significance. This is only the second time in my parliamentary career that I can remember such a debate being granted, and the first was on the phone hacking scandal. This shows the importance that Mr Speaker gives to the matter. More than 100 Members rose in the Chamber when he agreed to the debate and they were not just from one side of the House, but from both, and they were not just from the Conservative and Labour parties, as all the Democratic Unionist party members were here. It was a very significant show that this House wanted to discuss its views in advance of the European summit and that Members wanted to get their message across to Ministers. I hope that when the Minister sums up, he will be in receiving rather than transmitting mode. That is why this debate is important— Ministers should know what the House is thinking before they go to Europe to debate the issue and, if necessary, cast any votes.

I want to return to the question of the procedure that has led to the mess we find ourselves in today.

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman is making a point that has previously been made in this debate in slightly different ways, which is that there should be more opportunities for this House to say to the Government what position they should take before they go into European negotiations. Does he agree that such debates should not only be reinstated but be on votable and amendable motions?

[Mr Bone]

The hon. Gentleman is psychic, because that was the very point I wanted to come on to. It is ridiculous that we are not having such debates and it is even more ridiculous to suggest that they should be scheduled by the Backbench Business Committee. Everyone knows that the Backbench Business Committee is supposed to get 35 days a year, but that has not happened in this double Session of Parliament. I am very pleased to see the Leader of the House pay close attention to the debate and it would help the House enormously if the Committee had the days marked in advance. If that were the case, perhaps the Backbench Business Committee could put on such debates, because we would at least know in advance that we had the days. We did not have a day before the summit on which we could have scheduled this debate. That is not the issue, however. This debate should not be put on by the Backbench Business Committee but by the Government, and it should be on an amendable motion rather than a “take note” motion. I agree entirely with that point.

Let me briefly mention the veto. The Prime Minister rightly vetoed the EU treaty, and no one can pretend that this is an EU treaty—it clearly is not, because we vetoed it. It is also clear that the Prime Minister and the Government believed that the EU institutions could not be used.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Bone]

I shall give way in a moment. As on any other occasion when the EU is defeated, the EU has ignored that and carried on as if the rules were not there.

[Mr Spellar]

I think that the hon. Gentleman might just have answered my question. He was stridently asserting that the Prime Minister had asserted his veto, and I wanted to know what he had vetoed and what effect it had had.

[Mr Bone]

I do not honestly believe that the right hon. Gentleman, who has sat all through this debate, could possibly not understand what the veto is about. The Prime Minister quite clearly vetoed the treaty so it could not be an EU treaty. That is what happened. That is why the British people were 100% behind the Prime Minister and why coalition Members—or at least the Conservative coalition Members—were wholly supportive of him. He had a better reception for that veto than for any other of the very good things he has done as Prime Minister.

The next issue is whether the treaty will work. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) is not in his place, but he made a very good point when he said that there were two ways of looking at this matter. One was that we could create this European political and economic union dominated by Germany and that the euro would work. I do not think there is any chance of that system working and it would actually result in the greatest political unrest in Europe since the second world war.

[Bob Stewart]

It looks to me very much as if we would have a centralised economy commanded by Germany. If there were any chance of it working, it would be brought down by the fact that the people of Europe—the people most affected by it—would reject it. There would be a total rebellion by the people of those countries.

[Mr Bone]

It is very appropriate that my hon. Friend in particular made that point. What we would see is extreme nationalism. We would have extreme nationalists saying, “This is the fourth reich,” and all that that would mean. I am talking not just about little political demonstrations on squares outside Parliaments; it would overturn democratically elected Governments. That is why the solution that the hon. Member for Rhondda suggested would not work.

The solution to this problem is to allow countries to leave the euro in an orderly way. Greece, Spain and Portugal at least would come out of it and would then be able to do what every other country has done in the past when it has had an economic problem—devalue its currency and set its own interest rates. There would then be some hope for growth in the future. The idea that we will permanently have regions of Europe that will always be depressed and have the most horrible austerity funded by German taxpayers is beyond belief. I have a feeling that the good and the great of Europe have a policy at the moment of hoping that something will turn up. It is like borrowing more and more on one’s credit card hoping that one’s Euro lottery ticket will come up. It will never come up. What they have to do is deal with the problem now. That will not be pain-free but it will result in a Europe that will begin to grow again. That would be not only in our interests but in the interests of other individual countries.

Probably the main point I want to address is whether we as a nation are being a good Samaritan. It seems to me that we are not, although we see the problem. We did not go into the euro because we always thought that we could not put different countries with different political structures into one economic area with one interest rate and one currency and expect it to work. We said that was wrong, and that has proved to be the case. What we are doing at the moment—this is where the good Samaritan point comes in—is walking by on the other side of the road. We can see what has happened and that something is seriously wrong—that someone is seriously sick—but are we prepared to risk being unpopular and say something about it? If we were a real friend and a real good Samaritan we would say, “You’ve got this wrong and the way to fix it is not to carry on but to stop, think of the problem and solve it by having an orderly reduction in euroland.” That is where we are letting down not only ourselves but other countries in Europe. I urge the Minister not to walk by on the other side of the road but to be a good Samaritan.

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[The Minister for Europe (Mr David Lidington)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. I am conscious that in the limited time available I am unlikely to be able to do justice to all the various and detailed questions that have been asked. As my hon. Friend said, I gave evidence on this subject to the European Scrutiny Committee for nearly two hours last Thursday. I am not sure whether the transcript is yet available on the Committee’s website, but if Members wish to explore these matters further, I refer them to the detailed answers that I attempted to give to my hon. Friend and other members of the Committee.

I take very seriously the comments made by a large number of hon. Members about the importance of scrutiny. I completely agree with those who have said that while the European Scrutiny Committee does an excellent job within its prescribed terms of reference, which are confined to looking at documents as they come from the EU institutions, there is a powerful case for what one might term more upstream engagement by Parliament in examining the strategic direction of European policy before it takes the form of specific items of European legislation. Some, at least, of the Chairs of the departmental Select Committees are interested in pursuing that further, and I very much hope that they will feel encouraged to do so.

In response to my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) and others who asked about having debates before European Councils, I can only repeat what has been said before from this Dispatch Box: it was an explicit part of Tony Wright’s report, which led to the creation of the Backbench Business Committee, that such debates should be among those for which responsibility was transferred from the Government to the Backbench Business Committee, to be dealt with in the time that was allocated to that Committee.

[Mr Bone]

rose—

[Mr Lidington]

I will not give way, but I take seriously the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) made about the Backbench Business Committee wanting to have predictable times at which it can schedule such debates. The Leader of the House was listening carefully when he made his remarks and, I am sure, will be attentive to that particular point. I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the fact that a review of the procedures suggested by the Wright Committee is due in the near future.

I did not agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone when he laid strictures on individual EU countries. Greece and Italy may do things differently from how politics is done here, but everything that has happened in those countries so far has been within the bounds of their constitutions. The legislation that the Governments of those countries take through has to be enacted by the democratically elected Parliaments.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stone was right to point to what I believe to be a genuine, underlying tension in European affairs at the moment between two important pressures. The first is the economic logic, which prescribes that if we had a single currency, interest rate and monetary policy, logically we would have to move towards greater fiscal integration. That, after all, is one reason why I and most members of my party opposed the United Kingdom entering the euro. We felt that that was the inherent logic of the project. Against that, there is the political challenge, which is whether, if there is to be greater fiscal integration among countries that share a single currency, there is a sufficient sense of common political identity, not just for the Governments of those countries, but for their voters, that they can accept major decisions in economic policy being taken at, and democratic accountability being transferred to, the European institutional level, rather than being based solely at national level.