European Union Bill

Priti Patel Excerpts

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I wish to raise just a few points, but I first wish to welcome the Bill and the introduction of the referendum lock. I congratulate the Minister for Europe on the way in which he has addressed many of the concerns raised during the passage of the Bill, particularly as regards my amendments and new clauses. I thank him for his perseverance with me and my arguments. He has given some strong commitments on transparency in the EU, on improving cost-benefit analysis, and on having better impact assessments and more EU legislation held to account in this Parliament. He has also rightly given us warm words on ending the era of Departments gold-plating directives and legislation from Europe, as well as on the long overdue one in, one out rule for European regulations.

The Bill will safeguard against some European power grabs—which is of course more than important, long overdue and welcome—but, alas, not them all. As my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary said earlier, the Bill is not a panacea for all the EU’s ills, but it is clearly a step in the right direction. There are areas where the EU already exercises competence, as laid down in the Lisbon treaty, and where it can secure more powers from Britain, without the need for any safeguard in Parliament or by triggering the referendum lock in the Bill. The Bill does not deal with those matters, but I continue to urge the Government to do everything possible to prevent British interests from being undermined in that way. I would press the Government to work towards repatriating powers from Europe to this country, to protect our sovereignty and to renegotiate our financial contributions and the colossal sums of money that we hand over every year to the EU.

Finally, as we know, the Bill deals with the EU, but as we have seen with prisoner votes recently, this country’s ability to make its own laws is being undermined by another European body: the Council of Europe and its Strasbourg-based institutions, with their increasing desire to exert control over our country and to undermine Parliament and British democracy, and the regular issuing of diktats that the European Court of Human Rights considers but that escape parliamentary scrutiny. I therefore briefly urge the Minister and the Foreign Secretary to consider introducing a similar package of measures and reforms to improve the democratic accountability of those institutions and to ensure that British laws, as we have heard throughout the passage of the Bill, are made in Britain by the British, and that we effectively put the national interest first.