European Union Bill

Stephen Dorrell Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)]

I do not always agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), but when he describes this as a mouse of a Bill he is rather closer to the truth than the rhetoric of the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who slightly overstates the dangers that are attached to it.

I speak in support of the Bill. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), I am a pro-European, although, when I listen to the enthusiasts make the case for our membership of the European Union, I quite often conclude that the case is made in rather more apocalyptic terms than those that I would choose. We heard a good example of that from the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), who seemed to claim credit for the European Union in the collapse of the Soviet bloc and in the outbreak of democracy in Spain, Portugal and Greece. No doubt he would attribute to it the green revolution in Ukraine—

[Mr MacShane]

Orange.

[Mr Dorrell]

Orange. The right hon. Gentleman is quite right. We regard all those developments as steps in the right direction, but, although there is a chain of causality back to the European Union, it is a relatively modest one.

I shall try to make the case for the Bill, which should be supported, in considerably more modest—one might even say, more sceptical—terms, because people who claim for themselves the title of sceptic in the European debate often desert the basic principle of scepticism, which is to stand back from the argument and seek to assess it more coolly than sometimes is the case.

I have drawn attention to the argument from the hon. Member for Rhondda in support of the EU and our membership of it, but those who argue the case against it, and increasingly explicitly argue that we should leave it, tend to express the argument in terms of irreversible shifts of power and use the word “permanent”.

I again am a sceptic, however, because history teaches us that no human institution is permanent and there are no irreversible shifts of power. There is only a tide of human events, and the case for the European Union, which I am happy and, indeed, keen to make, is the pragmatic case whereby, in the world of 2010, the European Union, which is a dramatically different institution from that set up by the treaty of Rome in 1958, should be supported not because it is perfect, when it plainly is not, but because it serves a purpose. Imperfect as the EU is, it is part of the arrangements for the governance of Europe, and on balance it contributes more good than it inflicts harm. In human affairs, that seems to me justification enough for the institution to continue to exist.

It is often said of the European Union that there is no European demos. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary used to make that case when he argued for a more sceptical approach to the development of European institutions. It has become increasingly obvious that there is no such thing as a European demos, but the EU, as it has evolved since 1958 and partly because it now has so many more members, is increasingly obviously an intergovernmental organisation, which most people in the House and, indeed, among our constituents accept as a fact of life, not something that should be particularly resisted.

[Mr Jenkin]

Where is the evidence that the European Commission or the European Court of Justice accept that the EU is an increasingly intergovernmental organisation? I put it to my right hon. Friend that, actually, they insist on quite the reverse.

[Mr Dorrell]

They may have ambitions, and people within those organisations plainly do have ambitions, but that is exactly what the Bill seeks to address. It introduces not an irreversible, immovable, permanent safeguard that can never be overcome, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) said, a further inhibition on the development of competence within the European Union, which I would have thought my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) welcomed. Again, it is a modest step. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone dismissed it as a mouse of a Bill, but even if it is a mouse it can be a mouse on the right side of the scales, and that seems to be the case for it.

The Bill is right in principle and in practice. It is right in principle, because I do not agree with the arguments against referendums in principle when the question at stake is how the country is run. I agree with one of the points that my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) made, when he said that part of the problem in terms of public acceptance of the European case is the perception—indeed, the reality—that competence has passed to the EU without the scrutiny that our constituents want to see. That is a correct statement of historical fact, so, in order to rebalance the argument, it is a step in the right direction and a correct principle that any further accretion of power to the European institutions should be subject to a referendum block, the terms of which are set out in the Bill. The hon. Member for Ilford South argued that a Bill introduces the opportunity for judges to interpret it—well, yes; that is the nature of an Act of Parliament. If we pass an Act of Parliament, that creates a statute, which is interpreted in the courts. There are no Acts of Parliament of which that is not true.

Against the background of what has happened in the European argument over 40 years, the Bill introduces the correct principle that further accretion of competence to the European institutions should be subject to a referendum. That is right in principle. I also think that it is right in practice, for the important reason that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary set out in his speech and which was impliedly accepted in the speeches made by both the shadow Foreign Secretary and, ironically, my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham. What matters in the European argument now is the use of these competences and how this increasingly intergovernmental organisation reacts to the pressures of events.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham pressed the point that there are some fundamental threats to our economic development, tied up in particular in the current pressures on the euro. I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend about the dangers that arise as a result of those developments. The case that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary was making for the Bill is that it is a modest step to disarm the constitutional argument about how we are run, in order to focus the debate on where it properly needs to be—on how those competences are used by the European institutions and how that impacts on our way of life.

[Mr Clappison]

My right hon. Friend is making an eloquent speech. May I take him to the question of intergovernmentalism? Is that not precisely what we were told was happening at the time of the Maastricht treaty, with the construction of the pillars, which were supposed to reserve certain competences and areas of responsibility for the intergovernmental method? Since then, has not the European Union deliberately knocked down the pillars and brought those areas of intergovernmentalism into the main European treaty, which relates to the functioning of the European Union, and that in no way can be described as an intergovernmental body?

[Mr Dorrell]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. Like him, I would have much preferred it if the Lisbon treaty had not been introduced, so that the pillars of intergovernmentalism in the Maastricht treaty were protected. But that does not alter the fact that if we attend a Council of Ministers meeting in Europe to exercise the competences of the European Union, the process of discussion about how the power is used by the Council of Ministers, particularly in a world of 27 member states, has the feel of a negotiation between member states of an organisation. It is a negotiation between member states.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex is right to say that there is a strong power of initiative in the European institutions. Like him, I do not want any further competence to be passed to them. My case for the Bill is that it reduces the risk of that process happening again; it does not make it impossible, but it reduces the risk. I hope that it will make a modest step towards rebuilding public trust in the framework of the European argument and therefore refocus that argument on where it properly needs to be—on how those competences are used, rather than on yet more discussion about the further extension of “the European project”.