European Union Bill

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 7th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Tim Farron]

I do not think I am permitted to take more than two interventions.

There is such Eurosceptic hostility to the European Union that the last Government took the view that to attach themselves to the EU would mean seeing their popularity sink. They should have gone on the front foot; perhaps we would be in a different position if they had.

The UK and other member states face many major challenges, such as delivering economic growth, completing the single market, delivering new free trade agreements, cracking down on cross-border crime, combating climate change and fighting global poverty. The Bill should finally place to rest the concerns about the lack of democratic safeguards over big EU decisions. It will ensure that future big decisions about Britain’s place in Europe are taken out of the hands of the governing elite of the day and placed firmly in the hands of the British public and, on their behalf, this Parliament.

The Bill is a fine example of what coalition politics produces—a document delivered by two parties, working together despite their differing traditional outlooks on the EU.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Tim Farron]

I will not. I am permitted to take only two interventions without losing time and I want to ensure that I give people a chance to speak.

Despite our differing traditional outlooks on the EU, the coalition has come together, found common ground and drawn a line—obviously—under the European constitutional question once and for all, we hope, by ensuring that the public and Parliament have the final say on the big questions that will determine how UK and EU relations evolve. The Bill should also give the British public a new sense of ownership, enshrined in law, over the future evolution of UK relations with the European Union.

The Liberal Democrats are unashamedly a pro-European party. We fundamentally believe that British national interests are best served by playing an active and leading role in the European Union. We are also fundamentally a democratic party and one that believes in devolving power to the lowest level possible and in reconnecting the public to politics through democratic reform. We recognise that the experience of rapid EU integration over the past two decades, although it has been necessary and ultimately beneficial to the UK, has left many members of the British people feeling sceptical about and disconnected from the decisions made in their name at an EU level, most recently with the Lisbon treaty.

This is why the Bill is so important. Its main purpose is to reconnect the British public with EU-level decisions and to reassert parliamentary controls over those key decisions. The Bill should help to give the British public a new sense of ownership over the UK’s relationship with the EU in the future and it provides the British public with the legal guarantees that they, not the Government or Parliament, will have the ultimate say in future decisions about the UK’s level of involvement in the EU.

Now is the time for the EU to focus on delivering solutions to the huge challenges that face all member states rather than looking inward. The Bill is in keeping with a number of innovations in the Lisbon treaty that seek to provide national Parliaments and European citizens with a greater say over EU decisions and the direction of the European project. I say that as a member of my party who voted with my now coalition colleagues in favour of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. If we had had a referendum, I would have argued in favour of that treaty.

The UK is not alone in recognising that the pace of EU integration has left a dangerous lack of understanding about the connection between the EU institutions, national Parliaments and their citizens. In fact, that was recognised by all EU member states in the Council, by members of the Commission and by Members of the European Parliament long before the Bill was conceived. Indeed, that concern was translated into concrete measures in the Lisbon treaty. The treaty has gone a long way towards creating new connections and controls between the public and national Parliaments in the EU, which I warmly welcome. It is too early to see how they will work but the direction in which the EU—and now the UK—is moving is clear.

Let me give some examples of Lisbon treaty democratic and parliamentary control innovations. The European citizens’ initiative enables a petition of more than 1 million European citizens from across the member states to trigger a legislative proposal from the Commission and is a unique and groundbreaking innovation expressly designed to develop connections between European citizens and the often seemingly alien EU institutions. The new yellow and orange card system enables one third of national Parliaments, via the scrutiny Committees in the UK, to object to an EU proposal if they feel that it breaches the principle of subsidiarity, requiring the Commission either to reconsider the proposal or to force the Council and the European Parliament to come to a decision whether to scrap the proposal or to amend it. Also, the new emergency brake clauses in the treaty enable any single national Parliament to block a proposal if it considers the proposal in question to breach or contravene a fundamental component of the legal framework, such as criminal justice.

The Bill can in part be seen as a logical extension of the work of the Lisbon treaty in reconnecting the public and Parliament to EU decisions and its institutions, but our sincere hope and intention in supporting the Bill is that it will finally help to restore some sanity and pragmatism to the debate in UK politics about the EU and EU proposals. There is an extremely poor level of debate in the UK about the EU and the Bill should help to improve that. With a more transparent approach to our membership of the EU, some of the clouds of Eurosceptic mythology might begin to lift. For instance, the use of passerelle clauses will trigger Acts of Parliament and that will mean a rare and welcome opportunity to have an informed domestic debate about substantive EU proposals, giving Members of both Houses the chance to discuss the respective pros and cons of a particular EU measure for the UK.

For example, should the Bill become law, one passerelle that would trigger primary legislation would be that on establishing an efficient and fully functioning EU patent system. A proper patent system has been at the top of UK businesses’, innovators’ and scientists’ wish lists for decades and we believe that it is fundamentally in the interests of the UK. We look forward to discussing that groundbreaking proposal in more detail if and when primary legislation is introduced in the near future as a result of the Bill. Such issues will be discussed more often in this House and the voices of reason in this place will be forced to go on the front foot and to sell the benefits of EU membership and integration to the British public.

The Government have chosen to engage positively with Europe and to tackle the largest single block that leads to discontent about the EU among the British public, which is the sense that decisions taken at EU level are remote, unaccountable and beyond our control. Liberal Democrats believe that the UK’s national interests have been and will continue to be served best by our membership of the European Union. The major challenges that face us cannot be solved by UK action alone. They often require international action through the European Union. Our relationship with the EU, however, from the point of view of the media and much of the public, is pretty poisonous. For a sane Government who seek to advance Britain’s best interests, this is a hugely challenging position. Surely the challenge is too big for legislation alone to fix it.

There is a growing fear that unless something radical is done, the views of the British public and the politicians on the EU will continue slowly to drift on a tide of Eurosceptic media stories to a point at which this country will ultimately leave the EU altogether. I know that many of my colleagues on the Government Benches would favour that, but in my view it would be an absolute disaster for the United Kingdom. I would be interested to hear from the Minister what other plans the Government have beyond our Bill, in line with their commitment to play a strong, positive and active role in the EU, to start a new dialogue with the British public calmly and rationally to explain and sell the benefits of EU membership.

There are many questions to answer, but the Bill’s crucial task is to democratise and make transparent and trustworthy all our dealings with the European Union and to do so in a way that is pragmatic and positive for our immensely valuable relationships with our EU partners. For what it is worth, I think the coalition has succeeded in meeting those challenges and I look forward to continuing this formalised outbreak of accountability and reason towards our membership of the European Union.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak on Second Reading, and I will cut to the chase given that I know one more colleague wishes to speak before the Front Benchers.

There is a lot to commend in the Bill, and I will vote for it, but I wish to alert the Minister to some questions that I have posed previously. I hope that he can provide comfort, perhaps not tonight, but in Committee or by writing to me. After I had read the Bill, I thought it went further than I had expected from the coalition agreement. It does much of what we were told it would do by ensuring that ratchet clauses and passerelle clauses will be subject to a referendum. However, there seem to be a few exceptions, to which I wish to draw the House’s attention.

Clause 9(2)(a) to (c) covers articles 81(3), relating to family law, 82(2)(d), relating to criminal procedure, and 83(1), relating to cross-border crime, of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union. Subsection (2)(c) permits

“the identification of further areas of crime to which directives adopted under the ordinary legislative procedure may relate.”

The word “further” indicates to me a transfer of competence or power on which we should have a say. I shall give one example. It could be that Europol is given powers to investigate more areas of crime, for instance in fishing, which might worry my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel). Such a change would not be covered by the need for a referendum. I believe that the Home Affairs Committee and the Select Committee on Justice are due to table several amendments, covering a number of the passerelle clauses that are not currently guaranteed to cause a referendum, and I urge the Government to examine them carefully.

The Foreign Secretary said earlier that we are not giving up control of borders, but the accession treaties to which he referred automatically do that, because they extend the borders within which citizens of the European Union can circulate without hindrance.

As has been said, especially by my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), it is really important that we are careful about the language that we use to describe the Bill and how we sell it. We certainly do not want to oversell it, as happened in the last Parliament when all three parties said that they would vote for a referendum on the European constitutional treaty but did not. The timing of the Bill is also relevant, and I believe that the Minister is going to talk about that.

There is one other key area in which no referendum is provided for, and it is set out in clause 7(2)(d). It refers to the third paragraph of article 311 of the treaty on the functioning of the EU, which is about own resources. That article states:

“The Council, acting in accordance with a special legislative procedure, shall unanimously and after consulting the European Parliament adopt a decision laying down the provisions relating to the system of own resources of the Union. In this context it may establish new categories of own resources or abolish an existing category.”

In all the discussions about the Lisbon treaty, and about the European constitution before it, that was seen as one of the key articles that would allow the EU to levy its own taxes. When I raised the matter previously with the Minister he suggested that that would require unanimity in the Council of Ministers, and that I should not worry about it, especially under a Conservative coalition Government. However, I do worry about it, because the Bill is about trying to set up the law for the future.

Dare I say it, if the Bill had been in place under the last Government, I am sure that we would not have had a referendum even on the Lisbon treaty, given how it was sold to the UK Parliament as a mere tidying-up exercise. I will vote for the Bill tonight, but I ask the Minister to address my strong concerns about the British public. They do not want to be sold short, and they would be horrified to know that we might be voting for a Bill that would allow the EU to levy taxes, and that they would have no say.

I was three at the time of the last referendum on the EU, and ironically I do not want us to have a referendum in which the Government give away powers. However, it is important that the powers in the Bill are introduced soon to give the public confidence. Dare I put it in a way similar to my European parliamentary colleague Daniel Hannan? Pactio Europae censenda est.