Identity Cards Bill

I support the amendment and can perhaps cast a little light on the questions put by my noble friend on the Front Bench. In supporting the amendment I fear that I will have to cast doubt on its usefulness even if it were to pass into law. The amendment assumes that Her Majesty’s Government still have the power to refuse to sign up to an EU identity card system unless Parliament—this Parliament—has first given its consent. In other words, the amendment assumes that the United Kingdom still has the veto in this area. To understand why that may not be so, I regret that I must take your Lordships into a little of the detail of the Treaty of Nice and the subsequent Hague multi-annual programme for strengthening the EU’s area of freedom, security and justice. I start with the Treaty of Nice, which, as your Lordships know, in the absence of the proposed EU constitution, is still the legal basis for the whole depressing project of European integration. I point out that Title IV, encompassing Articles 61 to 69 of the treaty establishing the European Community—the TEC—is entitled, ““Visas, Asylum, Immigration and other Policies Related to the Free Movement of Persons””. I apologise for the eternal density and dreariness of Euro-speak, but I fear that there is more to come. But experienced Euro-sceptics among your Lordships will already have pricked up their ears and asked themselves, ““Is it possible that Brussels has the nerve to introduce a European ID card as a policy related to the free movement of persons?”” If your Lordships will bear with me, I can tell you that the answer starts to emerge from Article 67 of Title IV, which was inserted into the treaty at Amsterdam in 1997. To paraphrase Article 67, it says that for five years after the signing of the Amsterdam treaty, policies related to free movement of persons as well as visas, asylum and immigration were to be decided by unanimity. In other words, for five years after Amsterdam we kept the veto on initiatives brought under Title IV. But after that period of five years, Article 67 empowered the Council to take a unanimous decision, supported by the European Parliament, to move all or parts of Title IV to the qualified majority voting procedure under Article 251 of the treaty—or the co-decision procedure, as it is known in the jargon. Under that procedure, nowadays we have some 8 per cent of the votes. Some of us did our best to object to Article 67 when the Bill relating to the Amsterdam treaty was going through your Lordships’ House. But, as usual, we were told that we could not amend a treaty that had been stitched up in the Council of Ministers and that anyway the Government had retained the veto and could prevent Title IV moving to qualified majority voting, so we had nothing to worry about. So much for the Treaty of Amsterdam, as carried forward into the Treaty of Nice, which is the current legal basis for the European Union. We then move to the so-called Hague programme. In May this year, the Commission reported to the Council and the European Parliament on the programme’s 10 priorities for the next five years. On page 4 of that document, we find that,"““on 22nd December 2004 the Council was able to adopt a decision applying co-decision and qualified majority voting to all Title IV measures, with the exception of legal immigration, as of 1st January 2005””." So the Government appear to have failed to exercise their veto on 22 December last year, and the whole of Title IV, controlling visas, asylum, immigration and other policies related to the free movement of persons, seems to have passed to qualified majority voting and co-decision. To get some idea whether that could include identity cards, we move on to page 18 of the Hague report, where we find a heading entitled:"““Coherent approach and harmonised solutions in the EU on biometric identifiers and data””." The second paragraph under that heading tells us that the Commission is involved in,"““preparation for the development of minimum standards for national ID cards from 2005 onwards””." The third paragraph tells us that the Commission is also making preparation,"““for the development of minimum standards for sectors specific ID cards, if appropriate, from 2005 onwards””," which sounds rather worrying. Will the Minister tell us what those specific sectors might be? I may be wrong, and no doubt the Minister will tell us if I am, but I fear that that means that the United Kingdom can be outvoted in all the areas under Title IV, which now appear to include ID cards. If some noble Lords think that suggestion somewhat farfetched, I remind them of the EU’s ability to produce policies that bear little or no resemblance to their purported legal justification in the treaty clauses. There have been many examples of this over the years, perhaps the best known being when Prime Minister Major thought the UK had escaped the Working Time Directive when he opted out of the Social Chapter, only to find it brought in through the back door of qualified majority voting in the provisions for health and safety at work. Today the EU project continues as though the people of France and the Netherlands had not voted down the proposed constitution. Written Answers I received this year on 6 July reveal that the substantial EU space programme has been based on a Council decision which is to be agreed only at the end of this year. They also reveal that the EU’s new Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna relies for its legality on Article 308 of the TEC, being the original catch-all clause in the 1957 Treaty of Rome. That allows the EU to do anything in pursuit of the Common Market provided there is unanimity in the Council. How the new Fundamental Rights Agency in Vienna is justified by this is a mystery. Better still, and finally, on 19 July this year the Government told me that there are no formal or informal legislative proposals or other EU initiatives which rely on the proposed constitution—now in limbo. Yet for months before the French and Dutch votes we were told by every Eurocrat in sight that the heavens would fall in and the EU would grind to a halt if the constitution was not passed. So I fear that we are dealing with people who are perfectly capable of introducing EU identity cards via the qualified majority voting system against which we would have no response if we objected to it. So I look forward to the noble Baroness’s reply.