European Communities (Employment in the Civil Service) Order 2007

My Lords, it is the last of those questions that I wish to follow. I start by welcoming the order. I appreciate that there have been some sensitivities in Northern Ireland on this issue, but if we are moving Northern Ireland back to normality in every single sense of the term, the normal arrangements whereby nationals of other EU states, including the Republic of Ireland, have access to the British Civil Service under these terms have to be recognised. I congratulate Her Majesty’s Government and their predecessor on the openness with which we have treated the nationals of other EU states, following on from the employment of many Commonwealth nationals within the British Civil Service. Two years ago I was rather shaken, when I had been invited to give a seminar with some others to a group within Her Majesty’s Treasury on social policies in European Union member states, to find that I was addressing a group that included a British official of German nationality and one of Swedish nationality. I am told that when Gordon Brown invited Ministers from several other member states to a conference, the Spanish Finance Minister completely failed to understand how the native Spanish speaker who was looking after him could be a member of the British Civil Service, as it is so completely unthinkable that the Spanish Government would behave in the same way. I want to encourage Her Majesty’s Government to ensure that this order is applied properly by other member states. I declare a particular interest: British professors are not officials, but German professors are, with all the dignity that that brings to them—I assure the Minister that they carry it very strongly; far too strongly, in my opinion—which means it is extremely difficult for a non-German national to become a full professor in a German university. That is absurd. I wish the Government would be active in exposing the many barriers that cover a much larger area in other countries than in Britain, because those countries are rather more statist, as well as in poking fun at other Governments on this and pointing with pride to our record. This is one of the many areas in which in practice we are much more European than some of our Continental neighbours, although they still seem to think that they are somehow more European than us.