European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I am most grateful to my noble friend Lord Pearson for introducing the Bill at such a timely moment. It is timely because the nearly ex-Prime Minister, on the last lap of his world tour, will sign a document in Berlin later this month. It does not really matter whether we call it a treaty or a constitution; the only racing certainty is that it will involve transferring more power away from the nation states, the member states and Parliaments to the European Union and the Commission. I am ready to give way to any noble Lord on any Bench who can give me an example of when powers were transferred from the Commission to nation states. I do not know whether the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, who is an experienced European politician, could give me an example. Perhaps he will in his winding-up speech. Has there ever been an example of the Commission transferring powers to the member states rather than the reverse, as has been the historical reality? If we are looking at the cost/benefits, the costs are not just financial, as my noble friend Lady Noakes so ably said, but also political, and it is the political aspect which I should like to focus on. The political costs should concern members of all parties and all shades of opinion, whether they are Euro-phile, Euro-sceptic, or among the great ““don’t knows””. It would certainly concern the people of this country if they were told the truth or knew the truth about the political cost of this great construct. They may still touchingly believe that they vote in a democracy, but I am afraid I can demonstrate that it is getting increasingly remote. But perhaps they have understood that, which is why the number of people voting has dropped so significantly in the past few years. The transfer of power away from Parliament and the people it represents has been inexorable. The EU has always used the deliberately insidious but highly successful Monnet model—the method of moving ahead by small but incremental movements. It is a political grandmother’s footsteps, if you like—what my noble friend Lord Tebbit calls the salami-slicing and I call the Euro-creep method. My noble friend Lord Pearson mentioned the former German president, Roman Herzog, and a paper produced by the Germany Ministry of Justice, which came up with the figure that 23,167 legal Acts were adopted in Germany between 1998 and 2004. Of those, 18,917—about 80 per cent therefore—were of EU origin. The former German president said earlier this year in an article in a German newspaper, the Welt am Sonntag, on 14 January: "““By far the largest part of the current laws in Germany are agreed by the Council of Ministers and not the German parliament ... Therefore the question has to be asked whether Germany can still unreservedly call itself a parliamentary democracy””." Those are not my words but the words of a distinguished former president of the Republic of Germany. If he says that, surely we should start taking it seriously as well. The same supranational laws to which Roman Herzog referred have to be adopted by all 27 member states, including the United Kingdom. The proportion of supranational law will of course vary from country to country. However, it is safe to say that in every EU state, again including ours, something like 60 or 70 per cent of our laws—let us just say the majority; we are not going to argue about precise percentages—now come from Brussels. By lucky chance, an interesting research paper was published earlier this week by the legal information research firm, Sweet and Maxwell. The paper showed that 98 per cent of British legislation in the past10 years has been introduced by statutory instrument. This drew the comment from Professor Len Sealy, Professor of Law at Cambridge University, who advises Sweet and Maxwell, that the past 10 years have also seen a massive increase in EU law that becomes UK law without it ever having passed through Parliament, as statute or statutory instrument. Is that not shocking? Professor Sealy pointed out that there were over 2,100 EU regulations in 2006; their scope is astonishing, including cross-border insolvency, importation of bed linen, values of certain fruit and vegetables, the buying-in of butter, evaluation of statistics and labour costs and access of poultry to open-air runs. As he underlined, all became law without our legislators having to lift a finger. Let us be absolutely clear: these were laws passed by the Commission and the Council of Ministers and became UK law without being seen by either the other place or this House. To this annual cascade of imposed legislation we must add all the directives, which are transposed into UK law by Parliament—not that Parliament has anything at all to do with the process, except to reach for the rubber stamp. Those include the vehicle end-of-life directive, the landfill directive, the WEEE directive on electrical goods, the drivers’ hours directive, the shameful curd cheese regulations, which we passed earlier this year with a rubber stamp, not to mention the 21 directives making up the financial services action plan, which the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, mentioned and which will be hugely expensive. We do not know the full cost yet—nobody does—but it will be absolutely massive. Not a word, not a syllable, not a comma can be changed by our elected Parliament or this House—what some of us were pleased to call the Mother of Parliaments, which is now more the Zimmer of Parliaments. We may amuse ourselves by sounding off about them and passing harmless time discussing these regulations, but it makes no difference. I have to ask: are we really content with this? Are we really content that a majority of our laws are not only untouchable by Parliament but are not even seen by Parliament? Is that what we have come to? If so, why do we need so many highly paid MPs? Never have so few done so little for so much. I dare say that we could also ask why we need so many Peers, given that we cannot touch some 70 per cent of our legislation. What is the point? It is clear that the system is not working very well. The EU Select Committees do sterling work—it would sound rather silly if we said ““euro work””. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, was a member of one of them, as I was until 2000. I know that they do very hard and very thorough work, but their only power is the scrutiny reserve, which I am afraid is routinely overridden—400 times, to be precise, in both Houses since 2001. Ministers’ letters are invariably polite and thank the sender so much for that interesting report—““Now, where did I put the wastepaper basket?””. Why should it be otherwise, when Parliament has no power? The electorate seem to have got the message—witness the much lower voter turnout—but has Parliament? I am slightly encouraged that members of the Conservative Party, my erstwhile friends, have got around to sniffing the wind. Its Democracy Task Force under Kenneth Clarke has at least thought about strengthening Parliament, but its proposals are really much too timid and do not go nearly far enough to do what should be done to restore some authority to Parliament over EU law. If Parliament is serious about regaining some of the power that has been so arrogantly given away, it should give itself the right to mandate Ministers. Governments would have to have mandates from Parliament on what they can agree to in Brussels. That would be a frightfully good idea, but I can hear the sound of pigs getting ready for take-off. Without real power being given back to Parliament, the arguments about the constitution, to which my noble friend Lord Liverpool referred, are irrelevant. It does not really matter whether we have a constitution or what it is called. Dancing around the constitutional maypole in Berlin is simply a quaint folk ritual. The EU will carry on as it has always done. The apparatchiks will continue to use—or abuse, as my noble friend would have it—Article 308 and get into new legislative areas without having the legal basis on which to do so. They will, however, award themselves the legal basis on which to do so. Things will carry on. I have a copy of the Commission’s work plan for 2007 in my hand. It is illuminating. It is 19 pages of closely typed script, and it covers all sorts of areas: the strategic view of the energy policy; migration initiatives; social reality stocktaking—that should interest Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches, as it certainly would the Commissioners; space policy; the European space programme; defence initiatives; and so on. I can provide noble Lords with the rest of the documents if they are interested. All this means that it does not matter whether we sign the constitution or not; the machine will grind on anyway. That is what has been happening, and it will go on happening; so it does not matter whether we have a constitution or not. The EU has got on very well—or very badly, according to one’s point of view—without one. This is fundamentally about democracy. MPs should not have given away powers that were only lent to them by the electorate. They were not theirs to give away. No one under 50 in this country has ever had a chance to vote on anything to do with the European Union. The last vote on it was in 1975. They have not had a chance to stop the juggernaut. The real debate, which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, should welcome, is about the facts. This is what the Bill should be about; finding out the facts and determining whether it is right for this country to be swept up in this supranational avalanche of legislation, which affects the whole country but which is unseen, or unamendable, by Parliament. I am not in the business of rubbishing the EU for anyone who wants to be in it. Let us have it, by all means; we will trade with it and have a relationship with it. Other states may be happy to be part of it. I wish them joy of it, I really do. For us, however—this view is widely shared outside the Westminster bubble—the financial and political costs really are too great. I am confident that when the Government have the result of the committee of inquiry, as set out in the Bill, they too will agree that we are better off out.