European Union Bill

I am talking about the underlying issue that the Bill addresses, which is that of popular consent and distrust and how we rebuild popular consent. This Bill is the product of the coalition agreement and a compromise between initially very different positions. It is intended to draw the line underneath popular accusations that power is slipping silently and conspiratorially from London to Brussels. To demonstrate to the public that there will be a transparent process of scrutiny, the competences will not creep away but the complex and opaque processes of EU decision-making —sufficiently complex that my wife and I used to make a good living out of trying to explain them—will have to engage with public acceptability and public persuasion. The European policy of this Government is a product of coalition. It necessarily differs from what a Conservative -only Government would have pursued, under pressures from their own Back-Benchers, and from what a Liberal Democrat-only Government would have achieved. That is democratic politics and constructive compromise. A certain amount has been said about coalition. Indeed, I felt that the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, was suggesting that this coalition is somehow not entirely legitimate because it has not got an appropriate mandate. Because it is relevant to this, I would remind her again a little about where we were with the previous Government. That was an informal coalition between Brownites and Blairites in which, at one stage, according to Jonathan Powell, the Prime Minister’s party kidnapped a Treasury official from Brussels to Luxembourg in order to try and discover what the Treasury was negotiating on financial concerns. In the Lords, we now have a Labour alternative team of moderates proposing strong pro-European approaches. I note that it is a very different team to the one we had on AV, rather as one has an attacking and a defending team in American football. We look forward to detailed discussions on this but we start from where we are with the British public. We have their deep mistrust of the European Union. As we talk about the role of Parliament, we also need to remember that we have a mistrust of Parliament and the complex issue of parliamentary sovereignty. The Government, in their programme and policy, are moving to address the causes of that mistrust. The Bill sets out to address the anxieties of the British public. Several noble Lords have mentioned the position of the press, which is part of the problem. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, that my understanding is that those sections of the press which are the most vigorous defenders of British sovereignty are indeed those which are most preferentially owned by people domiciled outside the United Kingdom. That is one of the many paradoxes of the situation we are now in. Yet the United Kingdom is no longer an exception. If one looks at public opinion in most other EU states, that has also become more sceptical, as have the press there. Part of that—here I address the noble Lord, Lord Liddle—is that the EU itself has changed a great deal. It has become a great deal more complicated and it is therefore much more difficult to explain, particularly to the younger generation, why the EU is a public good which we should expect our public to accept. The Brussels bubble itself is one in which policy pursues an easy and seductive competence creep. I read a recent Policy Network document which was talking about how to revive social Europe. Indeed, I think that the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, was its author.