European Union Bill

My Lords, we have discussed the principles and details embraced in this clause at some length and I am grateful for the additional points that have been raised in the stand part debate. I apologise straight away if the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, thought that I cut him short or intervened as he expressed his very sincerely held views. I thought that he had commented earlier but I am very glad that he has now had an opportunity to speak. He raised issues that go wider than the Bill, although they are not totally unrelated to it. He raised the question of scrutiny in our two Houses, which is something that we want to strengthen. He is absolutely right that in the past the reasons for not observing or waiting for the scrutiny process were possibly a little too cavalier. These are matters that we have all argued for and there is a constant search for improvement. However, I think that the operation of our own European Union Committee and the European Scrutiny Committee in the other place are commendable. They cover an enormous amount of ground with very great thoroughness. Speaking from this government position, I can say that it certainly is right for the Government to pay maximum attention to that. It makes complete sense. There is the broader question of the democratic nature of the European Union and the kind of issues that were addressed in the Laeken declaration. That declaration pleaded with the European institutions and national Governments to seek ways to bring European affairs closer to popular consent and to the people so that they had a greater understanding of where the European Union benefited its members—as a home club or home team it could achieve greater things in combination—and where it should not necessarily intrude on affairs that were properly the concern of nation states and those close to the ground of intimate local issues, which were best governed and decided at national or local level and possibly not at the loftier level of the European Union. That is a broader issue which we shall perhaps come to. The European Union, like any great institution and certain institutions of the last century, needs reform. We are now facing totally different conditions from the ones that we faced even a couple of years ago, and so is Europe. Power has moved, wealth has moved and economic activity has moved. The things that some of us forecast 15 years ago, such as the rise of easternisation, as we called it—the rise of the eastern powers—have taken place. That is a question not just of shifting economic gravity but of shifting political gravity as well. In those conditions, Europe as an institution needs to move ahead and the nation states within it need to achieve greater popular support and democratic consensus than they have achieved so far. I shall come to that point again in a moment when I address the views of the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, which were extremely interesting and stimulating. I turn, first, to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr. I am sorry that he did not think that my answers were serious. They were intended to be deadly serious; obviously I did not have quite the right tone. However, I emphasised as strongly as I could that we need Clause 3 as well as Clause 2. Clause 3 is needed to address areas where there can be transfers of power and where the special short revision procedure is employed. The noble Lord asked why there was no significance test in the case of Clause 2. The answer is that in Clause 2 we are dealing with treaty changes where competences are shifted or not. In the case of the judges that he mentioned, there would not be a transfer of powers, so there would not be a transfer of competences. If more judges were appointed, the issue would not arise, so there would be no need for any of these procedures at all. Otherwise, all the issues in Clause 2 require treaty changes; and treaty changes, unless they are exempted or unless there is no transfer of power, qualify for and attract a referendum. In Clause 3 the pattern is completely different. There, we are dealing with transfers of powers which are not defined in the treaty, although they are defined to a considerable extent in the Bill. I have listed them again and again until I have become almost short of voice. This is a whole range of powers that can be transferred, and a degree of judgment—although not a vast degree—is required in relation to their significance. That is the difference. A little earlier the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, asked about another matter and I did not answer as thoroughly as I would have wished. It concerned the difference between Article 48(6) and Article 48(7). Article 48(6) addresses any part of Part 3 of the treaty on the internal policies of the European Union but only those where there is no increase in competence, because an increase in competence would not be consistent with Article 48(6). Article 48(7) is about the removal of vetoes in a whole range of cases, excepting those with military implications, which can be removed only under the ordinary revision procedure, which of course would be governed by Clause 2, and the extension of co-decision by the European Parliament. That is the difference between Article 48(6) and Article 48(7), which the noble Lord asked me about. I hope he feels that those are serious answers. The central theme of the Bill is that some contribution—obviously this is not a total solution—to the restoration of trust about where we stand in relation to the present and the future of the European Union needs to be established. It has been draining away very fast indeed. A whole range of things, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, touched on, can be addressed to reverse this and to bring to the European issue some kind of settled public consensus of the kind that, as I said earlier, is available to this day in relation to NATO, the United Nations and many other bodies. The British people are happy to be an interdependent, integrated part of these great organisations. However, that is not so in the case of the European Union because the hand has been played wrong again and again, the language and tone have been wrong, and the trust has evaporated. We are trying to make some contribution to reversing that situation. As to the other point that the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made about bundling treaties, I am not quite clear which side he is now on. Is the criticism that there will be too many individual treaties or that only big treaties tend to come along? We all have in our minds the Lisbon treaty and we took different views—I freely confess that there are different views among the coalition partners—on whether it was or was not like the constitution of the EU. We debated that for many hours and nights, and some of us had very strong views. We recall that the Government of the day, of whom the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, was, I think, a part at that time, believed that there should be a referendum on the constitution. Indeed, all parties said that there should be, but then somehow it all slipped away and suddenly only one party was prepared to stick to its undertaking that there should be a referendum. It seems to me that that is also going to be the pattern of the future. When we think of the vast complexities of getting treaty changes through the entire system of the 27 members of the European Union—soon to be 28—small changes involving transfers of competence or significant transfers of power to the European Union being proposed and having to go through the elaborate 21 or 24-month treaty change process is so unlikely as to be incredible. We will not see that. Although many people at the time of Lisbon said that they hoped there would not be another treaty, I suspect that there will be a treaty vehicle coming along. It may be a big one and it may include a whole number of issues involving transfers of competence and treaty changes. Some of us, though not all, thought at the time of Lisbon that such matters should have been put to the British people. That seemed a reasonable thing to do and the failure to do so seems to some of us to be part of the further slump in support for the European Union. I note some fascinating figures showing that in some countries which did have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty—Denmark is one—there was some improvement in support and enthusiasm for the work of the European Union as a result of people being consulted. Some of the cynicism along the lines of ““This won’t help. This will do the opposite””, as said by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, may not be well founded. If it is known that the political establishment—the elite and the governing forces in Parliament—is prepared to justify changes that it believes to be in the national interest in a referendum and to put them boldly and strongly, that will help, not hinder, the European Union. I agree with a great deal of the tone of the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, who comes to these matters with his customary realism and acute perception. Of course, the European Union needs to improve its operations. In many areas it is not delivering and is unable to be the combined, focused, united group that many of us wanted to see since the earliest days when we went to the Avenue de la Joyeuse Entrée in the early 1960s before the UK began to think about membership. Some of us dreamt that the kind of Europe that would emerge would be flexible, effective and able to come together on a number of issues. It has done so. It has agreed great things but in some areas it has run into increasing public cynicism and doubt, and in others it has clearly overplayed its hand. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, said that persuasion and negotiation are required, which is absolutely right, and it would be so if next time we had a referendum on a substantial block of proposals for further reform of the European Union, particularly if they are the kind of proposals that I would like to see. They would be carried but that would need to be by persuasion and negotiation. The noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, talks about using a blunderbuss, but when Mr Blair suggested a referendum on the European constitution—it was riddled with all kinds of provisions for competence transfer, all of which eventually went ahead under the guise of the Lisbon treaty—did he think that that was a blunderbuss? I do not think that it was; it was a perfectly sensible prospect that was never put into action, although it was in France and the Netherlands, for arguing the next stage of development for the European Union. If we want a strong, focused Union, I should have thought that requirement number one was the closer involvement between the institutions and the people, which means a more politically supported European Union understood for its values and its limitations, and that is seen as an effective and balanced organisation of which we the British are proud to be members, as we hope are the other 27 members. All of us in many areas, though not all, face the enormous challenges of the modern world. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, spoke about trust. We just have to disagree on that. We do not believe that the trust is there and we shall begin painstakingly to put it back, which is why I want the Bill to become the pattern and the way of things not only in this country but increasingly in others, many of which already have their own referendum provisions in certain instances and very elaborate filters in the approval of any treaty changes or transfers of power. We want that pattern to go forward and we think that it will help to build the trust that is clearly not there. Noble Lords referred yet again to the frequency of referenda. For the reasons I have described again and again, if there are no transfers of competence there will be no referendum; when there is an accession treaty there will be no referendum; when Britain is not affected there will be no referendum; when matters are not significant there will be no referendum. There will be referenda when issues covered by the schedule and in the detail of the Bill would produce reasons for treaty change. There would then be, as noble Lords who have been involved in such things know perfectly well, elaborate bargaining, which will go on for many months. There are a lot of negotiations so that some things dear to one country are held in place while others are traded away, and there emerges a bundle, which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, does not seem to like. A bundle of proposals for the further reform of the European Union will emerge. We—all parties—will fight for a pattern of reform that entrenches freedom, justice and more democracy. I hope that we would get the support of other member states in that direction. That is what will emerge and it will trigger referenda, as it will probably contain further proposals of transfer of competence. It may not but if it does it will trigger a referendum. I do not see that there is any worry about the so-called blocking of decisions. With a veto behind us we often negotiate vigorously on all sorts of decisions and we will join eagerly in the decisions that benefit this nation. We do not need treaty changes, threats, cajoling, blackmail or anything else to be effective negotiators in Brussels, as the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson, probably knows better than all of us put together because he was effective in certain key areas. How we or other nations handle these matters is completely divorced from how we conduct our affairs in Brussels. The noble Baroness mentioned enhanced co-operation but, frankly, that is not affected by this Bill. We shall be debating aspects of that in a later amendment so I shall not make further comments on that. Those are the views that I have and which I offer to your Lordships about this Clause 3 stand part. It is a central brick in the building block in this house of trust that one is trying to construct to bring Europe away from its elitist label and its unpopularity, and to ensure that in this country people trust those in charge concerning the sovereignty of this country, which is a role we can play as an active and positive member of the European Union. That is how we see the European Union reforming and making itself fit for purpose, if I may use that phrase, in the 21st century. That is why I believe that the clause should stand part of the Bill. Clause 3 agreed. House resumed. Clause 4 : Cases where treaty or Article 48(6) decision attracts a referendum Amendment 20 not moved. Amendment 20ZA Moved by