European Union Bill

My Lords, I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, on the need for proportionality and I accept that things will happen that we may not be able to foresee when we are drafting legislation and giving a legal basis to aspects of future decision-making. However, before I speak to Amendment 39B, I should like to say a few words about Amendment 39A. I welcome the explanation of the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, of how the Labour Party has moved considerably to advance accountability. It is particularly welcome given that it failed to provide for that in the time that it was in office. I do not often find myself echoing the words of the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, very much, but this afternoon’s discussion on the budget rebate was a very useful one to remind us that even when it was in office it took accountability so lightly that when the budget provisions were changed, as it appeared from today’s discussion—and nobody on the Labour Benches rebutted it—in 2005, the Chancellor of the Exchequer did not even agree with that change. Yet it happened. I turn specifically to Amendment 39A. The noble Lord, Lord Liddle, explained what his amendment would do. I have some sympathy with the idea that you would have a level of scrutiny here that should determine what should happen—in other words, that Parliament should take a decision, rather than having a referendum. But my question would be to the noble Lord about his proposed new subsection (4B), which calls for a resolution of each House of Parliament. It is not entirely clear to me what would happen if one House of Parliament approved of holding a referendum but the other did not. Presumably, we would have a situation whereby a Joint Committee could have recommended a referendum and, potentially, the Commons would have agreed with the Joint Committee but perhaps this House would not. I wondered whether he would be able to tell us what had happened, in that case, on Amendment 39B. In this variation, the review committee takes into account the significance, urgency and national interest at stake in its examination of the draft decision. Both urgency and national interest are, I say to noble Lords opposite, deeply subjective. We thought, with the European financial stability mechanism before us in February, that there was huge urgency in agreeing on what to do, because of the Greece, Ireland and Portugal scenarios. In fact one could argue that there is still considerable urgency, given where Spain—and, potentially, Italy—is. But the fact that other countries may be covered by that by the time the facility comes into being in 2013 suggests that something that one sees as urgent at a particular point in time may as events unfold not be quite as urgent as we thought. Let me come to a consideration of a national interest. We know that this is notoriously difficult to define in international relations, which is one reason why this concept of national interest, which we all cherish and hold dear, has never been given legal force. I recall when I was a student reading the realist American scholar, Hans Morgenthau, who in 1951 wrote his book In Defense of the National Interest, which was contested throughout the 1950s, during the Cold War, and all through the 1960s, and is contested still today. It has never taken off as an argument that was legally testable in a court of law, so I would be concerned—while I see what the noble Lord means; we know the national interest when we see it. We can touch it; we can feel it; we can smell it. But to define it in legislation would be extremely difficult to do. I therefore suggest some caution about agreeing with the amendment. On Amendment 39B, I ask the noble Lord what he would do if one House went in a different direction from the other.