European Union Bill

I do not think we are going to join the EPP. The previous Government did not want it, this Government do not want it and I suspect a future Government would not want it. The issue here is whether, if we were in the system and it sought to expand its powers, we would have been right to give up the veto or would we hope to achieve advance by unanimity. Would it not be more sensible, particularly in the legal areas that the noble Lord knows so well, to advance via a system of solidarity, unity and consensus, rather than by seeking somehow to move into the QMV area? These are serious matters that affect the overall pattern of our judicial system. Citizenship is another issue, and social and employment policy another. I thought that everyone nowadays recognises that we need to keep social and employment policy as near the people, the shop floor and the labour market as possible, rather than see it move further away from the powers of this Parliament by removing our veto. We will no doubt discuss justice and home affairs a great deal later. There are all kinds of institutional treaty revisions where unanimity and consensus are highly desirable—I would say essential—such as appointing judges and advocates-general, and devising numbers and systems for appointing commissioners, changing the composition of the European Parliament and a lot else as well. These are not trivia, but very big issues indeed. Each has been and continues to be a subject of major debate. Were we to give up the veto—there seems to be great confusion between what we can do within the existing competences and what would happen if we gave up the veto—each would involve a considerable transfer of power to the European Union. I have dealt with the question of the euro. My noble friend Lord Lamont has put that quite clearly. I will deal in particular with the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, on Article 332. These are complex matters. It seems a strange proposition, and I know that it is difficult to understand, that we should give up the veto, or that we should be prevented from giving up the veto, by the referendum lock in a decision under Article 332, which covers decisions to allow expenditure on enhanced co-operation to be borne by member states other than those participating. That sounds small and obscure. However, a move to QMV in this area would allow participants in a future area of enhanced co-operation to push through a decision that the expenditure of that arrangement would be borne by all member states through the budget, which would mean that member states that were not participating for good reason would still have to pay for it. There is a very good example of this. If Germany agreed to pay for someone else's defence activity, would we need a referendum before we could agree to anything in Schedule 1? No, of course we would not. Schedule 1 is not about decisions taken on these legal bases, but about any question of giving up the right to say no if a proposal is not in the national interest. That seems to be a perfectly reasonable item to include in the Schedule 1 list of vetoes that we do not want to give up, and which it would not be in the national interest to give up. The more one goes through these far-from-trivial, and in fact highly important, issues—each one would be likely to trigger a major debate in this nation—the more one is left wondering why anyone should want the United Kingdom to go for QMV and throw over unanimity in any of these areas. It is very hard to understand why anyone would want to do that.