European Union Bill

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in this debate, sometimes colourfully. There have been a lot of references to William Shakespeare, which I was rather glad about, having spent many years as a director of the Globe Theatre. I have sat through some Shakespeare which, frankly, I could not understand, but in other plays I have heard some wonderful, inner-illuminating phrases, so I am glad they have come into our debate. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, has led the way in that. As to whether he is Prospero doing such things as cannot be described, whether he is King Lear, or whether he remains in his midsummer night’s dream, I do not know. Perhaps I should leave Shakespeare there. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, for his presentation of his party’s position. I listened carefully to him, and if I may put this in a non-derogatory way, I would say that his speech was constructive in parts. He is right that we are at a turning point in the European Union. Indeed, one of my criticisms of some of the comments made during this long Committee stage is that we seem to be discussing the EU of yesteryear, a sort of pre-Lisbon world. Not only are we in a post-Lisbon world, we are moving into an entirely new international landscape where power is distributed in different ways. We have all said this to each other, and I know that your Lordships are acutely aware of it, possibly more than other bodies are. There is a new international scene that requires new policies and approaches by both the member states and the European Union itself. The noble Lord was therefore right to say that we need to build a new consensus in support of the European Union and our role in it, but I must say that he has failed utterly to convince me in his various interventions, including this one, that the flexibility which Her Majesty’s Opposition seem so keen on and so anxious to see, would not turn out to fill the Bill with holes and undermine all our efforts to create consensus and restore the confidence and trust of the people so that they do not feel that the political class—Governments and Parliament—was not undermining their position in a stealthy way. This seems to me to be a contradiction that is not yet clear. We will come to Report after the Recess. A great many wise and useful things have been said by Members on all sides in our Committee debates, and of course the Government will consider everything that has been said. My colleagues and I shall certainly do so before we reach the next stage. That almost goes without saying. For the moment, however, I must address the amendments before us, all four of them, about the idea of a sunset clause. It will not be much of a surprise to your Lordships when I say that the coalition Government, for which I am the mouthpiece today, oppose the proposal for a sunset clause. Although I know I shall not get full agreement, I shall try to set out as precisely and as clearly as I can why we do so. Let us start with the general proposition of including a sunset clause, and why it would be absolutely unprecedented and extraordinary to include one in this kind of legislation, which is constitutional legislation—there is no disguising that—and intended to build a consensus to improve and enlarge our democracy in the modern world, in the midst of this informational revolution that has transformed the whole nature of public domain and decision-making, and to give the British people a greater say, which they clearly want, over important decisions on the future direction of the EU. I do not at all share the view that these are obscure and arcane issues that no one discusses. On the contrary, particularly the much-maligned Schedule 1 issues, and indeed many others in Clause 6, are highly contentious so-called red-line issues which both Parliament and the public have stormed over—and the media have often joined in in ways that some of us find unattractive and not suitably calibrated. However, these are red-hot issues. The idea that they are not absolutely central to the concerns of the British people—to how we govern ourselves, position ourselves in the European Union and conduct our domestic affairs—seems to me not to be of the real world. These are very serious and central issues. The truth is that a sunset clause of the kind proposed—we are dealing with a number of different aspects, which of course I want to come to—would seriously undermine our attempts to reconnect the British people with the European Union in its changing form and the decisions taken in their name. Here I would say that I do not think that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, will accept—but I ask him to accept—that I am very tempted to have a lovely debate on the eurozone in all its aspects, but I do not think that this is quite the opportunity or even the time to do so. Let me return to this general idea that there should be a sunset clause in a Bill such as this. There were no sunset clauses, of course, in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 or, indeed, the European Communities Act 1972, and there is a very good reason for that. Such clauses would be a recipe for uncertainty where certainty is most needed, namely in the framework by which our democracy works. This Bill belongs to the family of certainty-building and not to the family of those who wish to experiment and say, ““Let’s just try this measure once and then close it down again””. It would hamper our efforts to rebuild the trust of the people that has been lost in recent years. Why? It would hamper them because we as a Parliament, and the Government as well, would be saying to the British people, ““You can have a say on future transfers of competence or power from Britain to the EU, but sorry, it’s only for a limited period unless the Government decide in their wisdom that the right should continue””. That seems to me to be completely the wrong way to go about the purposes, which even the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, seemed to share to some extent, behind the Bill. It would of course also absolutely guarantee the further alienation of Government and Parliament from the people whom we are supposed to serve and whose support and understanding of the values of our effective membership of the European Union we want to increase. It would be a retrograde step in the whole battle—