European Union Bill

My Lords, I would like to follow the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, because he has been correct in what he indicated. In debates in this House, we have had a great deal of speculation because we live in a world where we cannot be sure what the future will look like. Increasingly, that is the kind of world in which we live. The noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, who has profound experience, having been, for many years, the chairman of the European scrutiny committee, is absolutely correct in what he says. We are passing legislation which is likely to be tested by coming events in future years and yet we are doing it without giving ourselves any provision for insisting on a review of what we do over the next decade or so. I shall mention one or two of the speculations that we have discussed in these debates and not agreed upon. One is the proposition which has been advanced on several occasions by the noble Lords, Lord Kerr and Lord Hannay, which is about the possibility that our representatives in Brussels ministerial meetings will find it extremely difficult to support even those things that they profoundly and sincerely believe are in the British national interest because of a fear of setting off a referendum. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, may be right in that and he may be wrong, but the only way to find that out is by experience over the next few years. Secondly, there has been a great deal of speculation about whether there will be major new issues that might require an amendment to the treaties. Curiously, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, hinted at one such when he talked about the possible major revisions of the European Union Stability Pact. Of course, that applies only to eurozone countries, but anyone who believes that it will have no implications for the United Kingdom must be living in a world a very long way away from the global financial world of which we are a part today. We are talking about speculations, but that does not mean that we should not pass Acts of Parliament; it means that the case for looking at them and requiring them to be looked at is extraordinarily strong, and stronger than the case for almost any other kind of legislation that one can think of. I differ a little from the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, much as I respect him, because I can think of quite a few bits of legislation, with domestic implications, that would have gained from a sunset clause. There are one or two pieces of legislation all of us today would be only too happy to have seen off the statute book if there had been an opportunity to revisit them, which there so rarely is. My next point is with regard to the coalition agreement. On this, I address specifically my friends in the Liberal Democrat and Conservative parties. The coalition agreement, in its wisdom, made it absolutely clear that we should be willing to accept a referendum lock on major amendments to treaties. That is what it says. The major amendments to treaties that we talked about in these meetings, and here in debates in the House of Lords, have ranged from changes to the Schengen agreement, changes to the original euro agreement, and changes that might introduce a common foreign policy or a common defence policy. I freely admit that in this Chamber, we are all agreed—I congratulate the Government on persuading us on this—that there should indeed be a referendum lock on this limited number of crucial issues. It is also clear that many Members of this Chamber are profoundly concerned, as my noble friend, Lord Taverne, pointed out, about the thought that that group of very tightly disciplined and described referenda might drift into a general practice of referenda of a kind that will destroy parliamentary government; to put it in a non-abstruse phrase: adding a kind of Berlusconi sauce to the solid pasta of British parliamentary practice. I, for one, would be most reluctant to go along that track. My noble friend Lady Falkner is quite right to draw our attention to that, but at no point does the coalition agreement come to terms with the idea that now we will be imposing every change in the passerelles to a referendum—not just an Act of Parliament but a referendum. No one in the coalition is obliged to support that because it is not part of what was agreed in that original agreement. My third and final point is precisely the one made by the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, and my noble friend Lady Falkner and I take exactly the opposite view. It seems to me that one of the great advantages of proposing that there should be a review at the beginning of each Parliament is exactly that that will drive the debate back in the general election itself. What more democratic a structure could one choose to find, one where people would be likely to vote, likely to show an interest, likely to debate the issues before them in television, radio and in the street, than a general election? There is the fact that we would have to agree this legislation again at the beginning of each Parliament, in its very simple and short way, as has been pointed out—the statutory instrument agreed by both Houses. It would take no more than 24 hours, if one wanted to do it that way. The essential point is that no more democratic a process could be found than a general election, in which we should reach a decision on whether we want to continue with this legislation. That is far better than suddenly plucking a referendum out of the air at some point in the Parliament, when most people would be interested in other things and its salience would be low. So on the grounds of the speculative basis on which we are passing this legislation, of extension of referenda far beyond what our Parliament would want to see and of forcing the general elections to take on a major debate of our relationship with Europe and all the trust that would flow from an election result, I believe that the case for a sunrise and sunshine amendment—I say sunshine deliberately—could not be better argued. I strongly support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, and his colleagues.