European Union Bill

My Lords, a short while ago the noble Baroness, Lady Nicholson, said that the legislation had already served part of its purpose in that it has engaged us in debate. I have to confess to her that I have not run into a huge amount of discussion of it elsewhere. Nevertheless, I do not deny the truth of the point that we have had a major debate, but the points made by many noble Lords still bear testing. It is plain from this legislation that it is not intended that anything other than the passage of the Bill and the discussions on it will happen during this Parliament. I listened to what the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, said in an intervention, but unless I misunderstood it Clause 4(4) provides for an exemption around the stability mechanism, so that will not become the subject of the whole package of a parliamentary decision and a referendum either. So let us start, if we may, with the reality of the position: there will not be an event of that kind. The tests that may arise would be likely, if they happen at all, to occur either in the Parliament that follows this one or in the Parliament beyond the one that follows this—some way off. Those are exactly the circumstances which my noble friend Lord Grenfell described—I think he was the first person to use the words—as a step in the dark, and the noble Lord, Lord Williamson, made more or less exactly the same point. One of the things that concerns me, and one of the reasons I have added my name to the amendment so that the Front Bench is offering its support, is that inevitably we will have a period during which we test whether these new constitutional arrangements make sense, work well, are deliverable, do not undermine the Government of the day and do not undermine the parliamentary process. But the plain fact is that we do not know. I doubt if there is a noble Lord in this House who could do more than I can do, which is to suppose what might happen, but we do not know. What we do know is that when it is tested, we are more likely to know. Those are the circumstances under which we will gain any kind of authoritative understanding of what this constitutional change may mean. I do not think we do ourselves any favours by pretending that we know when we do not. There may well be minor issues or whole treaties. On the former, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, may be right to say that referendums would not arise around smaller things. Periodically, if he is right, they could be around whole treaties, which are much larger things. Moreover, I accept what the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, said, that these are likely to be very unusual events in themselves. What is more, I shall go on to assert something which is critical to the clause because I want to try to deal with this as a debate on an amendment tabled at the Report stage. I continue to assert that some of things which might be considered to be large and significant issues, and therefore may well call for referendum conditions after decisions reached by both Houses of Parliament, will not themselves create the need for a referendum either. I say that because I do not believe that any Government in the foreseeable future will carry legislation in either House about joining the euro—I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, that I have never advocated it, so I can say that with a clear conscience. I cannot believe that either House will succeed in persuading a majority of either House that we should relax the Schengen conditions and change our border arrangements. I know from first-hand experience as a Minister in the last Government that there was not the smallest chance of that happening, or of anyone believing that it would be desirable for it to happen. I shall not regale the House with arguments about an island people and so on, but noble Lords will understand the temperamental mindset of this country over a very long time. I do not believe for a moment that either House would carry by a majority the need for legislation which would then go to a referendum on changing the fundamentals of our legal system from what it is now to one based on Napoleonic law or some of the other systems of law in Europe, and I do not believe that either House, whoever is in Government, would succeed in conceding decisions on our taxation regime to anyone else and put that to a referendum vote. The things that really might bite on the people of the United Kingdom, if they were asked to think about them, will not be put to them. I shall come back to the insurance policy that the Bill claims to be in that context and why the sunset clause is a reasonable solution. I said in earlier debates, and it has been quoted back at me, that in those areas we should just say no. It is our belief that any Government in the foreseeable future will just say no. Their just saying no will probably have the consequence of protecting what we most seek to protect; that is, the credibility of our parliamentary system in the eyes of the public. I think that it was said from the government Benches that it would be pretty much inconceivable that anybody would go back with propositions of this kind at a general election or at any other time in the foreseeable future. I do not believe that our elected representatives—I shall not use the phrase ““political class””; it is intended to be derogatory and I am not going there—or those of us who have had the good fortune to be made Members of this House will go back with propositions of that kind. There will be an expectation on the part of the public that, in those fundamental areas, we would say no. It undermines public confidence if they believe that we do not have sufficient courage of our convictions to say no to things that are of such importance, and that we require somebody else to do it. I said a moment ago that I have understood the point of this Bill to be that, in an atmosphere where people do not trust politicians to say no and there has been too much drift, we need to insure ourselves against failing the political test in Parliament. I do not believe that we would do so, but the point is, were we to fail the test or to continue to fail it, this Bill as an Act would be insurance against it. It is like saying that you need insurance against that moment when you have totally lost your marbles, when you really have not understood the fundamentals of political life and have decided to embark on a politically suicidal course of action which nobody would have expected. It is like buying very expensive household insurance but routinely trying to set fire to one’s own curtains, not in order to claim the insurance but just to prove that, somehow, there was another fallback proposition which would sort it all out once you had set fire to the building. It is essentially a silly proposition. The test of this Bill as an Act will be a test in practice, but the test in practice has the following characteristic—which the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, introduced and a number of noble Lords have described far more eloquently than I can. It is a test of a very profound constitutional change; it cannot be diminished or dressed up in any other way. It is a profound constitutional change, argued for by those who believe that it is necessary as insurance against setting fire deliberately to one’s own curtains. There is significant merit in bringing together the two themes that I am trying to put to your Lordships this evening. The first is that we are going into an area where nobody can claim to know what will happen; the second is that it is very profound. For those reasons together, I ask what could be the sensible objection to a new Parliament concluding as to whether the legislation was working or whether it wanted to renew it. I am in absolutely the same frame of mind as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in that the one thing that I do not fear is discussion of renewal in a general election. I have heard all sorts of arguments produced during this debate that somehow it would make Europe so contentious that it would hijack the election. Elections are about a wide range of things; we should not delude ourselves otherwise. They are about, among many other things, health, pensions and the economy. It is a very broad canvas. If we had a serious discussion of Europe in the midst of that, I would regard it as a red letter day rather than the opposite, because we have so seldom had that in the past. Discussion of Europe has so often been a set of parodied arguments, on both sides. It has been wholly unsatisfactory and never really given people the opportunity to make a strong assessment of the advantages or disadvantages of our involvement in Europe. I do not accept any part of the argument that, following a general election in which this matter may well have been discussed with great rigour and precision, we should not then say, ““Has the test shown us this works? Is the constitutional innovation one that we want to live with for the foreseeable future?””. Those are absolutely sensible political preoccupations. People have playfully talked about the record of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, as a civil servant rather as though that should frighten rather than inspire us all. He put the question broadly in these terms: does each Parliament want to see its authority revoked and, therefore, does each Parliament want to conclude that it does not want to see its authority revoked? It may or it may not—I do not know the answer to that either—but it would be a very bizarre understanding of the authority of successive Parliaments in the constitution, unwritten as it is, of our country for that not to be something that a Parliament would be entitled to consider when it was considering constitutional change of this kind. A sunset clause gives that opportunity.