Today is Holocaust memorial day, and several hon. Members are wearing pins to signify this important date. Through the Holocaust Educational Trust, I have met a number of holocaust
survivors. It has been a privilege to meet them; it has also been troubling, in a way. It is important that we should celebrate the work that the trust does to remind us of the terrible things that happened on our continent, not that long ago. Through other initiatives, I have met survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Again, that was amazingly troubling. They, too, were amazing people. Those events, and those that might be going on in Syria as we speak, remind us all of the need to remember and to learn from the horrible things that have happened.
That is the thrust of my amendment. It attempts to get the Government to go back to the negotiating table in Brussels, not to veto this proposal for the Europe for Citizens budget line, but to ensure that
“expenditure under the programme may be used only to fund education about and reflection on the Holocaust, armed conflicts and totalitarian regimes in Europe’s history; and…no expenditure under the programme may be used to fund the promotion of European Union citizenship, integration or institutions”.
I would have thought that that was a pretty uncontroversial thing to ask for.
Let me refresh the memory of the House and explain how we have got to where we are. Article 352 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union gives the EU a wide-ranging power to legislate to achieve an objective set out in the EU treaties, if those treaties have not otherwise given the European Union the power to pass such legislation. The UK Government wield a veto over laws proposed on the basis of article 352.
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The European Act 2011 typically requires that, before the Government can give final agreement in the Council of Ministers to a proposed article 352 law, the proposal must be approved by an Act of Parliament. The rationale behind that was to subject the use of that treaty article to case-by-case approval by Parliament, due to the entirely open-ended and therefore unpredictable nature of the power that that gives to the European Union.
The European Union (Approvals) Bill seeks parliamentary approval for two draft European Union laws based on article 352. The Government have brought forward the Bill because they wish to support the proposals at European Union level, following negotiations on them, and the Council is ready to adopt them. If Parliament does not approve one of them—I am suggesting that it does not approve the Europe for Citizens draft law through the Bill—the Government cannot support the relevant proposal in the Council, and the European Union will not be able to adopt it.
The other draft European Union law, which would be approved by clause 1(2)(a), is a fairly uncontroversial measure that would require most EU bodies to deposit their historical archives at the European University Institute in Florence. The one that I am concerned with—I spent each one of my 10 years in the European Parliament tabling amendments to take the money out of the budget for this particular budget line—re-establishes the EU spending programme Europe for Citizens over the period from 2014 to 2020.