My hon. Friend is referring to CEPOL, which has been based at Bramshill in the United Kingdom in recent years. CEPOL is an organisation that encourages and facilitates cross-border co-operation between police forces. The European Commission recently proposed a measure to enhance and increase the ability of CEPOL to operate in relation to the training of individual police forces. The United Kingdom resisted that measure, as did other member states, and it is no longer going ahead.
As I was saying, this Government are very clear about the measures that we wish to rejoin, just as we have been clear about the opt-outs that we have exercised. Sadly, however, we are no clearer about the position of the Labour party. Some have called the Opposition’s policy inconsistent and incoherent, but I think it could be more carefully described as involving confusion and chaos. Labour signed up to the Lisbon treaty without giving the people of Britain a vote and without giving this House a say, and we must recall that the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), flew in alone and under the cover of darkness to sign it. That tells us a great deal about his belief in it. That treaty contained an opt-out, but Labour never explained whether it would use it.
All the evidence suggests that Labour does not share the determination of this Government to reduce the control Brussels has on our criminal justice system. Because even after negotiating their opt-out, the last Labour Government signed us up, by way of unanimity, to another 30 or so measures. In fact, virtually all the measures covered by the Lisbon treaty and this opt-out decision were agreed by unanimity by Labour during its time in office. So are we to assume that it would rather we had remained bound by all 130 of them, rather than exercising our opt-out and seeking to rejoin the limited
number we have identified? If not, why did it agree to the measures in the first place? But if so, why did it negotiate an opt-out? As I say, it is confusion and chaos.
Sadly, the Opposition day debate Labour called in June last year did nothing to clear up the mystery of Labour’s position, because the motion highlighted only seven measures the UK should “remain” part of. It was not clear whether that meant Labour would have exercised the opt-out and left all the other measures other than those seven, such as Eurojust, a measure that the police and prosecutors deem vital to continuing our co-operation with our EU partners. Another such measure is the prisoner transfer framework decision, to which I have referred and which allows us to pack foreign national offenders back off home? I suspect that the Labour party would rather we did not know, unless of course the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) is going to reveal all in her response to this afternoon’s debate. Having negotiated an opt-out from all the measures the Labour Government signed our country up to in the first place, when this Government chose to exercise that opt-out, the right hon. Lady and her party voted against it—again, I say confusion and chaos.
I repeat that the position of this Government is clear: we have exercised the opt-out, we support the return of powers from Brussels to the UK and we support acting in the national interest by rejoining a limited number of measures that protect British citizens and the victims of crime. That is consistent with our approach to the European Union as a whole. The EU needs fundamental change, and under the Conservatives, Britain is leading the way in delivering that change. At home, we have made the difficult decisions in the national interest to secure Britain’s economic future—now it is time to protect Britain’s interests in Europe. The Prime Minister has already taken tough action to stand up for Britain in Europe by cutting the EU budget, saving British taxpayers over £8 billion; vetoing a new EU fiscal treaty which did not guarantee a level playing field for British businesses; and refusing to spend British taxes on bailing out the euro.
Only the Conservatives have a credible plan to reshape Britain’s relationship with the European Union and to put this to the British people in an in-out referendum by the end of 2017. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady may laugh, but the Labour party opposes this plan and will not give the British people their say. So Labour has no policies and no ideas, and that is not the sort of leadership the United Kingdom needs in Europe. The leadership it needs in Europe is the leadership we are giving it, with the clarity we are giving to return powers back from Brussels to the United Kingdom, but to take other decisions to opt back into measures that are firmly and clearly in our national interest.
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