This is the difference between me and the hon. Gentleman: he wants to opt out of Europe and be a little Englander, all self-enclosed in a joyous new future he would propose for his nation, whereas we want to reach out—we want to share with the rest of our fellow citizens across Europe all the wonderful benefits of EU membership and EU entry. That is what we will secure in Scotland and thank goodness we will not be part of the rest of the United Kingdom, pulling in one direction under the UKIP-informed political orthodoxy that is starting to emerge here. We will do it in our own way and we will reflect our own particular political values when it comes to EU membership. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that topic.
We are going to get this measure in Scotland even though we feel it is not in the best interests of the communities we represent, but, as the hon. Gentleman alluded to, this will end soon when we have the referendum in September. No longer will we have our devolved responsibilities dictated by this Government. The Secretary of State will have seen the correspondence from the Scottish Ministers—the screeds of concerns, the evidence from the Scottish Parliament’s Justice Committee—but she will of course ignore them. That is what happens; we put forward our concerns and they are first ignored and then binned. This is what this Government still laughingly call the respect agenda.
Colleagues in the Scottish Government have stated repeatedly to UK Ministers the value we place on EU police and justice co-operation measures. We have pointed out that we have our own distinct legal system that needs to be dealt with differently, and we have our own processes of bringing serious criminals to justice and our own particular European partnerships for tackling growing levels of cross-border crime.
For us, the measures in the home affairs and justice chapter are extremely important. They are not something to barter in a game of Eurosceptic or Russian roulette with UKIP. They are measures that ensure that people accused of serious crimes are brought to justice quickly and efficiently. Unlike this Government, we very much support the sharing of information between police forces. We want to see improved joint investigations of cross-border crimes. We think it is a good thing to have better identification of people using false documents and the efficient transfer of criminals back to their own countries.
This has been done with no or little consultation. Scottish Ministers have repeatedly written to explain the possible implications of this decision on Scotland’s devolved justice system and to state clearly their very strong preference to remain fully opted into these measures, but the Government simply brought forward their intention to proceed with this opt-out without even a cursory discussion with the devolved institutions. That just is not good enough any more.
The lack of real discussion and the failure to listen to the devolved Administrations demonstrate this Government’s Eurosceptic arrogance at its worse. We all know why they are doing this. It is all because of the threat of UKIP at the polls, so they have got to be seen to be doing something—anything—about the big Brussels bogeyman.
It would be as well just to have Nigel Farage on the Front Bench trying to get this through. Of course UKIP has not got a Member in the House, but it pulls the strings in the House all the time, and this Government just respond by taking that agenda up. I do not know who will win the battle of the Eurosceptics, but it looks as though UKIP is going to win the battle of the European election polls in May. The point is that you cannot out-UKIP UKIP; they are the masters of Euroscepticism. This Government will never beat them in their race to the bottom to try and be harder on Europe and try to scare people out of Europe more and more. We do not do UKIP in Scotland—we barely do Tory; we have only one Tory Member of Parliament—yet we are going to be dragged into this Euro race to the bottom as the parties attempt to win Eurosceptic votes in the May elections.
The Government say that they are going to opt out of the home affairs chapter, only to opt back into the important stuff. The stuff that they will not opt back into is mostly dead and never used, as the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, but we could be put into a dangerous period of limbo—a gap during which the important stuff will not apply—that could diminish our security and safety. We have been forced to opt out of everything, including important measures for investigating cross-border crimes and bringing serious, organised criminals to justice.
Those measures include the European arrest warrant, which has been the focus of most of the debate today. Yes, the Government say that they will opt back into the European arrest warrant, but there will almost certainly be a lag period, and that is what concerns us the most. We know that there are those on the Tory Back Benches who do not like the European arrest warrant; we have heard from them today, and they remain disappointed that the Government will seek to opt back into the measure. For them, the warrant is a totem of EU badness—something that sums up Brussels, and must go—whereas to us, it is central to European justice and security, and to the safety of our communities. It has done a great deal to bring dangerous criminals to justice.
I suspect that opposition to the European arrest warrant is based on Euroscepticism, but our experience of it in Scotland is totally different. We have heard today of the example of Moira Jones. The European arrest warrant was instrumental in securing the conviction
of her murderer, in that it allowed clothing and other property to be seized before he could destroy it. That helped to lead to a successful prosecution. The speed with which extraditions take place is important, and long-drawn-out processes can be avoided only by using the warrant. We have none of the issues with the warrant that have been mentioned by other hon. Members. It has been particularly successful in Scotland, and it is something that all our law enforcement agencies welcome.
I shall give the House another example of how the European arrest warrant is working for us in Scotland. In January 2012, Grzegorz Gamla committed a violent attack and murder in Edinburgh. He was arrested within five hours of the issuing of the arrest warrant. That was achieved through the European arrest warrant system, but it was also facilitated by direct contact between Scottish prosecutors and the authorities in Poland under the European judicial network, which the Government say that they will not opt back into. Those two cases show how the ability to act incredibly swiftly using the arrest warrant allowed the criminal process to proceed much more quickly than it would otherwise have done.
There are other important Europe-wide security and policing arrangements from which we might find ourselves excluded for an unspecified period. We have heard about membership of Europol and Eurojust, for example, as well as practical police and judicial co-operation measures and joint investigative teams. The Government have said that they will opt back into most of the important stuff, but they are not seeking to opt back into the European judicial network, which underpins much of the good work of the European arrest warrant. We have been told by Scotland’s police and legal community that that network is invaluable to Scotland, but once again, the concerns expressed by our legal community have been overlooked.
This is all so unnecessary, and it represents a real threat to security and safety in Scotland. We do not share the ingrained Euroscepticism that now infects this Government at the highest level, and we refuse to have our political agenda determined by the threat of UKIP in the polls. The bottom line is that any gap between opt-out and rejoining has to be kept to a minimum. The longer the gaps and transition periods that have to be dealt with, the greater the likelihood of the problems that we have been discussing occurring.
Our preference would have been not to have the opt-out in the first place, but we are part of a UK that barely listens to us and that is pursing an almost opposite set of political values and a different political agenda from ours. This will be resolved in September when we vote yes overwhelmingly in the independence referendum and Scotland gets what it wants on these issues, at which point we will secure our membership of the European Union on our terms.
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