It is a privilege and an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). He spent six years as a Foreign Office lawyer and has a family back story that is perhaps more exotic than that of many on the Government Benches. Over the past half hour, he has, with his searing intellect, differentiated the small print, which he understands as well if not better than anyone in the House, from the key principles, which he enunciated. In particular, he concluded that we can achieve outside EU structures, albeit slightly more slowly in a few instances, what we can achieve within them, but without the downsides to liberty and democracy that are implied if we remain within those structures. He has done us a great service.
My hon. Friend spoke of the European arrest warrant. I felt that he spoke from the current centre of gravity within the Conservative party. He mentioned that the Home Affairs Committee, on which I sit, concluded that the EAW was fundamentally flawed, but did not mention that the Liberal Democrat member of that Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), voted to remove the word “fundamentally” from our report. I am delighted that Conservative members voted that proposal down unanimously.
It was instructive to hear from my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). I intervened on him to ask how many people he would be prepared to see kept in custody wrongfully in order, supposedly, to bring 100 guilty people to justice, but he did not answer. He has great hopes that there will be some new EU directive that will stop all those bad things happening and properly protect everyone’s rights: as long as we legislate, people will be protected in practice and we need worry ourselves no more. However, we also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois), whose constituent, Andrew Symeou, came to the Home Affairs Committee. My hon. Friend said that the proposals will not work and cannot be trusted, and that they will be judiciable by the European Court of Justice and subject to the proposals of the European Commission. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton said, the problems that have been seen in the old member states may be not just replicated but worse in the new member states. How many people would the Liberal Democrats be prepared to see wrongfully imprisoned to get 100 crooks bang to rights? Alas, there are no Liberal Democrats here to answer my question. They tell us that they believe in the civil liberties of the British citizen, but when it comes down to it they always put the European Union and their belief in Europe, right or wrong, before the liberties of the British citizen.
Today, we debate a motion on an opt-out. We have heard an awful lot of discussion on what we might opt into, but the motion actually reads:
“That this House has considered the UK’s 2014 justice and home affairs opt-out decision.”
It is important to understand that the opt-out has been agreed. Parliament has voted to exercise the opt-out. All this talk about opt-ins is speculative. We may or may not opt back into some, any, or none of these measures—that remains to be seen. The status quo ante is that we have opted out, we have exercised it and that
we have that great repatriation of powers. We will have to see whether it will be undone, or whether it will be maintained.
The great worry of my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, who is not in his place, is that we may sleepwalk, or accidently fall, out of the measures he would like to be in. I think he underestimates the degree of planning that went into delinking the two matters. A number of motions and draft motions were put on the Order Paper, and others were discussed between the coalition parties. Ultimately, the motion we voted on was to exercise the mass opt-out. There has been no decision by the House to approve any measures to opt back in. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, because the amour propre of Select Committees was also involved. The result of the decisions to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge signed up was that the mass opt-out and any opt-ins were delinked. Crucially, one came before the other.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge seemed to be concerned that there might not be agreement in this House on what we might opt back into. One fear was that, as he sees it, the Labour party might play political games and that it would like us to opt back into more than the Government might wish. If, as with the Syria vote, Labour Members vote for their own motion or amendment, rather than voting for the Government motion, and it fails, there might be no agreement on any set of measures to opt back in to. The Home Secretary told us about her negotiations with her European partners and the Commission. Have there been negotiations with those on the Opposition Front Bench on whether they will support the package the Government put before the House, or does she believe that she has enough votes from Government Members to drive through measures to integrate this country into the European Union in a way that we have not seen before?
My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge worries that this may come unstuck if the Government cannot reach agreement on what the measures should be. There has been discussion and there may be understanding but, as the Home Secretary rightly says, we do not know what we will be able to negotiate until we go through the process. We read in The Daily Telegraph today the concerns of a number of our partners about even a very modest proportionality test for the European arrest warrant. There will have to be further discussions between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats on whether an agreement can be reached in the coalition on what the Government want to opt back into and what is put before this House as a motion.
Those discussions and any decisions are likely to come after 22 May, when we consult the electorate in the European and local elections. That is when our constituents will have their chance to pass judgment on politicians, and, in particular, on the self-proclaimed “party of in”, which has made great play of these supposedly co-operative measures. The president of ACPO is quoted, and reference is made to whatever the police want. I remember the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, saying that if the police ask for something,
there is nothing that any responsible Prime Minister can do except to give it to them. That, surely, is the definition of a police state.
We hear about the ACPO evidence, but I understand that people in ACPO have been fighting to avoid this portfolio. When Sir Hugh Orde talks about the ACPO position on EU matters—he may continue doing so for at least the next few months—it is not because the police consider them to be so terribly important that Sir Hugh must talk about them, but, I fear, it is because other chief constables have learnt the lessons from the noble Lord Blair. If they intrude into politics and tell the public and politicians that they have to vote a certain way so that they can lock people up for 90 days without charge—to say nothing of police vans festooned with “Vote Labour” stickers—there will be a backlash, because the police should not get involved in politics to that degree.
Unfortunately, with the European investigation order and the new statute for Europol, we have the prospect of our police being ordered what to do by politico-judicial structures in other EU countries where the separation of politics and operational policing is not what it is in this country. Do we, as a country, want to make a trade-off that allows British citizens to be arrested at the say-so of magistrates in Greece or Bulgaria and locked up for many months, if not years, in prisons that do not meet the standards that we in this country consider to be acceptable? Fundamentally, that is a matter for us as politicians, not the police.