It is a great pleasure, as always, to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland). Although we do not see these issues in exactly the same way, he always provides a huge amount of food for thought, delivered with great style and panache. I apologise to Members on both sides of the House for arriving late to the debate. I gave advance notice to the Speaker. It was because of the two statements and an engagement that I could not get out of.
I want to start the substance of my comments by welcoming the opportunity for Parliament to scrutinise this issue. Whatever one believes about the substance, we are getting far more scrutiny in this whole area than we ever did under the previous Government. I also want to say that I fully support the Prime Minister’s overarching strategy. In his article in The Sunday Telegraph on 16 March, he made clear his intention to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, including, as he spelt out explicitly, in the area of crime and policing. I think that he is absolutely right.
It is worth noting that polling commissioned by Open Europe has found that this matter, far from being some ivory tower issue with no resonance or relevance to the
public, was the public’s fourth highest priority for renegotiation. It is therefore right not only in principle, but in terms of resonance and relevance to the great British public. Likewise, the Prime Minister showed tremendous moral clarity in fighting not only for Britain, but for an important democratic principle in relation to the next EU Commission President. I feel that we need to do the same now.
I will avoid rehearsing points I have made in previous debates on the topic, which I know Ministers will have heard until they are blue in the face. I will instead confine my remarks to four key points. First, I believe that we must take a long-term view about the supranational direction of EU justice and home affairs policy, taking into account the evolution of policy and law, the ambitions of the Commission and the tidal direction of travel among EU member states. One does not have to buy into Viviane Reding’s dream of an EU-wide Minister of Justice to see that we are taking incremental steps, slowly but surely, like a slow tide, towards a single EU justice system. We can debate the pace, but I challenge anyone in the House to argue that that is not happening in practice.
One need only look at Europol and Eurojust. Currently, colleges of national police and prosecutors collaborate on important cross-border work, such as combating drugs, human trafficking and terrorism. Originally they co-operated on an essentially intergovernmental basis, but national democratic control is slowly but surely being whittled away before our eyes, like salami-slicing. If we look at the detail of the two new regulations on Europol and Eurojust, we see a strengthened role for the Commission, additional duties of co-operation on national Governments and, most importantly, the eroding of national Governments’ ability to decline requests for co-operation or to hand over data.
Eurojust’s revised mandate will provide substantial co-operation with the new EU Public Prosecutor’s Office, which will grow in time, leading to more and more pressure for it to consume functions currently undertaken by Eurojust. That is inevitable. We can see it happening bit by bit. If we were truly drawing a line in the sand, would we not make it clear now that we will not be opting into those new measures?
At the same time, if we opt into the basket of measures, as the Government propose doing, we will hand from the British Supreme Court to the European Court in Luxemburg the last judicial word on the scope of these swelling supranational powers and our corresponding national democratic duties. I, for one, am reluctant to see that happen because of the European Court of Justice’s record of judicial activism. In answer to my hon. Friend the Member for South Swindon, the difference is that judicial activism in the UK can be overruled by elected and accountable Members in this House. That democratic control is not available in relation to decisions of the ECJ, which are being extended bit by bit.
We saw that in the High Court last year, when Mr Justice Mostyn, hardly a right winger on the judicial benches, made it very clear that, to his great surprise, the ECJ had torn up our opt-out from the EU’s new charter of fundamental rights. We saw it with the ECJ’s attitude towards the extraterritorial application of the EU Tobin tax to Britain—although, those proceedings are still ongoing. And we saw it this year with the ECJ’s frankly ludicrous ruling on internet search engines, conjuring
from thin air a “right to be forgotten.” That is important, because we can argue about the rights and wrongs of privacy and transparency, but that was patently judicial activism, and there is very little that we in this House can do about it.