Thinking back to all the Committee sittings, I recall that the Minister did not feel able to give an effective answer to questions about the Prime Minister’s negotiating stance in relation to the forthcoming European question and, particularly, European finances. He was asked a number of times—by me and by other Members, including Labour Front Benchers—what would be distinctive about that stance, and what the Prime Minister’s precise objectives were. The Minister responded by telling us that the Government’s objective was to minimise the EU budget, to ensure that it was efficient, and to protect the rebate, but that has been Government policy for a number of years. What really interested Members was whether the Prime Minister had a specific intent and negotiating stance, and what his objectives were. We were interested in those questions in the context of European finances, so that we could judge his success or failure after the negotiations.
If the Minister does not feel able to provide an answer to what strikes me as a very reasonable and fair question, he will add to and fuel suspicions among both pro- and anti-Europeans in the House that it is not just a question of the Prime Minister’s having a stance, but of the Prime Minister and the Government deliberately concealing the nature of that stance from the House and the country, so that it will not be possible for them to be judged effectively when the negotiations are over. That seems to me to be a fundamentally
unsatisfactory way to proceed in regard to any financial issue, let alone an issue as important as European finance.
The Minister shakes his head. I hope that, if he disagrees, he will intervene and reveal what the Prime Minister’s stance actually is, because we are all mystified by what the targets are in the negotiations that are at this moment taking place in various European capitals. The Prime Minister, on our behalf and at our expense, is moving from capital to capital, and the only people who are not to be informed of his actual negotiating posture are the Members of this House and the people of this country. That is a remarkable position.
I am familiar with the Minister’s steady hand at the Dispatch Box, and with his wonderful cover drive. I know that he would not want, at the very last minute of the Bill’s progress in the House of Commons, to be caught at slip in not answering a simple question: what are the Prime Minister’s negotiating targets, and how will we be able to judge whether he has achieved them?
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.