My Lords, the Minister argued in winding up on the first group of amendments that we should be talking about the Bill and not about the issues raised by the amendments, which seemed a very ill-judged remark. This Bill is about a very wide range of policy areas—economic, constitutional and international—on which the Government are asking us to give them extensive powers, on trust, without telling us what they intend to do. The question for many of us is that we cannot trust the Government so far in giving them all those additional powers, unless they tell us rather more clearly what they intend to do.
These amendments deal with the implications of leaving the EU for British foreign, security and defence policy, and with the management of those policies when we withdraw. As we withdraw, which is what this Bill is about, we will also withdraw from the structures of common foreign policy and the common security and defence policy in the Treaty on European Union, as specified in a large number of articles. So what will we do then? The leave campaign never addressed this in the referendum, so there is no way one can say, “Well, it’s the will of the people, we can’t stand in their way”. The leave campaign denied that the EU was ever concerned with anything to do with security, foreign policy or defence. We were told when we joined that it was just about the common market, and now it has turned into something else. Anyone who has read Edward Heath’s 1968 Harvard lectures, what he said when he became Prime Minister and what Sir Alec Douglas-Home said as Foreign Secretary, what Jim Callaghan did as Foreign Secretary and what the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, followed through on, including his London report on strengthening the
mechanisms of common foreign policy, and what Geoffrey Howe achieved, would know that Britain was absolutely at the heart of forming common foreign policy procedures in the European Union. I remember writing something about it for publication in a Chatham House journal in the late 1970s and being briefed very helpfully in the Foreign Office by the official who co-ordinated our input to common foreign policy, whose name was Pauline Neville-Jones. One or two Members of this House may, indeed, be familiar with the name. I also recall the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who sadly is not in his place at the moment, insisting even after the referendum that the EU had nothing to do with British or European security—and I gave him an annotated copy of the 2015 security and defence review with chapter 5, which is entirely about European defence co-operation, marked for his benefit.
Last September, the Government finally published a position paper on common foreign and security policy, which said, remarkably, that,
“the scale and depth of collaboration that currently exists between the UK and the EU in the fields of foreign policy, defence and security, and development”,
is such that we need,
“a deep and special partnership”—
a familiar phrase—
“with the EU that goes beyond existing third country arrangements”.
It goes on to point out that the UK was a founding member of the EU’s CSDP and takes part in all 15 common security and defence policy operations and missions and concludes:
“The UK would like to offer a future relationship that is deeper than any current third country partnership … This future partnership should be unprecedented in its breadth, taking in cooperation on foreign policy, defence and security, and development, and in the degree of engagement that we envisage”.
Well, that was interesting. Nothing was said for months afterwards—and, finally, the Prime Minister last week gave her speech in Munich in which she went into a little more detail about what she at least, if not the rest of her Government, seems to envisage. She said:
“The EU’s common foreign policy is distinct within the EU Treaties … So, there is no reason why we should not agree distinct arrangements for our foreign and defence policy cooperation in the time-limited implementation period, as the Commission has proposed. This would mean that key aspects of our future partnership in this area would already be effective from 2019”.
In that case, it is about time the Government started to educate the population on what arrangements they propose to make with the European Union. I hope, at least, that someone has told the European Union the sort of things that we might like to envisage. She then goes on to talk about our: joining the European Defence Agency and the European Defence Fund; contributing to the European Union’s common development policy, but on the condition that we also play an active role in formulating future European Union defence policy—I am not entirely sure how we do that, as an outsider—co-operating in cyberspace and space; and dealing with a whole range of issues including, on internal security, a new bilateral treaty between the EU and UK.
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We need to know, before this Bill is passed, what sort of things that implies. We cannot entirely take on trust what the Government have said, partly because we know that they are confused and contain many disagreements within themselves. The Foreign Secretary made another speech last week. I looked very carefully through it; it is longer than the Prime Minister’s. There is one sentence in it about future co-operation with the Europeans. It says:
“It makes sense for us to continue to be intimately involved in European foreign and security policy”.
After that, he goes on to make a number of jokes about what British tourists do in Thailand, Doggerland and other such places, and does not return to the subject at all. One can conclude only that the Foreign Secretary is not of the same mind as the Prime Minister on how far we should continue to collaborate. I was even more interested to note—I am sure the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, will have noted—that the two-page article in the Sunday Times the Sunday before last about “Brains for Brexit” said that, far from the European Union being an asset in security terms, it has been responsible for more conflicts than any other international institution in the last 20 or 30 years. That is a quite astonishing comment which I think means that the European Union was responsible for various wars in Yugoslavia, among other matters. That at least suggests that the hard Brexiters, of whom the noble Baroness is one perhaps, see the European Union as something with which we should have no security relationship.
The purpose of the amendment is to say that, before the Bill is passed, the Government should be more coherent and clearer—with different Ministers saying the same thing—about what sort of deep and special partnership we wish to have. We will clearly not continue to command EU common deployments, as we have done in Operation Atalanta, but if we are to contribute, there has to be a very clear framework. I am conscious of this from what I had to do as a junior Minister in the coalition Government. There were those then—Liam Fox above all—who were happy to co-operate with the French and others in Europe, provided we did not tell the newspapers about it. When I suggested that we might, perhaps, invite the press up to Northwood to see the rather magnificent joint command for that operation, he agreed that ambassadors from other EU states could be invited but certainly not the British press.
The Government are incoherent on this issue. We therefore have the right to demand clarity before the Bill becomes law. The Bill takes the UK out of the European Union. The Prime Minister has just said that she wants us to stay in many of its foreign defence and development activities. How will that happen and how far are the Government prepared to commit themselves to it? I beg to move.