Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

The House will be pleased to hear that I do not intend to speak for the same length of time as the previous two speakers. However, I want to make some important points. First, as a proud Labour MP, it has never been my wish to interfere with the Government’s intention to legislate on particular matters, although we have disagreed from time to time. I have been driven into some unusual situations by that. I have had doubts about such a motion on only one previous occasion, but I am afraid the Minister has not convinced me that this motion makes adequate provision for debates such as those that I and many other Labour colleagues want. I have already intervened several times, so the House may have gathered what my objections are, but I shall quickly run through them now. The motion provides for eight days during which we will discuss clause 2. In effect, the Bill is a single-clause Bill. The treaty’s effects on UK legislation are included in that clause. Most of the amendments will be tabled during those eight days, but the days have been divided in an unusual way. The House will not go into Committee for the first four and a half hours of each day while it is scrutinising the Bill. That is a constitutional novelty. On Friday, I will have been in the House for 12 years and so I suppose that I am a relatively junior Member, but in those 12 years I have never seen the scrutiny of a Bill involving a generic debate, determined by the Executive, for the first three quarters of the day, with the House going into Committee only for the last 25 per cent. of the day—the last hour and a half, in this case. The first problem with the form that has been adopted is that not only is it a constitutional novelty but it allows the manipulation of the debates by the Executive to their advantage. The themes that have been determined by the Executive are clearly intended to exemplify what they see as the beneficial aspects of the treaty. However, many other aspects of the treaty will not have the same beneficial effects on the UK. The Government have deliberately set about creating a set of debates on themes that are intended to exemplify the beneficial effects of the legislation and the treaty, but that is not how legislation ought to be scrutinised in this place. The second and equally important problem with this way of proceeding is that we know that generic debates—Adjournment debates and other debates on Government motions—are largely dominated by the speakers from the two Front Benches. We have just seen an example of that. The debate started three and a half hours ago, and I am the first Back-Bencher to speak. The four and a half hour generic debates will be dominated by those on the two Front Benches and it is clear that the voices of Back Benchers will not be heard in the way they would if the House were in Committee, where they could seek to amend the legislation and thereby affect the treaty. It is clear that the miserable one and a half hours each day might be dominated by a series of Divisions, while the four and a half hours will be dominated by the Front-Bench spokespeople and, in particular, by the Executive. That is not the way in which the House should proceed. It seems that such a process will also distort the character of the debate. It is clear that the division between those who sit on the Front Benches is about the role of the nation state and national Parliaments vis-à-vis a superstate or federal states. That is clearly an important debate for the House, but other voices, on our side at least—and I am one of them—want to raise another critique of the EU. Let me briefly exemplify the kind of debates that we should have, but which are excluded by the motion. Many of us have accepted that the economic powers that in the past were coterminous with the nation state are now supranational and even global. It is therefore inevitable that if we want to attempt to control the effects of those economic powers, we must have some supranational co-operation. The argument in favour of a Europe of the peoples that attempts in some way to control the power of those global corporations has been won. We want not a liberal, market-driven Europe but a social Europe. However, the terms of the motion exclude the possibility of our having that debate. The debate will largely be between those who speak from the two Front Benches and it will be about the nation state as opposed to the superstate, whereas we want a debate about a liberal Europe as opposed to a social Europe. That brings me to the subject of what the Minister has denied is an opt-out. I want to speak about the charter of fundamental rights. When the previous Prime Minister, Tony Blair, went to negotiate the treaty, we were told that the red line would not be crossed—the charter would not be allowed to create judiciable rights in the United Kingdom. When he had finished the negotiations and had been on the phone to the then occupant of No. 11, he came out and said, ““We’ve secured an opt-out from the charter.”” Those were the words he used, both on the record and in briefings to the press. Now the Minister denies that an opt-out has been secured. That needs to be debated because the charter of fundamental rights is central to the sort of Europe that is being constructed. Will it be a liberal, market-driven Europe, where inequality is intensified and companies are allowed to move across the globe with no accountability to the work force or the nation states? Will it be a Europe where the interests of ordinary people are secured by the charter of fundamental rights? In our debates, there is no opportunity to test whether the Minister was right to deny the opt-out or whether Tony Blair was right to say that there was an opt-out.