Business of the House (Lisbon Treaty)

The Chief Whip shakes his head; he should read the ruling given by Mr. Deputy Speaker in Hansard tomorrow. The matter does not rest there. The Government’s case for avoiding a referendum rests largely on providing ““detailed parliamentary scrutiny”” , as they put it, of the Lisbon treaty in the House, but the Minister completely failed to justify the abandonment of the referendum pledge, on which almost every Member to the House was elected. The marginalisation of Parliament is even more disturbing given the leak of a confidential Slovenian EU presidency strategy paper today. It sets out a raft of areas in which the detail of what the treaty will mean in practice has yet to be decided. That applies to decisions on the exact role of the new EU President and the high representative; on the powers of Eurojust and Europol; and to the exact meaning of the solidarity clause should an EU member be subject to a terrorist attack. Those are the very areas that Parliament should wish to scrutinise, yet the process in which the Government have collaborated is designed to avoid exactly that scrutiny. How can the House question the details of the role of the new EU President, if those details are still being worked out? Effectively, as the think-tank, Open Europe, has argued, we are being asked to trust the Government to sign a blank cheque. I do not think that we should sign it. On one level, the Government have already lost the argument about the treaty. Almost every impartial observer has concluded that in substance it is essentially the same as the EU constitution, and that it will mean a substantial increase in the EU’s powers. The programme motion is an admission of the extent of the Government’s defeat. It cuts time for debate on matters of genuine importance in the treaty—justice and home affairs; the EU President; the EU Foreign Minister; the EU’s new legal status; changes to defence arrangements; and the profound changes to the treaties—to a minimum. Instead, it ekes out time for talk about other subjects, some of which are important in their own right but to which the treaty makes very little difference at all. Ministers are behaving rather like a student who, when asked a question to which he does not know the answer, gives an answer to a completely different query. That is the level to which the Government have sunk: jester politics in place of the detailed debate that they promised us all along. Our amendment to the motion would give the House the bare minimum of debate that the Bill merits. It would ensure that, as promised by the Government, there would be 20 days of debate in the Commons. Instead of the absurdity of trying to discuss the vast and far-reaching changes in justice and home affairs in one day, we would have at least two days to do so. Let us remember that the Government’s position is that the establishment of a common EU asylum policy and a common EU immigration policy by treaty does not even merit a day’s debate in itself, which is indefensible. The amendment would allow greater consideration of the major changes that the treaty will make in foreign and defence policy, including the role of the EU Foreign Minister, the diplomatic service, the loss of vetoes in foreign affairs, and the creation for the first time of a common European defence policy. Those issues surely merit more than one day’s debate. The amendment would provide two days to consider the profound legal changes that the treaty effects such as the granting to the EU of its own legal personality; the abolition of the intergovernmental status of criminal justice; and the declaration on the primacy of EU law. The amendment would allow some debate on the distribution of powers between EU and member states brought about by the treaty, yet the Government, according to the motion, think that such discussion is completely unnecessary, even though the treaty, for the first time, lists the EU’s areas of competence and their nature. The amendment would ensure, too, that the charter of fundamental rights and the British protocol pertaining to it are debated, whereas Ministers, who are already very sensitive on this issue, clearly did not want the charter even to be mentioned in the programme for debate. The amendment would allow some discussion of the treaty’s effects on national Parliaments. The European Scrutiny Committee has repeatedly drawn attention to the obligations that the treaty places on the House, but Ministers seem to think that there should not be any debate about that, either. Our amendment rectifies a basic structural flaw in the Government’s programme. One and a half hours to debate amendments is practically unworkable. It prevents detailed discussion of the treaty, and as anyone remotely familiar with European treaties knows, the details matter. In our view, 20 days is not enough to do justice to the treaty. A case could easily be made for more debate and, as confirmed by the House of Commons Library, Maastricht, by comparison, was debated for 29 days. The programme motion, however, offers less than half that time. We have sought to allow the House to vote for a programme that simply holds the Government to their original word. The amendment would not wreck the Bill; it would simply allow the House to do the job that the Government promised that it would do in the first place. The whole story of the treaty is shabby: it was cooked up behind closed doors; it was rammed through to avoid public debate, with almost any deal being struck to evade the people’s verdict in a referendum; and it was signed in circumstances of considerable national embarrassment. The Government know that they are losing the argument. To take one recent example, this week’s Charlemagne column in The Economist stated:"““The British Government is accused of breaking its word by rejecting a referendum. That too is true. Even Europhiles wince as Ministers struggle to justify their about turn.””" The Minister was certainly struggling earlier, when he did not justify the Government motion to the House. The Government’s programme motion represents a further betrayal of the people and of this House as well. We should deal with the treaty with proper thoroughness in accordance with the promise that the Prime Minister made to this House and to the people who sent us here. That is what we propose to the House tonight.