Treaty of Lisbon (No. 2)

My hon. Friend is being ingenious and allows me to move on to the next part of my remarks. The Government say that the treaty would better equip the EU to tackle the twin challenges of energy security and climate change. They claim that it will drive forward a liberalised European energy market, benefiting not only British consumers but British companies that wish to gain a foothold in the region. We agree with them about the necessity of freeing up Europe's energy market and the impact of driving down prices and empowering our companies, but we profoundly disagree that that cannot be achieved through current or proposed EU legislation. It is ironic that the Government once presented the case for which I am now arguing. We are in an absurd situation, in which the Secretary of State has just eloquently defended a position against which his colleagues lobbied only a year or so ago. During the negotiations on the constitution, the former Minister for Europe desperately argued against including article 176A, stating that it was ““unnecessary”” because"““all aspects of energy policy are effectively covered elsewhere in the Treaty, e.g. single market, environment””." That is correct. However, he went on to register his ““detailed concerns”” on the text, which, he said,"““we consider may have the unintended effect of changing the boundaries of EU competence and the types of measure which will be subject to unanimity””." Those comments are significant. They are not light concerns about single words, the colour of the ink or the commissioners' handwriting. They are ““detailed concerns”” about the ethic of the article. Yet we are replaying that message to a Government who have suddenly developed a case of selective memory failure. If the then Minister for Europe was worried at the time, we are much more worried to find that the Government comprehensively failed to delete the article and now compound their failure in that duty by refusing to trust people's judgment in a referendum, which they promised. We should have significant concerns about today's European market. France is dominated by EDF; Germany has been carved up by RWE, Eon, Vattenfall and ENBW, which own about three quarters of production and distribution capacities. Breaking the link between generators and grid operators would be an important component of the quest for liberalisation, giving European consumers more choice about their supplier and enabling our industrial leaders to grab a piece of the huge market. There are 20 million consumers in the UK who are supplied by French or German-owned companies, yet, across the channel, not a single French or German consumer is supplied by a UK-owned supplier. We support the measures that the Commission unveiled in September. Those measures are already possible under existing powers—the amended treaty is unnecessary to achieve them. Liberalisation is by far the most effective tool for maintaining a secure supply throughout the EU because it delivers increased diversity of routes, companies, corporate strategies and risk profiles. Liberalisation sends a powerful message to EU suppliers that, in the long term, they will profit more from an open and transparent market than from relying on a national or regional champion. The latter is the stuff of old bloc politics and we are now in a different world.