Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

The debate during the 1975 referendum roamed much wider than that; plenty of histories of it have been written. It is a matter for the hon. Gentleman to win an argument within his own party. Perhaps he wishes to propose that his party commit itself to leaving the European Union—an idea on which the hon. Gentleman is very keen—and putting the question to the British people in a referendum. That would be the appropriate way to address that absolutely fundamental issue. Meanwhile, I shall make a little progress before provoking some more interventions. Lest the House forget, I was just saying how the ideas moved from being sentiments to legally enforceable mechanisms. The lessons of European history are conspicuous: good will and paper barriers, in and of themselves, are no protection from the perils of authoritarianism. The creation of common minimum standards, backed up by law and enforced by supranational courts—that is the heart of the argument—has turned out to be a powerful guarantee of citizens' rights and freedoms. Britain has played a pivotal role in developing that culture of rights and the idea of human rights across Europe. My point to the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) is that that has been of profound importance in helping to introduce across Europe shared prosperity and stability, from which our own citizens have so benefited. Without not only that culture, but the ability to enforce common standards of human rights, I doubt very much whether we would have seen the extraordinary progress made during the lifetimes of many right hon. and hon. Members, including mine. We have moved from a position in which only a handful of European states could be described as functioning democracies; there were dictatorships not only in eastern Europe but in what we now describe as western Europe. Today, almost every nation meets that description, or is working hard towards it. When I was Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary I was very involved in the expansion of the European Union from 15 to 25 to 27. The key issue was not about bringing the economic performances of the countries joining up to a standard; the key issue for them was to ensure that their human rights provisions were raised to decent standards, in practice as well as theory. Without the bedrock of the European convention on human rights, and the other rights added to it and now described in the charter, that change—from which we have benefited and which was supported by every party in the House—could not have occurred.