Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I am short of time and cannot take too many interventions. We debated the matter to exhaustion. He could conclude only, rather lamely, that the House should decide such matters, but the whole point about the charter is that we will not decide. We are talking about a bald, unconditional right in the charter, derived from no other document, which takes decision making on those subjects away from the House. It is a matter of democracy, and if the hon. Gentleman refers to Hansard, he will see just how foolish his defence was. There is also the remarkable saga of the opt-out claim to consider. The former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, often said that we had an opt-out, which was completely untrue. That was later corrected, but none of the well-paid officials who helped him issued a correction at the time. The fact is that we do not have an opt-out from the protocol. The European Scrutiny Committee shows, certainly to my satisfaction, that the protocol gives no defence against rights finding their way back into UK law indirectly as a result of our overriding obligation to abide by European Union law. That obligation is asserted elsewhere in the treaty that we are considering, and indeed in existing treaties. The European Scrutiny Committee shows that the protocol on which the Government constantly rely is threadbare. It is certainly fatally weakened. The rights are incredibly general. Human dignity and physical integrity are again supported, and, in general terms, who could be against those concepts? However, they have great relevance to the debate on abortion. Whatever one's views on abortion, I think that we all agree that decisions on the subject should be made by representative Parliaments. We can contrast that with the situation in the United States, where such issues are a matter for judicial decision. That is one of the reasons why people there shoot doctors and try to blow up abortion clinics. Decisions on whether abortion should be restricted or available on demand are, as a constitutional right, made by the Supreme Court, and cannot be changed by Congress; that would require an amendment to the constitution, which is incredibly difficult and cumbersome to achieve. Removing decision making on that subject from the congressional sphere creates more frustration, and less democracy. Exactly the same is true of respect for family life and the right to found a family; they sound fine, but they could easily be applied to issues that the House spends a great deal of time debating, such as the rights of asylum seekers and the extent to which they can be reunited with family members in other countries. At present, they generally cannot be so reunited. Would we like it if debates in the House became irrelevant because such issues were decided for us? The same is true of social rights—the so-called chapter IV rights—which are constantly, and rightly, raised by Labour Members. Those issues should be a matter of contest between ourselves. It is quite wrong that a decision about whether they are adjudicated on in the European Court of Justice depends on whether the protocol is strong, weak, or threadbare, or can be relied on. We know that the European Court of Justice is an activist, interventionist court with its own dynamic. As I pointed out in an intervention, it is not neutral in any dispute between a member state and the European Union institutions. If the treaty is ratified, the ECJ will be required by treaty law to practise mutual sincere co-operation. I would never go to court if I knew that the court had to practise mutual sincere co-operation with my legal opponent, but that is the situation in Europe. If our protocol is under attack from the European Union, the arbitrating court has a duty to co-operate not with the member state but with the Commission, or whatever the European Union constitution involved. The fact is that human rights are incredibly complex. They often involve conflicts and trade-offs. A balance has to be struck between competing rights, and that should be done here in Parliament. Of course we sign up to overriding international rights to moderate the behaviour of states internationally; that is what the European convention on human rights did, which we signed in 1950. The charter, however, does something quite different: it drills down into member states' law-making processes. It will interfere with and replace decisions that we should make here. It is a further massive transfer of power and authority from the House to another jurisdiction, and people know that. They will cease to come and lobby us about their rights—about whether those rights should be extended, or whether the competing rights of, say, employers and employees should be removed or strengthened. They will not bother to do that. They will not vote for us if they know that those essential decisions are not made by us in Parliament. There is evidence that that already happens. There is disillusionment with the political process. Let us not pretend that the loss of democracy here somehow creates democracy in the European Union, because turnout has declined in every single European Parliament election since 1979. The disillusionment is continent wide. The public are simply losing faith in the ability of elected people to influence decisions and outcomes affecting their lives. Again, in the section of the treaty that we are discussing, we are being invited to transfer more powers from the House. The Government were well aware of that danger, and that is precisely why they fought the proposals all the way through the Convention process. The Convention became the constitution, and when that was turned down, the Government fought the proposals in the new treaty. The safeguards and reassurances given are almost worthless; that is the conclusion of the European Scrutiny Committee's report. That is why I invite the House to support the amendment this evening.