European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am simply making the point—I am not trying to avoid the ruling—that, ultimately, I had to say:"““We must learn to live in the modern world… of protectionist pressures””," which are inherent in the problems of exclusive and shared competence that we are considering today. I continued:"““We must bear in mind the consequences of giving legal effect to the proposals in the Single Act. The European Court of Justice will be involved. We must be sure that we know what we are doing. Who will control it all? The Government? Parliament? The Commission?””—[Official Report, 23 April 1986; Vol. 96, c. 378-9.]" By Parliament, I meant this Parliament. I simply wanted to get that point on the record. I repent because it has become abundantly clear from all our debates in the past few days that the European Court of Justice and our inability to invade the acquis communautaire, unless we have a ““notwithstanding”” formula, will prevent us from achieving our objectives. The Lisbon agenda has been mentioned several times and I especially commend the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr. Harper), who enlarged the debate to encompass subjects that matter. The internalisation of the market is in the framework of the current proposals. We are dealing with an internal market but also with protectionism within it. There have been several exchanges about Mr. Sarkozy's comments. Our main objectives should be to look outwards, as my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean said, to a globalised economy, as I attempted to predict—I believe correctly—some 20 years ago in 1986. I believed that the single market was intended to operate in that way. It has not worked in that way. Indeed, it has internalised, not externalised and it has therefore failed. That is why the Lisbon agenda has failed. The Minister for Europe is not personally responsible for the documents that relate to the Lisbon agenda, which were submitted to the European Scrutiny Committee in January. However, he is representing the Government and I simply want to repeat the European Scrutiny Committee's comments about those documents. We were given an analysis and I am sorry to say that we had to be critical of the Government's response to them. In a nutshell, we said that the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury could not justify the report that she gave. That related to the entire Lisbon agenda and every single matter dealing with competition policy and the re-launching of all the initiatives that had failed since 2000, in respect of which Will Hutton, the rapporteur and an extremely distinguished economist, made some critical comments to the European Reform Forum, which I helped to initiate. We in the Committee said that the degree of explanation in the"““two…paragraphs in the Treasury's Explanatory Memorandum, one of which is little more than an elaboration of the titles of the seven documents and annexes concerned, is a wholly inadequate description of the content of the almost 400 pages of these papers.””" The Committee asked the Exchequer Secretary to ensure that the documents would explain things properly in the future, and so on. I mention that because it is made clear in the documents that those who run the European Community are aware of a thing called reform fatigue. There is a reluctance to tackle issues that require reform, and we are not getting the reform required. Let me turn to the question of exclusive competence—I shall deal with shared competence in a minute. The article in question—article 2B—concerns the enhanced approach through which the Union will grab and maintain new areas of exclusive competence. In particular, it will dictate competition rules. We heard an interesting speech from the erstwhile temporary leader of the Liberal Democrats, the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable), but as I pointed out to him, he missed the main point. Although he explained the layer upon layer of development of the internal market, the reality is that we have reached an apex and have to retrieve the situation in order to prevent the overregulation that is literally destroying British business and European business, too. In fact, the leviathan has engulfed the European single market. That is the problem, and it cannot be changed except by invading those regulations and the acquis communautaire, and by ensuring that we reform all the regulations—