Treaty of Lisbon (No. 4)

It would have been better if the hon. Gentleman had waited until the end of my speech. I shall give way to him once he has heard my whole argument. We now see a consensus on the Single European Act. That Act did indeed establish qualified majority voting to complete the market, but the problem is—and it is also a problem for the hon. Gentleman—that it did not stop there, as far as the European Union was concerned. We now see, particularly in this treaty, an extension of qualified majority voting into fields far beyond the single market. I asked the Secretary of State what proportion of our law came from the EU, and he did not know. I am not sure that he would know how much of our law is determined by qualified majority voting either. The ink was barely dry on the Single European Act when the process began that led to the treaty of Maastricht, to which the hon. Gentleman also alluded, and the Conservative Government of the day, very much to their credit, negotiated to put in place the safeguard of a pillar structure. The ink was barely dry on the treaty when the European institutions moved to new ground and set about collapsing the pillars. We moved on—this is the real answer to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon)—to the European area of justice, freedom and security, more developments in the common European foreign and security policy, and developments that we were told might lead to common European defence. We then came to the long list of policy areas that the treaty contains. The right hon. Member for Holborn and St. Pancras (Frank Dobson) gave a good example. He complained that the health service would not be the sole responsibility of the House and was worried about the influence of US health corporations. Whatever our view of the Single European Act, we must ask whether it was the genuine aim of the European Union or simply a tool to accomplish other, different objectives. That is a live debate in Europe—perhaps it should be heard more in this country. The outcome of the negotiations on the treaty provided one answer to that debate. After the French no, the Government experienced the humiliation of ““competition… free and undistorted”” being removed from the list of the objectives at the beginning and put into the protocol at the back. The Government are trying to get round that political humiliation with an argument based on legal technicalities about the effect of law in the protocols and law in the body of treaty. The objective was moved expressly and deliberately through the intervention of the French Government. It was at the beginning of the treaty and would have determined the shape of the EU and the shape of things to come. Our Government's negotiations on that failed and we suffered the humiliation, which has been trumpeted in France and many other parts of the EU, that free and undistorted competition is not the EU's objective. Whatever the legal force of the Government's achievement, it is not the same as having competition as an objective. Time and again, the Government return to the House from negotiations and try to put a brave face on their defeats. They have had to accept provisions that they opposed and subsequently performed contortions, with Ministers describing them in the House as a great step forward and good for the country while simultaneously introducing proposals to ensure that they would not apply here. Historians will have an interesting time investigating the background of and motivation for the UK negotiating position last June and earlier, when the rebate was lost. My hon. Friends talk of incompetence and it may be part of the historians' remit to investigate that. However, such failure is partly inherent in the UK's relationship with the supranational authority of the EU. It is a shame that Ministers cannot admit the truth to the House: sometimes, because of the nature of the institution, they cannot get their way in negotiations and they have not been able to secure what they and this country's electorate would have preferred. We must therefore be careful and jealous of the power of the House. We must be careful about the matters for which we permit the EU to exercise power over our electorate. Power is either exercised here, where we are accountable to our constituents and Governments are accountable to the people, or it is not. In the latter case, it is exercised elsewhere and the relevant authority is not so accountable. We sometimes pretend that, in the history of our relationship with the EU, there is some huge, underground storage facility beneath the House, containing unexercised and undistributed power. I reiterate that power is exercised either here or in Europe, by a supranational authority, over which we have limited ability to shape what takes place. Of course, we go to the limit of that ability, but it is not the same as national parliamentary accountability. That is the shame of our current proceedings, which are a travesty. We have been denied line-by-line consideration of the treaty. There could be no more compelling evidence of the way in which power has passed from the House and the House has been degraded. That is to the House's discredit.