Treaty of Lisbon (No. 5)

I am of the opinion that when all the parties in the House have committed themselves to a referendum, that referendum should be granted. That makes this case wholly different from any previous case from 1998, 1992 or whenever else. In the general elections that preceded those occasions, no party had committed itself to a referendum on the European treaty. In this Parliament, every party committed itself to a referendum on a European treaty. The Government cannot therefore mount any credible argument that a difference in the provisions in the treaty from the provisions in the constitution absolves them from their referendum commitment. They can argue instead only that the provisions are relatively unimportant or are small improvements—that would seem to be the gist of the Foreign Secretary's case—that would not merit a referendum in any case. That argument, however, comes up against three major problems. The first is that it is generally agreed by observers who set out to be impartial that in this area the treaty makes important changes. The Foreign Affairs Committee of our own House noted that"““the Government risks underestimating, and certainly is downplaying in public, the importance and potential of the new foreign policy institutions established by the Lisbon Treaty, namely the new High Representative and the European External Action Service.””" Last week, Mr. Andrew Duff, who is the leader of the Liberal Democrat MEPs, said:"““The Treaty has large potential and a dramatic impact in the field of common foreign and security policy.””" Secondly, it has emerged that important decisions about how exactly the foreign and defence provisions will be implemented are being held back until ratification in this country, in particular, has been completed. The decisions, for instance, about the role of the president of the European Council in foreign policy and the roll-out of the EU diplomatic service, as well as those about the nature of the all-important structured co-operation in defence, will only be taken later, according to the leaked memo from the Slovenian presidency written on 16 January, when they will no longer be subject to the scrutiny of this Parliament, let alone the people of this country. Those decisions are clearly of huge importance. Indeed, there is a prospect that the scene is being set for a serious turf war between the president of the Council and the high representative—not a clever thing to build into any constitution, and not something that suggests that their roles will be unimportant. The third difficulty for the Government in making their case is that the changes on foreign policy and defence brought in by the treaty were important enough for the vast majority of them to have been strongly opposed by the Government. The background to that is that for many years there has been instinctive agreement across the House about the relationship of the European Union to foreign policy. The Foreign Secretary gave voice to some of this in his speech. We have all been in favour of member states of the EU working together on foreign policy issues on an intergovernmental and consensus basis. The need to do so in the years to come—for instance, hopefully, in relation to the Balkans and in dealing with the foreign policy challenges presented by Russia—is clear. In common with the Government, we wish that there was a more effective and forceful unity of foreign policy approach from EU members.