European Union (Amendment) Bill

I will come to the external action service issues in a moment. On the specific point, I refer the hon. Gentleman to the report of the Foreign Affairs Committee on choices made by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to close, for example, the high commissions in Lesotho and Swaziland and to concentrate representation in Pretoria. It is not only in Africa but in some of the Pacific Commonwealth countries where we no longer have diplomatic representation. The Chinese, however, are all over the place. The Committee has raised that issue consistently in recent years. It is wrong that we no longer have that level of representation, and that is a matter for the Treasury, which needs to provide more resources to the FCO. It also reflects the difficult choice that the FCO has to make on resources to provide greater security and more posts in certain countries. For example, we have a big new embassy in Afghanistan. The other change is the development of the role of the high representative—now correctly named. The role was never that of a European Union Foreign Minister. That was always an absurdity, because the EU is not a state and it does not need the terminology of a state. We do not have a Foreign Minister or a Foreign Ministry: we have the external action service and a high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. It is important that all hon. Members and people who write about our proceedings use the correct terminology. If those people who oppose the development of a ““European super-state”” start using the wrong language, they may mislead people into thinking that something exists when it does not. We have, as the Foreign Affairs Committee pointed out clearly in its report, an intergovernmental approach to foreign policy, and it is clearly stated that such matters are dealt with on the basis of agreement between the 27 member states. We can go further. The Committee concluded that the changes in the Lisbon treaty do not risk undermining the common foreign and security policy's intergovernmental nature. Indeed, there is a greater shift towards the member states, not away from them, in some aspects of foreign policy.