Treaty of Lisbon (No. 6)

I agree, as a matter of fact. The problem is that this is an issue of enormous importance. I do not want to give the impression, any more than my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells does, that the Conservatives are not genuinely interested in the developing world and third-world problems. The Under-Secretary of State for International Development, the hon. Member for Harrow, West (Mr. Thomas), who is now in the Chamber, knows that I, and other Conservative Back-Bench Members, dedicate a great deal of our time to trying to deal with these questions. The Secretary of State was kind enough to refer to my work on the all-party group on water and sanitation in the third world, of which I have the honour to be chairman. An early-day motion on that subject was signed by 250 Members of Parliament, while 310 supported my early-day motion on the reduction of third-world debt. Why? There is all-party recognition that the subject is incredibly important. It is utterly unacceptable that people should die needlessly in developing countries. It is appalling and disgraceful that a child dies every 15 seconds for lack of proper water. That is unacceptable, and it is essential that the Opposition, as well as the Government and the Liberal Democrats, should fight to ensure that we have policies that work. Against that background, I am deeply worried about the manner in which the EU functions on aid. Irrespective of our belief that help and the eradication of poverty should remain at the heart of our policy making, the EU is not the mechanism for achieving that. All the evidence points in the other direction. We heard my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells eloquently express the fact that the documents that he elicited were left blank. We know that the European Court of Auditors has issued a number of reports over an extended period to demonstrate that the way in which EU aid is delivered is not good enough. We know that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Clare Short), when she was Secretary of State for International Development, was deeply critical of the way in which the EU functioned in relation to her responsibilities. I do not believe that what she said at that time had anything to do with the Iraq war. It was just an objective assessment of how she saw the operation being conducted under the aegis of the EU. Why would I be concerned about the specific obligations imposed under the treaty? For example, as I said in an earlier intervention, and as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells mentioned, the fact that the treaty arrangements provide for exclusive competence in this field is a retrograde step. Exclusive competence, for those who have the faintest idea about the EU—not for those who pretend that they do not know, allow these processes to continue and then pretend that our Parliament and our Government have some residual ability in to legislate—means that states cannot legislate in that field. It means that the ability of this House and its better means of delivering the objectives that we all seem to share—with the proviso that we, for our part, would like to exclude exclusive competence, as the Government intended—are contracted out. I wish that some Members of this House would be honest enough to realise that they are effectively conning the British people when they pretend that they are improving the lot of people in the third world, when this exclusive competence will mean that we will no longer be able to make provision to help the people whom we all agree need help.