European Union (Amendment) Bill

It will not be a surprise to the hon. Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) that there will never be common ground between us on the high representative and the development of the common foreign and security policy. I am sure that the authors of the BOND paper will be delighted by the slightly higgledy-piggledy manner in which every bit of it seems to have been quoted this afternoon. In the previous debate, I used one of the quotations that the hon. Gentleman cited, so I do not think that it is a killer quotation in favour of his broader point. I say to the hon. Gentleman that one big thing that we press for all the time is greater co-ordination—within the United Kingdom, in the European Union and in other multilateral institutions. We want better co-ordination among political foreign policy objectives, development issues and, where relevant, defence matters. As the hon. Member for Glasgow, North (Ann McKechin) said, the lines between some of those matters are necessarily blurred on occasion. I wonder whether we should be a bit more pragmatic in our approach to the high representative and the other aspects of the new CFSP arrangements, notwithstanding my having asked in the previous debate for some reassurances on the high representative having administrative staff dedicated to this area. We have the prospect of a proper focus on poverty alleviation at the heart of the treaty, which is a pretty good guarantee that it will remain the major focus of development assistance and a vast improvement on what we had before. Finally, will the hon. Gentleman consider the example of Kosovo, because I am not sure where he would put that on the great spectrum of development, foreign policy and defence-type issues? Although it is clear that a proportion of its population has to endure extreme poverty, Kosovo would not usually meet the benchmarks for most recognised assessments of extreme poverty. However, in the context of the past couple of weeks, surely we have an ongoing responsibility to Kosovo. The new set of arrangements will allow us to meet that, but a much more clear-cut separation regarding development would not.