European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful to be following the speech of the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, South-West (Rob Marris), whose legal mind made powerful points—although the copies of the text do not always seem to be the same. I was excited at this, day No. 6 of the Committee of the Whole House on the European Union (Amendment) Bill. I thought that, for the first time, there would be something to encourage me to support the treaty. The Government have led on the criticism of the failure of the European Union to deliver aid to the least developed countries in the world. They have been highly critical of the failure in the Doha round. In my view, the greatest failure of the European Union has been the damage that it has done to developing countries—it has been criminal how it has blocked access to markets that would relieve poverty across the world. It seems strange that the Lisbon treaty will not improve the development aid situation, but make it worse. It seems incredible that instead of strengthening the role of development aid within the EU, we are going to make it a subsection of foreign policy. The high representative will run around trying to build empires and influence people, and will undoubtedly use the aid budget to implement foreign policy. Amendment No. 245 seems a mild one that would improve the treaty; I do not think anyone on the Government side could argue against it. All it basically says is that the aid budget should remain unaffected by the high commissioner or high representative—given what many people think of the post, we could call him the effective Foreign Secretary.