Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

I shall make some progress and then, of course, give way to hon. Members who want to intervene. I will set out the main changes under each category shortly. However, I first want to remind the House that institutional reform of the EU is not new. Indeed, it is one of the few constants of almost every EU treaty. The European Economic Community started in 1957 with an institutional framework designed to meet the needs of a club of six member states. It had a Commission, a rotating presidency, Community competences and a legal personality. However, at each stage of development, faced with fresh challenges, member states have adapted the EU's institutions and decision making to address those new challenges. There has therefore been continuing reform of the EU's institutions and decision making. In the 1980s, faced with economic underperformance and the challenge of making a reality of the single market, the member states, with this country in the lead, introduced a widespread extension of qualified majority voting. In its effects, that was perhaps the most radical change to European decision making. However, as the Government of Baroness Thatcher recognised at the time, those major moves to QMV were in the UK's national interest. Without that, the single market could not have been created. As Baroness Thatcher said in a speech in the other place in 1993:"““we would never have got the single market without an extension... of majority voting... we wanted a single market and we had, in fact, to have some majority voting.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 June 1993; Vol. 546, c. 562.]" Foreign and security policy, co-operation in justice and home affairs and the process of creating the euro was part of the reform that the Maastricht treaty enabled. That treaty introduced the concept of co-decision with the European Parliament and moved important policy areas to QMV, including education, public health, transport safety, development co-operation and consumer protection. Some, including Baroness Thatcher, felt that the Maastricht treaty went even further than the Single European Act in transferring decision-making powers to European level. Maastricht, according to Baroness Thatcher, ““is much, much wider”” than the Single European Act.