Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

We may be getting away from the effectiveness of EU decision making, but I strongly disagree with the hon. Gentleman. He is not being fair to some of the efforts made in Turkey in recent years, although of course it has a long way to go. It is of huge geopolitical importance that the European Union should be able to welcome Turkish membership in the coming years. Obviously, the hon. Gentleman and I will have to disagree on that, but I think that there is agreement in various parts of the House that the treaty will not help with Turkish accession, much though that might fortify the hon. Gentleman's enthusiasm for the treaty. Before those interventions, I was speaking about possible ways of reforming the presidencies of the European Council. The choice that has been made in the treaty is the creation of a permanent president. That is a mistake. If Ministers are sincere in their apparent belief that that will strengthen the role of member states in the EU, their naiveté about how political institutions work is rather alarming. A central institution will necessarily develop different goals and interests from the member states. To claim, as the Minister for Europe did last week, that that is nothing to worry about because there is already a president of the European Council is unconvincing. Having a national Head of Government preside over meetings for six months is not at all the same thing as having an EU figure separate from national Governments in place for at least two and a half years, nor does it convey the ambitious role that the presidency is set to play. One explanatory memorandum submitted to the European Union Committee in another place helpfully set out the president's role in some detail. It is worth taking note of the memorandum as it came from the Government, in the form of the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr. Hain). First, it said, the president is to chair and take forward the European Council's work. That is fairly obvious, but anyone with the slightest familiarity with the way in which political institutions work, which surely includes all of us in the House, knows that whoever chairs a meeting and manages its agenda is, in effect, in charge of it. The chairing of the Cabinet, for instance, is fundamental to the power of the Prime Minister of this country and was part of the development of the power of the Prime Minister. When that meeting is as important as the European Council, it makes its president in his capacity as chairman a very significant figure indeed. As the memorandum goes on, the president would provide"““a much more serious co-ordinating role than can be done by a job that changes every six months””" and would co-ordinate and prepare the work of the General Affairs Council. Taken together, the president would take the lead in setting and running the EU's whole work programme from the Council's side—a crucial role that would play a huge part in deciding what the EU actually does. As we have pointed out before, in the hands of a skilful politician—it would be bizarre to think that future presidents would not be exactly that—the post-holder could use his or her powers to become the leading figure in the European Union. To take the role out of—[Interruption.] If the Government think they will ever succeed in nominating me for that, they have another thing coming. To take the role out of the hands of national Governments holding it by rotation and place it in the hands of a single figure sitting at the Council table not as the representative of a nation state, but in his own right, is a fundamental change to how the EU works and it is one further illustration why there should be a referendum. The presidency is set to play an ambitious role. According to the Government's memorandum, the president's job is"““to increase Europe's global influence””" and to be the person"““to whom the foreign Presidents pick up the phone””." On this, the Government are in happy agreement with the European Commission which, in a briefing paper, explains explicitly that the president is designed to answer Kissinger's famous question, ““Who do I call if I want to call Europe?”” The Government know full well that there are others in Europe putting the case for, eventually, direct election to that position, who believe that the establishment of the position in the treaty will open the way to that in another 10 or 15 years. That would mean a huge shift of political authority away from national Governments, and in the treaty the Government are opening the door to that. Given the importance of the post, it is extraordinary that crucial questions about how it would work in practice, what staff or secretariat would be at its service, and how, given its foreign policy role, it would interact with the High Representative, have yet to be decided after the scrutiny of the treaty has been completed and after we have lost any opportunity to have a further say about it. It was noteworthy that of all witnesses that the Foreign Affairs Committee asked about how the two posts would relate to each other, only the current High Representative thought there would be no problem—an interesting pre-emptive strike in the bureaucratic turf war that the treaty will set in play. It is not helpful to the Government's newly favoured candidate, Mr. Tony Blair, who, it is reported, is interested in the job only if it is sufficiently important, that even his ardent advocate, the Minister for Europe, is unable to tell him whether it is worth his while because its powers have not been defined. The former Prime Minister agreed to create a post whose powers had not been set, but which someone of his abilities could very easily expand. Although the EU's institutions are working, there is no doubt that they could work better. One or two improvements are even in the treaty. We welcome the provision for open voting in the Council of the European Union, and I am pleased that after supporting this move and then opposing it, the Government reverted to their original position. The reduction in the number of Commissioners is also welcome, although it would be naive to represent that as taking some great scythe to European bureaucracy. It is not a cost-free reform, because there would be times when some nations with tens of millions of citizens would have no representative on the European Commission. I suspect that when we come to 2014, that will not be the end of the story. In the light of these modest but welcome changes that were secured, it is particularly regrettable that the reactive way that the Government have approached the matter from the beginning left them unable to secure highly desirable reforms. It is astonishing that the Government made such vast concessions on so many subjects to which they attached great importance in the strongest possible terms, but they were unable to obtain even mild concessions commanding wide-ranging support in the EU, such as the establishment of a single seat for the European Parliament which, by ending the current nonsense of the endless procession between Brussels and Strasbourg, would have saved the European taxpayer €200 million a year.