Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

No. I am saying that that should have been one of the Government's negotiating objectives, but they never raised a whisper about that in the treaty negotiations, while giving up many other points that they had tried initially to defend. To illustrate the point further, we do not tire of pointing out that the Government objected in the strongest terms to much of the content of the treaty. The delineation of competences, to which I have already referred briefly, is yet another example. The Government's chief negotiator described the article on shared competences as the ““worst of all worlds””. There were repeated failed attempts to have the wording changed from what the right hon. Member for Neath described as an ““illustrative but not exhaustive”” list. Far from providing certainty as to what powers are the EU's and what powers are member states', the treaty, reproducing the Commission's text word for word, allows a vagueness that can only tend to allow the EU's institutions to enlarge their competence at member states' expense. It was not just how the EU's competences were delineated that the Government objected to, but their distribution. In repeated failed amendments the Government objected at the Convention to making competition an exclusive EU competence. It should be a shared competence, they insisted. They said that if the Community had exclusive competence in that area,"““the Member States would have no power to . . . establish rules to promote competition.””" All those objections apply equally today, but it is in the treaty. The Government also strongly and repeatedly objected to what is now proposed new article 2B(2) of the treaty, which provides for the EU to have exclusive competence to conclude international agreements under a range of circumstances. They rightly called for the deletion of that article, pointing out on this doctrine of implied competence:"““This is currently case law. Attempting to codify it in this way results in oversimplification. So best left for case law. All the caveats that would be required to make this accurate would also make it far too complex for a Constitution””," yet it remains in the text. Absent, too, is the caveat that the Government called for on the common commercial policy.