Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman twice, and half of the debate has gone by, so I want to skip through much of what I was going to say. If we take these matters together—this movement of competences, the creation of the single legal personality, the creation of the presidency, the abolition of intergovernmental safeguards on criminal justice and policing, and the EU's new powers and role in foreign policy and defence, which we discussed last week—this paves the way for a more powerful role for the EU at the expense of nation states across the board. This enhancement of the EU's powers should be of particular concern to the House, because for the first time an EU treaty seems to impose—the Minister discussed this in his speech and it can be argued in different directions—a legal duty on national Parliaments to the EU. He partly had that debate earlier with the Chairman of the Scrutiny Committee, so I will not go further into that now. It should be a matter of deep regret to Ministers that national Parliaments, which, for all their faults, are the one institution to which the peoples of Europe feel clear attachment and ownership, are the big losers in the renamed EU constitution. The loss of what even the Minister now admits comes to a total of more than 50 national vetoes, the expansion of the EU's powers over criminal justice, and all the other provisions that we have debated in broad outline over the past days, add up to a substantial loss of power for the House. More and more decisions will be made at the EU level over which the House will have little control, leaving our constituents, the voters, with fewer meaningful political levers to pull to secure their views and interests. In a century and a society where people feel that decisions are taken too remotely, it will mean that more of those decisions are taken more remotely still. All that national Parliaments have in compensation is one very small step to the better monitoring of EU proposals in the so-called orange card on subsidiarity. We welcome the small move that it represents, but we must be realistic about how little it means. The German constitutional court described the provision last week as ineffective and impractical. Given the indifference with which the Government have treated the views and input of Parliament and public in their negotiations on the treaty, and their utter disregard for their election promises, we have every right to be cynical about the Government's intentions on openness and accountability in the EU and the future use of these powers. We look forward with interest to the Government's response to our amendments next week on the ratchet clause, which will ensure that no more national vetoes could be abolished without primary legislation. If they and other parties are at all sincere in their claims to support parliamentary control and scrutiny over the Executive's actions in the EU, they will support that amendment. I have touched briefly on the weighted voting procedures as they would affect Turkish accession and I will leave it to my hon. Friends and others to debate those in more detail, as I have already been speaking for half an hour. When taken as a whole, the treaty is not needed by an EU that is coping with enlargement well enough. It does little to improve the EU's efficiency or its decision-making processes, while failing to deal with some issues that do need reform. It weakens still further the role of national Parliaments and above all shifts power away from member states to the EU's central institutions. Its provisions are not in the British interest, nor are they what the Government wanted. Its contents are a testimony to the weakness of the Government's negotiating skills and their want of vision for Europe. Where Europe needs flexibility, the treaty brings rigidity, and where it needs to change to let power flow from the bottom up, it gathers it to political institutions remote from electorates. It is a document born of a political vision for Europe out of place in the 21st century. The whole European project would benefit from its rejection, but, most importantly, its importance and profound effects on the way that this country is governed, merit a decision of the British people in the referendum that they were promised.