Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

It is a great pleasure to follow the Lib Dems, who I am sure will still be basking in the glory of getting the headline that they were thrown out of the Chamber for demanding a referendum. I just wish that they had demanded one on the real question, which is whether we agree with this treaty. I want to confine my comments to national Parliaments. I went to Brussels in February 2002 and rather foolishly agreed to represent national Parliaments at the Convention on the Future of Europe. I confess that if I had imagined I would still be talking about it six years on, I would have chosen a different job, but there we are. I want people to think back to the debates we had on the role of national Parliaments. Front Benchers keep saying that the treaty gives more power to national Parliaments, but that is based on an interesting definition of what amounts to power. There are three different strands to the debate. Do I argue that national Parliaments should become a separate institution within the institutional framework of the European Union? No, I do not. We should have the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers representing Governments. I am not an advocate of a system whereby national Parliaments—ours or any other—habitually arrive at a different view from their own Governments. That does not mean that such an outcome should be precluded, but a system in which it is seen to be the function of Parliaments to oppose their own Governments would seem rather absurd. There is, however, a role for national Parliaments to scrutinise and to monitor a principle that seems extraordinarily important: the principle of subsidiarity and proportionality. When the working group on national Parliaments was first set up, and the issue of subsidiarity was brought up, an old hand who was a legal adviser during the Maastricht negotiations muttered to me, ““Oh, that's the dud they sold to Major.”” John Major returned from the Maastricht negotiations saying, ““We have negotiated a protocol on subsidiarity and proportionality; we should keep the two together. This will mean that Brussels will never have any influence on anything that is not appropriate at EU level.”” He confidently predicted that 25 per cent. of the legislation coming from Brussels would be rescinded because it breached that principle. Whitehall looked at the matter, but nothing happened. I thought something similar was going on when the two working groups were split so that one considered only subsidiarity. That group came back with the idea of the yellow and orange card, but rejected our proposals on the red card, which would have had some significance. National Parliaments were dealt with by a separate group, so there was a division. During the negotiations, the Commission started saying that subsidiarity is very important and, mysteriously, the figure of 25 per cent. came up again. Again, nothing happened. When we inquired whether the Commission could come up with a single example of when it had withdrawn a proposal because it breached the principle of subsidiarity, it could come up with only one—in 10 years. It was one of the bright ideas put forward during a UK presidency, when we proposed an EU zoo directive, which would have regulated the water temperature for sealions. Even the rest of Europe thought that that was slightly wacky, and it was thrown out. One example in 10 years does not suggest to me that this is an important, meaningful or effective mechanism.