European Union (Amendment) Bill

I had not intended to speak to this clause, but I shall do so as I was unable to speak in the earlier debates. Today is the first time that I have felt that the Chamber has done its job. It has interrogated the Minister—an old footballing friend whom I congratulate on his courtesy—and we have been able to get to the nub of the issue. I listened to two excellent speeches; one from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) and the other from my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), who made two telling points on fine detail, which is critical. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) that the clause is not necessarily the most important element in the Bill. None the less, we must oppose it for two reasons. First, I agree with my right hon. Friend that previously we have not had the opportunity to undertake the level of scrutiny that was promised to us. I was stupid enough to believe the Prime Minister when he said that we would have line-by-line scrutiny. I did not realise that he meant ““line-by-line”” to mean two lines, rather than every single line of the Bill. I now know what he meant: we would discuss the title and the end of the Bill, and that would be good enough. I never agreed with the nonsense of the Second Reading debate at the beginning of every day and I refused to speak in them because they have ripped the heart out of what the House is about. I came to speak to amendments on defence to which I had attached my name but I was unable to do so. One of the important reasons why we should oppose this and every clause is that none of them so far has had enough debate and scrutiny to allow us to give the right attention to detail. Detail is what we do in this place. I have heard it called petty or trivial detail; the truth is that the House is about detail, and the grandstanding speeches that have been made are less important and less relevant to how the treaty will affect our legislation. The second point was that the clause gives form to a substantial element of change in the treaty; the partial collapse of the pillars, as the Liberal Democrats put it. It seems to me that when a house collapses, it collapses; it can partially collapse or fully collapse, but try living in it afterwards. In this so-called partial collapse, we have collapsed a huge undertaking made at the time of the Maastricht debates. I never believed the Government on the EU anyway, whether Conservative or Labour. I stand by that even today. I think that I was right about this matter. Undertakings were made at the time about what would happen to us subsequently: we were given undertakings that because of the new pillar construct, we would be protected thereafter from any further incursions—the tide had been stemmed and all would be reversed. That cannot honestly be said to be what has happened. Those pillars were pillars not just of the whole process of the EU, but of an argument that said, ““We have reached the high point and thereafter all will be changed.”” We should therefore oppose the clause because it breaks a previous Government’s commitment on the EU treaties. The change from the European Community to the European Union is not a minor one; to be fair, Labour Members have not pretended that it was. It is not just a terminological change, but a major change to how everything flows and the legal context. We should also oppose the clause as it is based on the idea that all that flows from it will come from a kindly Government who will only ever do the right things and make the right changes. I and hon. Friends tabled an amendment to strike out clause 3(6) for that very reason—because the extent of this is almost limitless. Of course the Government will say to us, as all Governments have always said to us, ““You can trust us as we have the best interests of the British nation at heart.”” I am sure that all Governments believe that. I do not think for one moment that the Minister would try to sell the country down the river; he believes that what he is doing is right and that the Government would resist any change. The problem is that there is a natural dimension to this: this whole process of change from within the European Community—now the European Union—has a dimension that overcomes Government resistance. In due course, more and more will change and flow from this, and Governments will go along with it. In fact, we get so casual with secondary legislation that it flows through this place like a river in spate. There is so little that we ever do about it. We nod through measures that we should never nod through. Admittedly, there are good Select Committees that try to pinpoint things that go wrong. The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), the Chairman of one such Committee, is present, and I congratulate him. They are, however, like the little boy with his finger in the dyke. The truth is that we will be overcome—in fact, we are overcome. More and more power is taken away from Members of this House and put into the hands of the Government, and exercised in due course on behalf of the EU. Therefore, I do not trust Governments either of my own persuasion or of the other political persuasion when they say, ““Trust me.”” This House should never trust Governments. That is what we are here for. Why do we sit on these Benches if all we want to do is give way to the Government? We should never trust them for one simple reason. Our history over hundreds of years is bound up in this clause, because it is about us not trusting them; it is about us fighting to take back powers, not about giving them to another body to be exercised via the Government. That is why I feel strongly about the clause, and why we should resist it. It is alien to the entire way we believe we should operate. We were elected here not to trust, but to spell out. Our trust should be placed in the words in front of us, not in what a Government say might be their meaning in 10 years. If we do not believe what their meaning is said to be, but instead believe that they would allow a Government to extend things beyond and far into the future, we should say no. Even if that does not happen, we should say no because that is a power we have no right to give them.