European Union (Amendment) Bill

It is a great pleasure to follow those of my hon. Friends who have spoken to this amendment. Their feeling for the House, and their commitment to parliamentary democracy, is self-evident and beyond peradventure. It is a particular pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash), who made a most careful speech in support of amendment No. 60. I very much support that amendment, and also amendment No. 20, which was moved so ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). The Minister has quite a weighty responsibility in answering the arguments in support of the amendments. They are so strong that he will have to argue very convincingly if he is to do them justice. He will correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that the amendments could be passed without putting this country's ratification of the treaty in doubt. We could ratify the treaty and still adopt the amendments, which offer a much stronger safeguard than the one in the Bill, to whose weaknesses various hon. Members have rightly drawn attention. My concern is that the passerelle provisions will mean that constitutional change will come thick and fast. In an earlier debate, I put it to the Minister that they made constitutional change much easier to accomplish than at present. In fairness to the Minister—who has been very fair in these debates—I think that he accepts that. I have another question in the same vein: does the Minister believe that constitutional change will happen much more often under the passerelle provisions than it has in the past? I suspect that he does. The passerelle provisions mean that there is no need for any of the paraphernalia and rigmarole—that is, an intergovernmental conference, its associated mandate and a lengthy process of ratification—that have accompanied a constitutional treaty in the past. They also mean that no spotlight of attention will focus on the treaty and the package of changes that it contains. Instead, change will come before the House on a case-by-case basis. As the Bill stands, that change will be subject to a most lightweight parliamentary procedure. Why cannot we have primary legislation on this matter? At least such legislation would embody and highlight change and make it transparent, so that everyone could see what was happening. It would also mean that this House had an opportunity to debate the change in full. As far as I am concerned, these amendments—even if the Government accepted them—could be only second best. That is because I simply do not want the provisions in the treaty of Lisbon that enable the proposed changes to be made. I do not like the treaty: some parts may not be as bad as others but, on balance, I do not want it to be brought into law. I think that the treaty marks a sea change in this country's relationship with the EU, and that it will result in much faster incremental change than in the past. Earlier, I was challenged by a Liberal Democrat Member to say whether there was anything in the treaty that I liked. I shall have another look through it, but I shall make the following deal with the Liberal Democrats. If I were given a choice between keeping the European flag and anthem and getting rid of the rest of the treaty, I would not have much hesitation about keeping the flag and the anthem. I would run up the European flag—I would have to build the flagpole first—and I would learn how to hum the anthem. I would much rather adopt all that than the provisions in the treaty. The passerelle clauses are very important because they make change much easier to accomplish and, as a result, it will come thick and fast. Some people in Britain are worried about the amount of incremental change that has happened already. Various Labour Members talked earlier about how the democratic deficit had caused power and authority to slip away to a political elite in Europe. However, if the passerelle clauses operate as I fear that they will, there will be many more instances of power slipping away to Brussels, bit by bit and case by case, on an incremental basis. People are worried about the steady drip of power and authority away from this country and this Parliament, and towards Europe. However, if they are worried about what has happened through conventional treaties—and many would say that those treaties led to enough incremental change—there is one message that they need to bear in mind: if the passerelle clauses are allowed to operate without a proper safeguard, they ain't seen nothing yet.