European Union (Amendment) Bill

It is certainly true that a strong body of the press articulates vitriolic hostility to the European Union and to this treaty, and such comment is not always as informed as it might be. The comfort that I find is that I wonder how many people buy the red tops for the political comment, rather than for the coverage of media personalities, the world of sport and footballers’ wives. That is quite legitimate, and occasionally all of us enjoy a surreptitious glance to relieve some of the rigours—[Interruption.] I invite colleagues in Portcullis House to look in the corner room where the newspapers are stacked and observe how rapidly they disappear through the course of the day. It is not always the coffee machine that people are in pursuit of. We constantly wring our hands about the decline of Parliament and its impotence in the face of the Executive. The real issue is the balance of power not between us and the European Union or between Parliament and the people outside, but between the Executive, whom we send into government, and elected representatives in Parliament itself. My party is devoting a huge amount of energy to looking at how we might redress the balance in the way in which our democratic processes work in the Westminster village. That is a far more urgent task than dealing with some of the fears that we are expressing at the moment. In the last debate in which I spoke, I said that the Eurosceptic motto might be:"““Present fears""Are less than horrible imaginings””." I apologise for attributing that to Milton; if I were better read, I would have realised that it comes from Macbeth. If we have a referendum on this treaty, how should I argue to my constituents about other things on which we might hold a referendum? What about detention without trial? That fundamental issue of civil liberties has far greater implications for our liberties than anything contained in this treaty. I am an old-fashioned liberal—I am sorry about that—who, in a sense, echoes Roy Jenkins’s view that there were many merits to the permissive society. If we move from representative government to government by plebiscite, how much of the architecture of the liberal and tolerant society would be demolished? I do not disagree with the thesis that there will be once-in-a-lifetime occasions when referendums are necessary. Our joining the European Union and the subsequent endorsement of that was a key point. I accept that if we were to join the single currency, it would be a sufficiently dramatic change as to require the endorsement of the people and the legitimacy that that would confer. I note that one of the biggest changes that has affected this House is devolution. Indeed, we constantly complain about the way in which the balance of power in this Chamber has been shifted by devolution, the creation of a Parliament in Scotland and an Assembly in Wales and the process in Northern Ireland. Some 85 per cent. of the British people were not consulted on the transfer of power that that brought about. This treaty is not a great breaking point or a hinge of our contemporary history; it is, broadly speaking, tidying up. It contains a lot of common sense, and five years down the road people will wonder whether all the terrible things that were supposed to flow from it actually happened—I suspect that they will not have happened. If we say no to the treaty, the European Union will not collapse and Britain will not be expelled. Europe is jolly good at muddling through. As soon as one negotiation is completed, Europe is condemned to begin the next negotiation. The one thing that cannot be done sensibly is to walk away from the negotiations, because the process is ongoing and grinding. The extent to which it works and what comes out of it at the end is amazing. We should not assume that we are in the same position as three or four years ago at the point of the French and the Dutch referendums, because things have moved on and a renegotiation has taken place. It would be seriously dislocating for the UK to find itself demanding that process again, and it would also be seriously dislocating for my party. I believe that my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) will be the next Prime Minister, and when we look at this directionless and purposeless Government, that becomes increasingly plausible and desirable. It would not be in my right hon. Friend’s interests to inherit an intractable time and energy-sapping dispute with the European Union and to have it hanging over his head, so it is in my party’s interests that this business is dispatched and that we move on to new business. If we do not move on, he would have to deal with nagging voices on the Conservative Benches and in the party seeking to question the whole issue of Britain’s membership of the European Union. He would need three hands to deal with not only the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe in the short term and the treaty, but a bigger issue that would begin to emerge and that would threaten the success of his first term as Prime Minister. I want him to have his hands free to deal with the hugely important and urgent things that a Conservative Government would need to address. Equally, I think that the European Union needs no more treaty making within the foreseeable future, because other agendas such as climate change, migration and asylum, which will flow largely from climate change, terrorism, competition and the protection of the role of developing countries in a global economy. Nothing assures us that the European Union will deal with such agendas, but the treaty gives it a better chance of doing so, if the political will exists. We should start by dispatching the Lisbon treaty in this House, where the decision making belongs, for ratification across the European Union. We would then be able to move on to the agendas pressing on us—how the UK governs itself and how Europe can better represent the interests of all the citizens of Europe, which it increasingly encompasses.