European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I am a member of the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Grenfell, and therefore I cannot pay tribute to the quality of his report. I can, however, pay tribute to the quality of his chairmanship, his stamina and his patience with his committee. I have three other interests to declare and then three points to make. The first interest is that I was a member of the negotiating team on the single market. The team included Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe—now the noble Lord, Lord Lawson of Blaby, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe of Aberavon—and was led by Margaret Thatcher. What a pleasure it was to see the noble Baroness back in her place again earlier today. The single market team was effective partly because it worked with the late Lord Cockfield in the Commission and partly because it united the Government. It was an all-out effort. Later, I was a member of the teams, led by Prime Ministers Major and Blair, that worked on enlargement. That, too, had been a priority of the Conservative Government. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, referred to the Bruges speech. We should remember the bit of it that is most recalled in eastern Europe—the part where Margaret Thatcher spoke movingly about the great cities and civilisations of central Europe and about how they, too, must be brought into the Union. We believed then, as I do now, that finishing the uncompleted task of achieving free movement of goods, services, capital and labour throughout Europe, from Aberdeen to Athens and from Tallinn to Tyneside, was, and is, a noble cause, in the EU and British interest, and one that demanded the help not just of an effective European Commission, impartial and well organised, but also of an effective European Council. The European Council was the instrument that the three Prime Ministers for whom I worked used so well. The second interest that I have to declare is that I spent 36 years in the Diplomatic Service, gradually convincing myself that advancing and protecting British values and maintaining the Commonwealth and the transatlantic links that spring from, and are nourished by, these values, is best done when a united European Union acts as a multiplier of British influence. Talk of a choice between an Atlanticist and a continental, European policy, which was the subject of debate in the Foreign Office of my youth, is overtaken now: the dichotomy is a false one. Our global interests and our global reach give our views added weight in debate in Brussels, and we cut far more ice in Washington and do far more good for our Commonwealth friends when we have the backing of a united European Union. Therefore, I declare an interest, and a conviction, that the more cohesive and effective the European Union, the better for the United Kingdom. The last interest that I have to declare is somewhat personal and probably explains why I am unaccustomedly and briefly promoted to so high a position on the speakers list. I am the Derby County of the day: expect not to see me again so highly placed. When the noble Lords, Lord Maclennan of Rogart and Lord Tomlinson, were speaking for this House with the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Scotland of Asthal, in the European convention in 2002-03, I too was there—not speaking but scribbling. Some of the formulae that we shall be debating in the weeks ahead are mine; surprisingly. They survived the scrutiny not just of the convention but of the intergovernmental conference. Therefore, I declare an interest and am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Howell, recognises that interest. Unlike him, I cannot claim to have sat at Jean Monnet’s feet, but I draw his attention to the importance of reforming the European Council. First, I want to mention three things that it seems to me might make the European Union work a little better as a result of the treaty. They are all features that emerged from the convention. The European Council was invented by Chancellor Schmidt and President Giscard d’Estaing 30 years ago. In the 1980s and very early 1990s, it was the motor of the European Union; but it is now seizing up. Bringing heads of government together in a small room for direct debate with no audience of officials had worked well. It solved the British budget problem at Fontainebleau and the Spanish budget problem at Edinburgh. It also drove forward Lord Cockfield’s single market plan. However, what worked with nine or 12 in the room worked less well with 15 and works rather badly with 27. Gone is the tradition of the chairman in office making a tour of capitals before each meeting of the European Council. How can he when there are 26 other capitals to visit? The reform which brings a fixed-term, full-time President of the European Council will make the Council work better, and I profoundly believe that that is in the UK’s interests. It was opposed by the heirs of Monnet: it was opposed by the Belgian and Luxembourg Governments. The grounds of their opposition in the convention was that the new President of the European Council would overshadow the President of the Commission. They may turn out to be right, I do not know—time will tell—but certainly the European Council was never a part of Jean Monnet’s plan and the idea of the President of the European Council being full time and fixed term would have come as a surprise to him. Perhaps that is why it is opposed by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. He may be concerned that the Commission will be overshadowed by the member states in the Council. My second example is about voting rules. I need say no more, as the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, has drawn attention to the importance of the change in the voting system, which increases the British voting weight in the Council by 50 per cent. That is not the only reason why the reform is the right thing to do; it is important for democratic legitimacy that there should be a closer correlation between population and voting weight. Over time, as more issues move to qualified majority voting—as some do in this treaty, although not nearly as many as in the Single European Act and the treaty of Maastricht—it will be increasingly important that the system of voting should be legitimate. I think that the change effected in this treaty brings that about. My third example concerns British influence in the wider world. Putting together the posts of Vice-President External Affairs in the Commission and Secretary-General of the Council and giving the high representative the job of chairing the Foreign Affairs Council and being our negotiator abroad, rather than having the rotating presidency try to do the job—a pantomime horse, as my noble friend Lord Hannay called it—is a sensible reform, if you want the show to work and if you want to provide an answer to Dr Kissinger’s perhaps apocryphal question, ““When I want to speak to Europe, whom do I call?””. Unless we are complacent about the state of the world or our place in it—or unless we are Luddites and want Europe to become more introspective, more unpopular, less outward looking and less effective—we should welcome the reform and ratify the treaty. My final point is more fundamental. The Brussels institutions are closer to us than Manchester, thanks to Eurostar. The Brussels institutions now speak English, literally and metaphorically. The agenda of those institutions is one of market opening, liberalisation and enlargement, which has been the bipartisan theme of the two Front Benches over the past 20 to 25 years. Why, then, do so many people in this country purport to see the EU as a threat rather than an opportunity? The question is unanswerable, but the solution may be in the treaty. There is an element of reassurance to be found in it. As the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, rightly said, the product of the convention was never a constitution. A constitution is an agreement between citizen and state; the Union is not a state and does not claim to be one. It makes no claim to any legitimacy arising directly from the citizens, transcending the member states. There is no ““We, the people”” in any of the texts that we have been looking at in Brussels for the past six years. The convention produced the draft of a treaty, an agreement between states, defining more clearly than before the extent to which they agree to confer power on the centre. These definitions have survived in the reform treaty; to that extent, the texts are identical. Crucially, the enunciation of the principle of conferral has survived. It was always implicit that the Union could do only what the member states agreed that it should, but now it is explicit in the treaty. The treaty classifies and categorises the various forms and boundaries of powers as well as the ways in which they may and may not be used. It reinforces the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality, makes explicit the member states’ right to take back powers, and spells out the right of an individual member state to leave the Union—the right to secede—if it wants to do so. None of that was in Jean Monnet’s plan either; he would probably have disapproved quite strongly of the secession clause. The critics need to put away their caricatures and look at the Union of today as it is, and as this treaty would confirm it. They will not, of course. Instead we shall hear again the argument that the reforms are not fundamental enough, that the treaty should not just have confirmed member states’ rights to take back powers but should have taken them back. That was the case made by Conservative Party representatives in the convention in 2002-03; presumably, if there were to be a referendum campaign now, that is the case that would be made again. But there is a problem of which we all need to be aware: in the convention, not a single representative of any of the 27 Governments agreed with the Conservative Party’s representatives’ ideas on repatriation of competences and no EU Governments agree with those ideas now. If we refuse this reform treaty because we want different reforms, more reforms or repatriation, the effect will be that we will get no reforms and we will, indeed, go back to the Maastricht treaty, the Single European Act, a European Council that works less well, fewer votes for the UK, and incoherent representation to, and in, the outside world. Agreement on treaty revision requires the positive support of every single member state, but every signatory state objects to what the British Luddites want. That is a recipe for humiliating isolation. If they mean what they say about ““not letting the matter rest””, the logical course would then be secession, leaving it to others to pursue the open, liberal single market for which previous Conservative Governments fought, and to others to write its rules in ways that might or might not suit us, with no input from us. What a sad betrayal of a proud record of success that would be. I am sure that it will not come to that, or at least I very much hope not. As I trust has become apparent, I favour the Government’s Bill.