European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, will forgive me if I do not follow precisely the lines of his intervention. There will be opportunities in Committee to go into the details of the treaty and the Bill. At this stage, I would like to explain briefly and in broader terms why I support the treaty and the Bill and oppose a referendum. There is a rather curious tendency at the moment to want to set on one side the achievements of the European Union over the years as being somehow out of date or irrelevant to today's debate. That is a bad mistake because the past has lessons for the future. Let us briefly recall that the EU was instrumental, alongside NATO, in cementing peace and security in western Europe. The EU was instrumental in ensuring democracy in southern Europe in Spain, Portugal and Greece, which was not at all evident some 20 or 25 years ago. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, argued so powerfully just now, the EU was also instrumental in bringing democracy and market economies to the countries of east and central Europe, although of course there is still unfinished business there. Let us also recall that the EU has been instrumental in creating a market of more than 400 million people, in which the increasingly free movement of goods, services, capital and people has contributed greatly to Europe's prosperity. There, too, there is unfinished business. In my view, the United Kingdom has benefited greatly from these developments. However—and this is the point that I really want to stress—the United Kingdom has contributed greatly to those developments as well, under both Conservative and Labour Governments. I join my noble friend Lord Kerr in saying how glad I was to see the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, in her place this afternoon, for whom I worked for many years. As I said, the UK has contributed greatly to these developments under both Conservative and Labour Governments. It has contributed greatly to the creation today of a European Union of 27 variegated nation states—I stress that—governed by an increasingly flexible set of arrangements. I would argue that that set of arrangements reflects what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to in his opening speech as the ““dignity of difference”” among the member states. That is indeed what the European Union of today is increasingly about. Today’s European Union of 27 variegated nation states is light years away from the centralised, homogeneous Union that was the dream of many people in the EU’s earlier years. That is simply not on the agenda any more. Nobody wants it; certainly not the east and central European countries who have recently joined the European Union having escaped the Soviet yoke—a point powerfully made by the noble Baroness, Lady Quin. The lesson from all that is surely that engagement by Britain in the development of the EU—even engagement that has, at times over the years, been a little grudging—has been in Britain’s as well as the European Union's interest and that we should have the confidence to recognise that the more that we engage, the more we will get the European Union that we want and that we are comfortable with. At a time when the challenges that the European Union faces are so great, a policy of disengagement or even partial disengagement would be a huge mistake. Those challenges are indeed, as other noble Lords have mentioned, great. They are: to complete the single market, particularly in energy, so that the European Union is better able to meet the challenges of China, India and other emerging economies; to take a lead on the big global issues and notably on climate change—unlike some other noble Lords, I really do think that that is an important role for the European Union and one in which it can play a leading role; to strengthen the European Union's external policy so that it can play a bigger role in fighting poverty and helping to meet the millennium development goals; to deliver humanitarian aid, as the EU is a major deliverer of humanitarian aid after conflict and natural disasters; and to strengthen its foreign and security policy—for example in Iran, in the Middle East, in Africa’s conflict zones, and towards Russia, where the incoherence of the EU’s approach is now so damaging. If ever there was a case for a stronger European foreign and security policy it is to ensure a more coherent policy towards Russia. Will the Lisbon treaty help the European Union meet those challenges? I share the view of noble Lords who have said that it will. Like all treaties it is imperfect; at times it is incoherent, and at times it is incomprehensible. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, it is certainly not a great leap forward towards some centralised European state. As I have argued just now, I truly believe that that is now a mirage. The Lisbon treaty is rather a series of changes that will make the EU more coherent, for example in its external policy and in replacing the now outmoded six-month presidency. It will strengthen national parliaments’ role in the conduct of EU affairs—not automatically; parliaments will have to make that work, but there is an opportunity. It will strengthen the UK’s voting weight in decisions taken by majority voting. Let us not forget that majority voting stops others vetoing things we want and not just the other way round. Those seem entirely sensible changes which I suspect will, when the treaty is in force, seem far less dramatic than they seem now in prospect. Surely the right thing to do now is to ratify the treaty and for the United Kingdom to work hard in its implementation so that we have the arrangements in place that can ensure the EU can more effectively meet the challenges which I believe all of us see as important for the future. Finally, on the referendum, perhaps I am a little gullible or naïve. I have been a member of your Lordships’ House for less than two years but I had been increasingly persuaded in that time of the need for a stronger role for parliaments in our parliamentary democracy. Against that background, it seems rather odd that there are such strong voices arguing for the cession of parliamentary authority to what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, described as the gamble of referendums. I accept that referendums have a role in our constitutional settlement if there is a genuine transfer of authority and genuine change in the constitutional arrangements—as would have been the case, say, if we were genuinely ceding responsibility for our foreign policy—but I do not believe that we are, as the Select Committee report made clear and the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, and the noble Lord, Lord Roper, argued. I cannot imagine any future Foreign Secretary of any Government, and certainly not any Foreign Secretary for whom I have worked, being prepared to give up Britain’s independent foreign policy. I find that simply inconceivable. I do not believe that the original constitutional treaty would have justified a referendum, and I believe that the Government were wrong in promising one. But all the more so would it be wrong to offer one now on the Lisbon treaty, not least because with the special provisions negotiated for the UK it really does differ from the original, now defunct constitutional treaty. My conclusions are that it is in Britain’s interests as well as those of the European Union to ratify this treaty and to put its provisions into force and that we should oppose a referendum.