European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I congratulate the European Union Committee and my noble friend the chairman on a wonderful report. It is a great encyclopaedia of the facts of the treaty of Lisbon on which I hope we shall all draw over the next few weeks. I also congratulate the Constitution Committee and its chairman on its report. I noted its conclusion that the reform treaty is hardly a threat to our democracy. This has been a most impressive debate with notable speeches, especially from pro-European Conservatives, who made very good speeches indeed. I congratulate noble Lords on their contributions. Listening to those who oppose the reform treaty it is clear that apart from the question of a referendum, to which I shall return later, their main sticking point is sovereignty. They argue that the treaty involves an unacceptable loss of sovereignty. I am writing a book on the Attlee Administration and over the weekend I studied the British Labour Cabinet’s reaction in 1950 to the Schuman plan—the scheme to pool the coal and steel resources of France and Germany. Other European countries were able to join, including the United Kingdom, if it wished. The scheme was to be organised under a common authority. It was the brainchild of Jean Monnet, who has played a walk-on part in this debate, although he might be surprised to find that he was doing so. Noble Lords will remember Herbert Morrison’s off-the-cuff response, ““The Durham miners won’t wear it””. But the Cabinet papers show that the main reason the then British Labour Cabinet was not prepared to participate even in the negotiations over the European Coal and Steel Community was because the plan involved what it saw as a loss of sovereignty, which it thought could lead to a federal state. We have heard it all before. The Cabinet turned it down flat and from that moment we lost the leadership of Europe which was ours for the asking. As we now see, the Cabinet’s fears were grossly exaggerated. The so-called high authority in the end turned out to be mainly advisory. The effective power rested with the member states. As to the idea of a federal state, 60 years later the European Union, with a bureaucracy of a medium-sized British ministry and a budget of under 1 per cent of the European GNP, has hardly the structure of a federal state. As the Lisbon treaty underlines, the power in the EU is derived from its members, who can leave the Union if they wish. Competences are governed by the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. Provision is also made for competences to be transferred back to the member states. Indeed, the really significant changes in the treaty involve strengthening not the centre and not the Commission but the Council of Ministers, which remains, as it always has been, the powerhouse of the European Union. The same is true of the main changes. Who will the European Council President be appointed by? The Heads of Government. To whom will he or she be accountable? The European Council. The high representative of the common, foreign and security policy and the External Relations Commissioner will be combined into one post which will be chosen by, and accountable to, the Council of Ministers. The greater role of national parliaments—the yellow and orange card procedure—is not only good for accountability, as the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, pointed out, but will strengthen the role of the member states in the running of the EU. But of course opponents of the treaty point to the extension of qualified majority voting and claim that, because it is going to be extended in a number of instances, it will lead to a major erosion of national sovereignty. That can be their only argument. Of course, let us not exaggerate. My noble friend Lord Kinnock made an analysis of the instances of the extension of qualified majority voting: the 16 changes that do not apply to the UK or do only if we agree; the 14 that are purely procedural and the 20 that are in areas that are important, but they are important for us, and that is why we would like to extend qualified majority voting to aid to disaster areas, the strengthening of research and innovation, the protection of intellectual property rights and above all energy policy. All those are in the UK interest, and we retain the veto on vital nation state issue such as tax, social security, foreign policy and defence policy. For most other issues, QMV is almost always in the UK interest, because it enables us—we never hear this point put by the opponents of the treaty—to get other countries to do things that we want them to do. In other words, by pooling our sovereignty we acquire additional power; what I think my noble friend called ““super sovereignty””. If Members opposite doubt that, I invite them to consider the situation if the CAP was not subject to QMV. Without QMV, do they really believe that there would ever be any CAP reform? There has been some, and there will be more in the future. The noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, one of the architects of the single market, to whom we have paid tribute today, introduced QMV on an unprecedented scale, and she well understood the point. I quote from her memoirs: "““British businesses would be among those most likely to benefit from an opening-up of other countries’ markets. For example, we were more or less effectively excluded from the important German insurance and financial services markets. The price which we would have to pay to achieve a Single Market with all its economic benefits, though, was more majority voting in the Community””." She understood the point; I beg Members opposite to understand the point as well. The United Kingdom benefits from QMV, and we should never forget that. Under QMV, the UK has proved extremely good at assembling majorities, and the enlargement has provided us with a larger pool of potential allies. Again, we should not forget that. The reforms of the QMV voting system are helpful to the UK, because under the treaty of Nice, which noble Lords clearly want to go back to, the biggest members, including the UK, did not receive their fair share of voting power. The double majority system ensures that measures can only be passed with 55 per cent of membership and 65 per cent of the population. We benefit from an increase in voting power, as my noble friend said, from 8.4 per cent to 12.2 per cent, which means that our share of the blocking minority goes up from 32 per cent to 35 per cent. Again, it is helpful to us. Finally, there is the referendum. I am on the record in this House as saying that because, unlike with the Single European Act or the Maastricht treaty, there was no major shift in powers between the nation states and the EU, it was not necessary to hold a referendum on the constitutional treaty. If a referendum was not necessary for a constitutional treaty, as it was then, it certainly is not necessary for the Lisbon reform treaty. Of course, in content there are similarities between the two treaties, but the Dutch Council of State, which incidentally is one of the few bodies that has made a study of the two treaties from this point of view, said that, "““the proposed Reform Treaty is substantially different from the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe””." It said that because the structure and conception of the Bill is different. The Brussels European Council of 21 and 22 June stated that: "““The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing treaties and replacing them by a single text … is abandoned””." Instead, the treaty of Lisbon amends the EU treaties. In one sense, symbols may be thought to be trivial and they have been swept aside by those who are against them as being trivial. In the end, symbols are not trivial, because they lead towards a federal state. Above all, the reform treaty does not set up signposts for a gradual expansion towards a federal state. The Brussels Council stated that the amending treaty, "““provides the Union with a stable and lasting institutional framework. We expect no change in the foreseeable future””." That has never been said before by a European Council. Now we should move on from institutional change and turn to the future agenda, about which there is a consensus in this House. We should do that by supporting the ratification of the reform treaty. I look forward to debating and voting for it during the next few weeks.