European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, one of the things that saddens me about this treaty is that we end the life of a body called the European Community. I always thought that that name was a good description of what Europe was. It was not a state, a federation or a confederation but a community of nations and a community of citizens. ““Union”” is a word that sometimes suggests unity and sometimes uniformity, which is clearly not and never will be the intention of the European Union. However, I regret the passing of the word ““Community””. I was interested in what the noble Lord, Lord Renwick of Clifton, said about all the problems in relation to Britain and the single market and the things that have not happened in the other member states. I was a Member of the European Parliament when there were only 15 member states. Early on in my mandate, someone very wise said to me, ““There is one thing that all the 15 member states agree on, which is that the other 14 states always cheat””. Not just the United Kingdom but every member state perceives the others as not implementing the burdens that they have to take on. I recall the European Court of Justice and the Commission having to take the then Conservative Government to task for not having implemented a number of water directives. At the time we were one of the lacklustre members in environmental matters and we did not implement legislation that had been activated elsewhere. One of the outcomes of that was that the costs of raising our environmental standards were so high that the Government had to privatise the water industry. I am sure that that is why Devon and Cornwall now have the highest water rates not just in the UK but across Europe. I want to look in particular at the democratic deficit in Europe and whether this treaty will make it better or worse. It is a legitimate area to consider. Sometimes we conveniently forget that, even when we first joined not the Common Market but the European Economic Community in 1973, we did so knowing that it was a legislative organisation. It produced directives and regulations, and laws were passed that Britain had to implement. We understood that; that was how it was. But the democratic deficit was huge and, as someone who is very concerned about citizens’ rights and democracy—as I am sure every noble Lord is—I wanted to test these proposals against that. We can see a number of improvements in relation to the European Parliament. A fundamental of democracy is an ability to understand the organisation that makes laws and expects its citizens to adhere to them. Anyone trying to comprehend the European Union has a great deal of difficulty with it. One of the major problems arose from the Maastricht treaty and the three-pillar organisation. As an MEP I found it amazingly difficult to understand and I am sure that it is almost impossible for citizens. But at least in this treaty we take out the third pillar and as a part of that ensure that co-decision, the ordinary legislative procedure which is now widespread, is applied. That means that we have directly elected Members of the European Parliament becoming involved in those areas for the first time. Noble Lords have already mentioned budgets. It is quite unacceptable under the principles that we accept in this Parliament—no taxation without representation—that elected Members of the European Parliament have little control over around half the EU budget, that relating to agriculture and fisheries. At last the problem has been dealt with and we can move forward to where we shall have full accountability in budgetary control. As to whether national parliaments will be in a better position under this reform treaty, it is up to them to take responsibility for controlling their Ministers in the Council of Ministers. That is a key way in which national parliaments can control the European Union and it is a very powerful way if they do it properly. If they are subservient to their Executives, that is their problem to a large degree. In this country we are somewhere in the middle—way behind Scandinavian parliaments and a long way ahead of some of the southern members. The yellow and orange card procedures are incorporated into the treaty. They do not make me feel excited about parliamentary control in European institutions but, again, it is up to national parliaments to make of them what they will and to use them. I see them as a plus. It is often repeated in this House and in the newspapers that the Commission is an area of ultimate secrecy. However, as a Member of the European Parliament, I could phone up members of the Commission and I could go and see them. I had easy access to some Members of this House and I was helped by other Members through their cabinets. It worked very well. My business constituents who had problems could get on the phone directly to Commission staff to sort out their problem. There is not a chance of doing that with Whitehall. One area that was a fortress of secrecy was the Council of Ministers, a legislative chamber that, with the European Parliament, formed a bicameral system within Europe. I am delighted to see that, at last, the treaty demands that when the Council of Ministers is in legislative mode it has to operate in public. I hope that there will be an equivalent of Hansard and that we can bring it to account. It is to be hoped that citizen issues will be improved through the European Parliament. However, I have a suspicion that citizens initiatives are more about spin than substance but, again, it is something that will, over the years, become significant. I would like to have seen a right for the European Parliament to initiate legislation. It is strange that the Commission should have a monopoly on that, even more so now that the third pillar is to disappear. However, in Westminster, does either the House of Lords or the House of Commons really initiate successful legislation? They do not. Ninety-nine per cent of successful legislation comes from the Executive, not from Members of Parliament. The referendum has been the big issue in today’s debate. I have a different take on it. To me, if an organisation such as the EU or the intergovernmental conference is so arrogant as to call a treaty a ““constitution for a continent””, it is right that there should be a referendum. But that is not what this treaty is. Certainly we should have had a referendum if it had been called a constitution, but it is clearly a treaty of far less importance than Maastricht or the Single European Act. Under those circumstances, therefore, it would be quite inconsistent to have a referendum. My noble friend Lord Burnett wants European citizens to play a much greater part in Europe. When the European constitution was debated, there should have been one referendum of all European citizens, in which they could have said whether the decisions that their heads of government within the European Council had come to were right or wrong. I believe that the people of Europe would have rejected that constitution. There would have been a crisis, which would have meant that Europe would have had to go down the route of seriously consulting its citizens for the first time in its history.