European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, it is very late and I shall not detain you very long. I want to discuss two linked subjects, one of which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. I refer to the Laeken declaration and Europe’s democratic deficit. The Lisbon treaty is the fruit of the Laeken process. If the Lisbon treaty is not effective in carrying out the policy that the Heads of Government adopted at Laeken, it is not likely to work for any purpose. The noble Lord, Lord Leach of Fairford, referred to Laeken in his excellent speech as the starting point of the whole process. He also discussed it in his evidence to the European Union Committee. Other than that, it has received rather less attention in this debate—interesting as though it has been—than it properly deserves. The Laeken meeting took place in 2001, as your Lordships will remember. It was a meeting of Heads of Government. It led to the convention being formed, which produced the constitution, which was rejected, which morphed into the reform treaty, which was eventually renamed the treaty of Lisbon. The Laeken meeting was a reflection of widely felt anxieties about the European democratic deficit. Laeken called for the convention to draft a more democratic structure ““closer to the people””. The constitutional treaty did not in fact move in that direction. It was rightly rejected on the grounds that it was a centralising treaty, and not a treaty that would move Europe closer to the people, with the benefits that that might be expected to have. The democratic deficit itself is not a single object. It is not only about democracy: it is also a failure of European liberalism. There are a lot of legal questions arising out of the Lisbon treaty itself that I am not competent to take a view on. Much of the competence is on the Liberal Democrat Benches. There is also a failure to adopt the principles of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is often spoken of, but progress towards it either inside or outside the Lisbon treaty has been extremely disappointing. The Heads of Government were rightly disturbed by Europe's relative lack of competitiveness, with much slower growth rates than the Asian countries. The question now is whether the Lisbon treaty has addressed the deficits successfully. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr, believes that it has. I regret that it has not. I am sure that the European Union needs to have substantial reforms if it is to flourish—perhaps if it is to survive. In particular, Lisbon has extended qualified majority voting to some 40 areas of competence of the European Union, but has not returned any powers to the individual nations, so the process of negotiation in Lisbon has been regrettably lopsided. The whole of the acquis communautaire, which is itself such an obstacle to reform of the European system, is still not only in place but growing steadily. When the eastern European countries joined the European Union, they were faced with accepting willy-nilly some 85,000 pages of the acquis communautaire. We are now told in this debate that that has risen to 98,000 pages. The acquis communautaire will undoubtedly in a few months’ time have reached 100,000 pages. But it will go on from there, occupying larger and larger areas of regulation. The Lisbon negotiation failed to tackle fairly obvious abuses. The most worrying thing is that although everyone knows that the common agricultural policy is a European abuse which needs major amendment, no one can manage to get any amendment through. That is as true of the Lisbon treaty as it is of previous negotiations on the CAP. All institutions have to be repeatedly reformed if they are to remain vital or even serviceable. I fear that the European Union needs further major new reforms. This was a point on which I did not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, who looked forward to a period of stability. I am not sure that a period of stability rather than reform is what is really needed. The situation has been made worse by the question of the referendum. I have heard all the arguments on both sides on a referendum, but what I think is certain is that the British people believe that a promise was made to them and that they now believe that the promise has been broken. One of the major problems of Britain’s relationship with Europe is indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, that the British people do not trust the European Union. Nothing is more unfortunate than the British Government taking a step, repudiating a promise, that makes the ordinary voter trust the European Union still less. It is not just the Government who will be blamed, though they will be blamed; the Union itself will be blamed. Looking at the referendum as the final issue, and the relationship between British public opinion and the European Union as an essential part of the future reform of the European Union, I shall vote for a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, just as I had the good fortune to vote for a referendum on the Maastricht treaty 14 years ago.