European Union (Amendment) Bill

I certainly intend to do that during the Committee and Report stages of the Bill. We have plenty of things to do. We have a major agenda for improving the European system and for being extremely constructive and pro-European, as this party has always been, unlike the party of the noble Lord who has just intervened. In moving this amendment I confess that I have an overwhelming, almost eerie sense of having been here before. It is a sort of Groundhog Day experience. This is not surprising because the treaty embodied in the Bill we are looking at includes 96 per cent of the measures in the rejected constitutional treaty. Many of the amendments that we shall move will follow exactly the same track as those tabled by the Government at the time of the initial convention which gave birth to all this process. We shall seek to learn how and why they failed, as most of them did, and what damage the Government believe will be caused by their reappearance in this treaty. That is something to which the public are entitled to know the answers. I hope that we shall get very full explanations from the Government. It will be contended by some—and has been already—that an amendment of this sort is wrong because the last treaty was not really a proper constitution in the first place. I agree that it certainly was not the tight, limiting and circumscribing constitution that my noble friend Lord Lawson, who is not in his place, argued for on Second Reading, and for which I confess I argued myself some years ago in a book. In my view, which I stated even before the convention was set up, the whole idea of the convention, which was a top-down rather grand affair, was bound to be a disaster. One disaster leads to another so we are where we are now as a result of those errors. I know that the Government keep claiming that the constitution concept has been abandoned. That is their main claim although the argument comes in two parts. First, it is argued that while the measures are the same—that seems to be admitted—there is no bundling of all the previous treaties into one document, so it cannot be labelled a constitution or even of constitutional significance. No doubt we shall hear that again today. Secondly, it is argued that for the UK it is all different anyway because the opt-outs, safeguards and red lines make it so. Our amendment challenges both these contentions and seeks to ensure that the Bill states the truth from the outset. First, it is by no means necessary for all measures to be in one document for them to have deep constitutional significance and implications and to convey new constitutional arrangements, as our amendment suggests. As I said on Second Reading, every schoolchild knows that the unwritten British constitution exists outside the boundaries of one document and always has; and just because the wrapping has changed it does not mean that the contents have changed. In the words of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, "““The substance of the constitution is preserved””—" in the Lisbon treaty— "““That is a fact””." Secondly, the four main UK opt-outs that are supposed to make us different are almost exactly the same as those given last time when the referendum was promised. I will come to that in detail in a moment. Thirdly, when one examines the red line safeguards, and when independent examination is made of them, they turn out anyway to be pretty worthless; in fact ““leaking like a sieve”” was what the Commons EU Scrutiny Committee said. It went on to elaborate, as others have, first that the charter opt-out is not an opt-out at all it turns out, despite earlier assertions by the then Prime Minister that it was. The justice and home affairs opt-out and opt-in arrangements we are told could well be overridden by the European Court of Justice now that they have all been absorbed into the single pillar, which is a major change. In the foreign policy area, the Bill seeks to assert that foreign policy has been excluded from the treaty and that 11 vetoes have been removed. In social policy, there are new EU powers in the treaty to which the UK Government originally objected in vain and again which the ECJ could easily overrule in its judgments. We do not know how the ECJ will reach its judgments on these matters; we will have to see. To all of this, as well as to the remarkable self-amending powers, which we will come to, which are granted by the treaty to the European Union institutions, we will need to give the very closest attention in our amendments. That is certainly no argument at all for claiming that while the treaty may be constitutional for others, somehow when it comes to the UK it has been sanitised by the opt-outs. Meanwhile, the one point on which there seems to be general agreement is that the treaty is unintelligible; or as the Lords committee says in its report rather more politely, ““inaccessible””. Apparently, that is the intention. It is the main purpose that the import of this treaty should be disguised to prevent what happened to the last one. We take the view, and I quote the Economist, that trying to sneak through a constitution on the sly is highly unwise and does a disservice to Europe. Nevertheless, there are some people—some intrepid explorers—who have managed to hack their way through the jungle of convoluted phrases and impenetrable verbiage, including our highly expert Lords Constitution Committee, to which we are very grateful. When it comes at last through all the undergrowth to the clearings at the centre of it all, it finds that the treaty measures, "““inevitably have constitutional implications””." It goes on to quote with approval an expert witness, who speaks of, "““fundamental constitutional change””," inherent in the treaty. The committee urges amendments to the Bill to strengthen parliamentary accountability in the implementation of legislation via the treaty; amendments that it is entirely proper for us to make to the Bill, as we will seek to do. I am very sad that we will not have our Liberal Democrat supporters with us even in doing that, although I thought that they were in favour of increased parliamentary accountability. It cannot be right to present this treaty to the public as something different from what it really is. Almost the whole world knows perfectly well that it has major constitutional implications and, furthermore, that it contains the seeds of powerful further constitutional change via the famous passerelle articles, which, again, we will look at very closely. The Prime Minister says that there will be no more change or transfer of powers, but the President of France, Mr Sarkozy, who visited us the other day—a man of great seductive charm—is already proposing that work should begin on the EU’s next round of integration. That can only mean more constitutional change, more powers to the centre and yet another move for Europe in the wrong direction, which will be taken presumably under either the self-amending provisions of this treaty or the next treaty, since Mr Sarkozy believes that this one leaves a great many issues completely unsettled. He is probably right. Party leaders are always talking about the need to restore trust in politicians and Parliament and to reconnect with the people. The people clearly want a say. The opinion polls make that absolutely certain and we shall be moving amendments on that precise matter. But as a first step, at least we have to tell the people what is truly in store for them, what is on offer and what is really inside the packaging of this treaty that purports to be so different from the previous one. We believe—