European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am extremely sorry to hear that. He is an extremely wise contributor to these issues. He has written a pamphlet with some observations on this treaty debate. I strongly recommend them to all your Lordships as full of wisdom. He warns us that we need to be very careful when it comes to presidents and giving them powers. He points out—and this is obvious to all of us—that this treaty, like the constitution before it, in effect gives us several presidents. It gives us the new two-and-a-half-year or five-year president of the Council; it gives us the rotating president of the Council, who was there before; the Commission president, who was there before; and of course the European Parliament president, who was there before. It also gives us the person who was called the Foreign Minister in the Constitutional Treaty and is now called the high representative, who has quasi-presidential powers as the double-hatted vice-president of the Commission and the chairman, so I understand—this is one of that many issues that have not been clarified—of the new Foreign Affairs Council. That figure will hold a very important role in defining the stance of the European Union on foreign policy issues, and how that fits in with the stance of the new president, as defined in the new treaty that I have just read out, is a bit of a mystery. We need to examine that carefully and give our combined views as guidance for the many issues that have yet to be resolved in this field. These are not settled matters—it is not a question of reopening the treaty, but of influencing many decisions yet to come. One argument used for the longer-term presidency is that the six-monthly business was very inefficient. That is the assertion that we hear from experienced officials and those who are anxious to improve the efficiency of Europe. The same argument, interestingly, is used on the website of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In the section entitled Lisbon Treaty myths, it talks of the need to enlarge the powers and lengthen the term of office of the president—and also, incidentally, to combine the roles of the high representative, both as a vice-chairman of the Commission and a member of the Council—because, it says, this will overcome and eliminate ““wasteful wrangling””. This is a wonderful insight into bureaucratic minds. Do these people not realise that what they think is wasteful wrangling is, to democrats, healthy argument and disagreement, which are necessary ingredients for successful democratic institutions to live and breathe? The truth is that time and again, we come up against a state of mind that I find quite objectionable, which, when it talks about efficiency, is actually talking about being able to shovel through the European Union sausage machine more laws and more regulations, more quickly, so that the ambitions of those who want more laws and more regulations can be satisfied more swiftly. That is not the kind of efficiency that a democrat should welcome, and it certainly does not bring the institutions of the European Union nearer to the people, which was the original ambition of the Laeken Council.