European Union (Amendment) Bill

The noble Lord is right: I should have said Council of Ministers, not the European Council. It is perfectly clear that he is not a Head of State. I am sorry if that was obscure. He is right to say that I missed out words. Council of Ministers is what I meant. I come now to the issue of whether the president of the Council should be double-hatted and also be, as was rumoured, the President of the Commission as well. In an exchange we had the other day, that was dismissed as unlikely and, indeed, impossible. We know what the Government wanted. Some time ago, in 2003, in an impassioned speech, the current Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor made it clear that the Government were very unhappy about any kind of treaty that might leave the door open in any way to this combination of offices. The British Government wanted tough clarification in the old constitutional treaty that that should not be so. In practice the British Government did not get what they wanted, and in practice we were left with the phrase, in relation to the president, ““shall not serve national office””. That is all. That is in both the old constitutional treaty and in the present one. The other night there was a series of exchanges, which I found extremely misleading, in which it was claimed that the British Management Data Foundation’s Lisbon treaty grid, a massive document, was incorrect about this matter. The noble Baroness said that it was not true that nothing in the treaty prevented the President of the Commission also becoming the President of the European Council and she urged whoever had written that to get in touch with her, which they have duly done. I expect that she has received a letter. It seems to me that the noble Baroness’s dismissal was incorrect. The issue is being constantly aired by senior European officials, including the former Italian Prime Minister. Indeed, it has been proposed that the president should be directly elected by the current President of France. Nothing in the treaty could stop that except the words that I described. The earlier and much stronger words that the British Government wanted have failed to get into either the constitutional treaty or the present one. Why do I spend any time on this? Why does it matter if it is said to be so unlikely? Why did it matter so much to the Government before? It is for a very obvious reason. It blurs the role between the supranational and supposedly independent Commission and the international Council. It also blurs the issue of whether or not the common foreign and security policy is ring-fenced, as Ministers repeatedly claim it is. We will come later on to that whole debate in much greater detail, as we will to the noble Baroness’s fascinating observation in one of her letters that the ECJ’s role in these matters is to police the frontiers between the common foreign and security policy and other Community matters. We have always sought and wanted practical co-operation with our EU neighbours on a wide range of issues in foreign policy, such as Burma, the Balkans and maybe Russia, although many countries in the European Union are quietly doing their own thing in their relations with Russia. We had a try at the Iran situation, although it did not have much effect in the end. We are still struggling with that. The question is whether we want to codify and legalise all this so rigidly. That is the question. It is the question posed by this amendment. I beg to move.