European Union (Amendment) Bill

I rise to support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Pearson and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hurd. I will stick rather more closely to the amendment than he did in straying rather wider. We have always been enjoined by the noble Lords opposite to stick to the amendments. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, was not there when those strictures were first voiced. I simply underline that this is about the Commission’s sole right to propose legislation. This amendment is about removing the Commission’s right to do that. It seems extraordinary that both this place and another place are happy to accept that a large majority—I will not put an exact percentage on it—of our law is made in Brussels by the Commission. It does not come from the Council of Ministers; it does not come from Parliament; it comes from the Commission. That is the whole point of this. We have it on the authority of the German ministry of justice, which two years ago produced a report, that some 80 per cent of the legislation relating to Germany is made in Brussels and not by the German Parliament, which prompted the German ex-President, President Herzog, to ask whether Germany can still unreservedly call itself a parliamentary democracy. On that basis, we should ask ourselves the same question. Almost exactly a year ago, a legal advice firm called Sweet and Maxwell produced an interesting report, which said that 98 per cent of British legislation over the past 10 years has been produced by statutory instrument. One of the advisers on that paper was professor of law at the University of Cambridge, Professor Len Sealy. He pointed out that over the last 10 years there has also been a massive increase in EU law that becomes UK law without being passed by Parliament, either as a statute or a statutory instrument. In other words, Parliament simply does not see it at all. According to Professor Sealy, there were more than 2,000 of these regulations in 2006 alone. Their scope was quite astonishing. I rang him up because I could not believe that this was true. There were more than 2,000 pieces of legislation in one year alone that had become part of British law without Parliament ever seeing them at all. Professor Sealy confirmed that these regulations, which, I stress, are not seen at all by Parliament, cover a wide range of matters. Their scope is astonishing, ranging from cross-border insolvency to the importation of bed linen. I find that quite hard to believe. People in this country are aware that Parliament has less and less say in making laws, yet the people whom they elected, they elected to make our laws. They can appoint them, dismiss them and elect them—but they cannot do the same for the European Commission, whose members are not elected and seem to be unsackable. So they are getting deeply resentful of a position in which a majority of our law is made not by the people whom they elected but by the European Commission. I have a few examples of such laws that we have had in front of us in this House and the other place, which include the end-of-life vehicles directive, the landfill directive, the drivers’ hours directive, the vibration directive, the fallen stock directive, the horse passports directive and the absolutely disgraceful curd cheese regulations—which was opposed by our colleagues on the Liberal Democrat Benches, I seem to remember. These were all Commission initiatives that had to be put into UK law. Yes, we can amuse ourselves, as we did, by debating them; we can have Prayers against them and spend long, happy hours of sunlit afternoons talking about them and saying why we agree or not with them—but, in the end, it does not really matter. They have to be put into UK law, willy-nilly, whether we want them or not. With qualified majority voting, a number of those initiatives that we did not agree with were put into British law. But Parliament is impotent to do anything at all about it; not a word, syllable or comma of any of those directives or regulations can be changed by the other place or this House. Are we really happy with this state of affairs? I read this morning in the papers that Members of the other place are going to get a large increase of some £15,000 a year. I do not want to stray into territory into which I should not stray, but why are they getting that increase if so much of our law is made not in the other place or here but in Brussels by the unelected and unsackable European Commission, when our elected Parliament cannot change a word of it? This amendment will bring laws much closer to the Parliament that the British people want, which may do something to reduce the lack of interest in elections here, which has been quite pronounced. People always wring their hands and say that they do not understand why the electorate is so uninterested in voting in British elections—and it is true that the percentage of voters has gone down and down. This is just a theory, but I think that it is because people realise that Parliament has much less power and that the people whom they elect do not make most of their laws and cannot amend them as they wish. We have to take these things, swallow them now and swallow them whole. I warmly support my noble friend’s amendment.