European Union (Amendment) Bill

moved Amendment No. 28A: 28A: Clause 2, page 1, line 12, after ““excluding”” insert— ““(i) Article 2, paragraph 12, inserted Title I, relating to categories and areas of Union competence; and (ii) ”” The noble Lord said: When I heard that we should have to look at things line by line, I did not intend that we should spend too much time examining whether or not we should leave the European Union. That is of no interest to us, and I would advise my Liberal Democrat friends to leave the matter alone if they want to get on with business. We want to look at the very hard and important issues that arise in the context of membership of the European Union. We turn now to what might be called, in the words of the treaty-makers, the horizontal issue of competences—that is, the defining of the division of powers between member states and the central EU authorities. I hope that, in discussing this horizontal issue, we do not drift into all the specific areas of new competences, which are listed fully in the treaty and in other documents, because we are going to debate some of those competences later on. That would be unnecessary duplication. Nevertheless, the competences issue is sitting there in the middle of the treaty, and it is an area where the UK Government used to be deeply worried—and rightly so—about creeping competences and the extension of the areas of competence. There they all are, on page 53 of the treaty—Article 2B for exclusive competences and Article 2C for shared competences, which are substantially extended. They were all in the constitution document and are replicated in this one. They are intended to clarify, but do they? The point of the Laeken declaration, which gave birth to the plan for a new constitution, and to the disastrous and mismanaged convention that all ended in tears, was to clarify the different layers of power, and to stop the bit-by-bit erosion of what I call the coastal rock cliffs of national interest by the ceaseless pounding sea of Brussels power—the late Lord Denning had even more emotive and evocative words to describe what he thought was happening. That was the intention behind the convention, the constitution treaty and its replica, the Lisbon treaty. However, even the most objective reader, and certainly 1,000—or 100, I must not exaggerate—different authorities throughout the European Union have had to admit that it does the opposite. This is a very confusing document. More powers are now shared. The sharing concept has come to the centre of the treaty yet no one is clear what the sharing means. The phraseology is that it allows member states to act only if the EU chooses not to do so. The treaty states that: "““The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has not exercised its competence””." With the best will in the world, there is a lot of room here for misunderstanding, subjective judgments, legal interpretations, analysis and argument. Certainly, clarity comes at the bottom of the list. It is no surprise that when these texts were drafted at the time of the convention for the previous treaty, the UK argued, first, that shared competence should be a residual category, but of course it is not; secondly, that the idea of an indicative list of competences and shared competences would be the ““worst of all worlds””, which is exactly what we have; thirdly, that competition should not be an exclusive competence, which it is; fourthly, that employment, public health and consumer protection should not be shared competences, which they turn out to be in the treaty; and so on. I shall not delay us any more than is necessary by listing all the new competences. They are extensive and go into areas that were vigorously opposed by the Government, yet there has been a change of heart without any reasonable explanation so far. I hope that we will now hear one. All this badly needs to be clarified. I beg to move.