European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for summing up the position as she sees it. There is an important thought here that we always plunge into the jargon of these treaties and of the law. It appears that here too we are to some extent in the hands of the lawyers and forget that there is a vast world outside that probably has little clue what we are talking about. My mind has been set to the question of what competence really means. It is defined in the 10th EU Committee report, where there is an excellent piece on the whole issue of competences which answers most of the questions. It is clear that competence defines certain areas in which the EU institutions have conferred on them by member states the powers—if they were to use them and if the processes, whether vetoed, unanimous procedures or procedures that could not be vetoed, were launched—to make laws and regulations and interest themselves in these areas. I notice that in the excellent report from our committee, Professor Chalmers said that there was, "““nothing in the Lisbon treaty which would prevent or limit the European Court of Justice from extending competences from the base established by the Lisbon Treaty””." We are on the edge of a very fuzzy, permeable line. It is right that, as parliamentarians, we should seek to get a little more precision into the limits which ought to circumscribe the use of power by those who hold it. Beyond that, I was pleased to hear the noble Baroness talk about the provisions for transferring back certain competences. She was asked which competences. She did not immediately have an answer from the past and, by definition, we obviously do not have an answer from the future yet. But that is the spirit. That is what many of us have been asking for all along—let us look in the 21st century at all the powers that piled up in the EU institutions during the 20th century. Let us re-examine them and see those that need unravelling, the acquis that needs unscrambling and the possibilities of decentralisation in an age of decentralisation, the reassertion of the democratic national parliaments as the anchor elements in the entire structure of the European Union. Let us look at those things, work on them and make suggestions about them. None of these ideas seems to have come forward in the past few years—whether at the Hampton Court summit, which was supposed to be the great opportunity, or at other summits. However, it pleases me to hear this language raised. I am so pleased that, as long as my pleasure lasts, which may not be very long, beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.