European Union (Amendment) Bill

I have some history in this area, having been chair of the relevant sub-committee of the EU Committee in your Lordships’ House from 1997 to 2000. In producing a report on the Schengen agreement, we managed, for the first time, to get hold of and publish what was then known as the Schengen acquis, which had been accepted in the Amsterdam treaty but without being seen by several of the delegations that had accepted it. We published several reports on British opt-outs, pointing out that the British had opted out formally and then opted back into an awful lot of things in detail. We tried hard to get first the media and then your Lordships’ House to take an interest in this and, indeed, managed to find time for some of our reports to be debated in an empty House late at night. We have to be a little more honest with ourselves about the level of interest that we have had in the past 11 years in this development. I can take my awareness of this matter back further. When I was still on the staff of Chatham House in 1988, I was asked to chair a conference of senior policemen on co-operation between the British police and their opposite numbers on the Continent. A very senior policeman from a county force in southern England commented at one point that he had just signed an agreement with his opposite numbers in France about the levels of co-operation on each other’s territory and had asked the Home Office how he should report that up the line. The Home Office told him that it was thoroughly in favour of this agreement but that it would prefer not to know too much about it. For the past 20 years, we have had a much higher level of co-operation between the British police and their opposite numbers on the Continent and, increasingly, between British prosecuting authorities and their opposite numbers on the Continent than Governments have wished to admit, the media to know about or Parliament to pay sufficient attention to. I regret some of the tone of this debate. The image of Brussels as hostile territory, of the European Court of Justice as being a threat and of British sovereignty being surrendered suggests that we see the European Union as something of which we are a deeply reluctant member. Several million British citizens live in other member states in the European Union, most of them highly law-abiding—although the Observer last Sunday carried an interesting article on the Liverpool criminal network, its activities in Amsterdam and its holiday homes in Marbella. Crime and therefore police co-operation—and the co-operation of prosecuting authorities—have to follow the extent to which we are becoming increasingly internationalised, which has implications for how British law enforcement authorities and British legal authorities work within a clear framework with their partners across the Channel. We on these Benches regret the intense complexity that opt-outs and opt-ins have now achieved. That seems to us to be a general obfuscation and, once this Bill is complete, the Government would do better to publish a White Paper explaining it to us. We believe that the United Kingdom’s interests are best served by opting in much more vigorously than we have done so far. We also accept the views of the Lord President about staying out of negotiations and then discovering at the end of them that what has been agreed does not entirely fit British national interests and is not actually in British national interests. We therefore accept the views of the EU Committee on this. We recognise that we have to engage in these co-operative activities and that closer co-operation among law enforcement and other legal authorities in a European framework has been, and continues to be, in Britain’s long-term national interest.