European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I listened with great interest to the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, introducing his amendment. Perhaps I may pick up on the intervention that I made and the subsequent discussion of it. In the discussions that took place at the European Council the United Kingdom Government clearly surrendered part of their rebate. It was not done exclusively as a trade-off—which was the rather crude description—for agricultural reform; it was also partly done within the confines of our own arguments and wishes for having a cap on the total overall budget to get the necessary resources available in the budget to allow the proper provision of cohesion funds for the new accession countries that we were so keen to see join the European Union. You cannot be in favour, as most people in this House are, of seeing the enlargement of the Union to the east and the bringing in many of those poor re-emerging democracies and then say, ““But we are not prepared to pay part of the bill for the cohesion benefits that we enjoyed and we are going to deny you””. It was partly the process of this country paying the price for enlargement that every political party in this country said that they were in favour of that: perhaps not every party—I see the noble Lord, Lord Pearson—but every party of significance. The rebate was there. It was not just a crude trade-off; it had other purposes. In saying that, we would be gravely mistaken if we allowed the assertion to be made in this House that part of the deal was for reform; where is the reform? The implication is that none has taken place. I will join with anybody in this House in wanting to see a continuation of and extension of the reform of the common agricultural policy, but to conclude from that that no reform has taken place is the mythology that we expect to see peddled by the odd couple of Back-Benchers, not by those on the Front Bench. Agricultural reform—although not enough, not fast enough, not wide enough and not deep enough—has nevertheless been significant. The noble Lord, Lord Taylor, referred quite properly to the report by the sub-committee chaired by my noble friend Lord Sewel, who I hope will speak in this debate on agriculture. I hope when it comes to the debate tomorrow afternoon on the sub-committee’s report that the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, will acknowledge many of the reforms in that report as going in the right direction—not there, not achieved, not fully or as far as we want, but nevertheless going in the right direction. In relation to environmental goals, cross-compliance, decoupling of payments, set-aside, market intervention, export subsidies and import tariffs, not to mention modulation and preparation for problems of climate change, this report is a good catalogue of both what is being done and what still needs to be done in order to achieve the task that we set out to achieve in the deal that was struck at the European Council.