European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I will straight away agree heartily that the Minister has done enormous amounts—staggering amounts, in fact, considering that she had a quick flit to Peru in the middle of it—to keep us informed on the meanings of the treaty and the Bill and on the issues she has encountered on the way in Brussels, and so on. There will be more to be kept informed about, both in this House and in the other place. Not all is clear. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, who is immensely experienced in this area, rightly said, there is not enough explanation about who does what. That is just a small consideration. Sadly, the noble Lord Wedderburn, cannot take part in these debates because he is not well, but he reminded us earlier that the appointments of presidents and so on are serious matters. We may be setting in train areas of expansion of powers that are a zero sum, in the sense that powers taken in those sorts of areas can be powers lost in others. In many areas, the Lord Watson dictum—that it is not a zero sum—is correct, but in these areas it could be wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, is also very experienced in foreign affairs and had 10 years’ command of the Foreign Affairs Committee. I think he followed me in that role. It is a splendid committee; he knows a lot about it, and he says it is all a journey. It certainly is, in the Foreign Affairs Committee—a lot of journeying takes place. All I would say about the journey we have had with the Bill in Committee and on Report is that it is rather like travelling on one of our older motorways. There seem to be a lot of road repairs and a lot of traffic jams. We are clearly going to have to do a lot more waiting before these things become clear. The noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said that these matters are all small details—but he will not have forgotten where the devil resides. There are many issues here that we have to be clearer about before one can be entirely happy that the proper role of parliamentary control is being fulfilled in satisfactory ways and we are not once again parked on a bypass while the traffic of legislation and the redistribution of powers rolls by. It was said—again, perhaps, by the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford—that we should all be happy about the treaty because we wish the EU to do certain things. Indeed we do, and we have legitimate arguments about the ways in which they should be done: how much legislation is needed, how much centralisation and harmonisation, how much variety and diversification. We all want the UN to do things as well, and I personally want the Commonwealth to do things. We want NATO, which obviously needs to adjust to the 21st century, to do things; many of the things it did in the past century will have to be done in quite a different way in the present century. We have had a wonderful contribution from the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York. It is marvellous that he should have the time to be with us this evening, right at the end of Report. He is with us, but he is not quite with me, on a rather central point: that this legislation is not like other legislation. It does not end up with the difficulties sorted out in our courts. Rather, those difficulties are sorted out in the supreme court, which all our lawyers have told us again and again is the European Court of Justice, whose powers, and the extent of those powers, are vastly increased by the treaty. All are agreed on that; no one has disputed that the extension of ECJ sovereignty, as it were—or at least of its powers and influence over the so-called Third Pillar issues with the exception of CFSP, although certainly intruding into aspects of foreign policy in different ways, as most people have agreed—is an important constitutional change. It takes our affairs into the hands of the European Court of Justice in a way that we did not always expect.