European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, many of us have been reading the Irish Times and the Irish Independent during the past two or three days. A great many things are being said in Ireland. It is not at all clear yet what the Irish response will be. We must respect the Irish decision and the debate which follows from it. We await the response of the Irish Government and the leaders of the Irish ““no”” campaign”” on what they propose to do next. Sinn Fein has already come up with a list of specific guarantees that Gerry Adams says would satisfy it. They include guarantees against any privatisation of public services, the entrenchment of workers’ rights and Irish neutrality. I am not sure whether the Conservative Front Bench is happy about that list or about the strengthening of Sinn Fein’s position in Irish politics to which the ““no”” campaign has contributed through its unlikely alliance between socialists, nationalists and free market libertarians. But, I say to he noble Lord, Lord Neill, the British decision is for us to make as a sovereign Parliament and a sovereign country, and not to hand over to the Irish to make on our behalf. It is the particular responsibility of our House as the revising Chamber to frame our decision in terms of what we think is best for Britain’s national interests; that is, our long-term national interests, not the immediate fears and passions of today. To complete the passage of this Bill to which both Houses have devoted exhaustive scrutiny will strengthen our Prime Minister’s position in this weekend’s European Council. We, as a responsible opposition party, will support that. I hope that Cross-Benchers, as responsible Cross-Benchers in a revising Chamber, will do the same. For many years, the Conservative Party was a responsible Government. When the Danes voted against the Maastricht treaty, in a Statement to both Houses, the Prime Minister, John Major, said: "““The ratification and implementation of the treaty is in our national interest””.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/6/1992; col. 827.]" He went on to say: "““My right hon. friends the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Foreign Secretary and I believed that this was the right treaty when we negotiated it. The treaty itself has not changed, nor has my view of the treaty””.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/6/1992; col. 834.]" We now have an irresponsible Conservative Opposition. I note that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, has now been taken over by the Front Bench, in the same way that so many amendments put down by Bill Cash in the other place were taken over by the Conservative Front Bench in this House. We find it difficult to grasp exactly the way that the Conservative Party now feels on this. William Hague said of the Amsterdam Treaty: "““Amsterdam was a bad treaty; bad for Europe and bad for Britain””," even though it was negotiated largely by John Major’s Government. On the Nice treaty, he said: "““Is not the truth, when we cut through the spin, that the agreement represents three more major steps to a European superstate?””." Now the Conservatives are saying that the Nice and Amsterdam treaties are fine; it is just the Lisbon treaty that takes us one step two far. I read with interest Daniel Finkelstein’s article in today’s Times, arguing that the Conservatives will do much better to fight the next election while obscuring their policies, hoping that if they win, they can then spell out their policies. So the suggestion is to fight without a coherent foreign policy which has to include a coherent European policy. That is slick marketing but it is also irresponsible populism. Last Wednesday, many of us wanted to be at the Tim Garden memorial lecture but had to be here because of the debate that day. I read the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, in that lecture last night. He said: "““So many of today’s threats to our comfortable existence, to our taken for granted safety and security, are rooted in the ongoing process of globalisation””." He talked about climate change, immigration, threats to employment, and rising food and fuel prices. The popular mistrust of globalisation in Britain is focused on the European Union. In the United States, it is focused on the United Nations and on international law; in France, it is focused on the United States, which is blamed for Americanisation—the same thing as globalisation. We recognise how large a problem we all face in democratic politics in all democratic countries, but what is common to all those countries is a popular mistrust of government above the level of the nation state, of negotiations behind closed doors by people who are seen to be out of touch with the common man, and a fear of change imposed by outside forces. The European Union is, however, the least undemocratic, most visible and transparent institution that we have. Compare, for example, the World Trade Organisation. It is much blamed by Irish farmers—I was following the debate as well—because Peter Mandelson was seen as giving away Irish rights on the beef trade within the World Trade Organisation. The WTO is an international institution which carries direct impact on national policies. There is a WTO assembly—I saw an ITU document asking whether some of us would like to join it. It is completely impotent compared to the European Parliament. On the OECD, the noble Lord, Lord Howell, who is very keen on the Commonwealth, might like to know that last weekend I was reading the Commonwealth Secretariat paper on co-operation in tax information exchange. The paper attacks the ““democratic deficit”” within the OECD. It refers to a very interesting paper by Joseph Nye for the Trilateral Commission on the democracy deficit in the IMF and G8. We all face a large number of problems of managing to co-operate in a globalised world. I pick up today’s newspapers and I see the Sun and the Daily Mail deliberately distorting the French Government’s decisions on their security strategy paper by saying that in future the Royal Navy is going to be commanded for some purposes from Brussels. They do not actually mention that, for some purposes, the British Royal Navy is already commanded from Brussels; that is where the NATO headquarters are. NATO is an organisation rather less transparent and less held to account than the European Union. Drifting to the fringes of the European Union will not spare us from the management of globalisation; it will simply reduce our influence over its management on climate change, energy, international security, foreign policy—the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has said on several occasions in our debates that we need stronger co-operation on our foreign policy towards Russia and the Middle East—or on containing trans-national crime and terrorism. The Lisbon treaty contains useful measures to strengthen our joint capabilities in managing these issues. We need some of those changes in order to be able to cope more effectively. Noble Lords should recognise that there is a real danger of giving way to populism, or following media campaigns with all their slickly obscured internal contradictions, rather than providing a lead—which is what politicians must do in a democracy—explaining political challenges and their choices to our citizens. We failed to do that on the European and international issues from Margaret Thatcher’s prime ministership on. That has been one of the greatest failures of the current Government. May I just compare that with the drift to populism in crime and punishment, which I know many people in this House are horrified by? Again starting under the previous Conservative Government and then under this Labour Government, there has been a bidding up by the popular press of the need for tougher measures against crime and more people in prison, as a result of which we now have more than twice as many people in prison as there were 15 years ago and more young people being locked up—and still the press demand more. The question that we have to consider today is where British national interests lie. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, referred to certain ingenious devices. This is yet another ingenious device in an attempt to block the passage of this Bill and the implementation of this treaty and to weaken Britain’s commitment to European co-operation. Our choice as a revising House should be taken in the light of Britain’s long-term national interests.