European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I think I am entirely within the rules, which are to tidy up what has been said before. This is a new amendment in view of new circumstances that were not there when this subject was originally debated. I trust it is helpful to your Lordships. In any case, I have only got about another two minutes. The House of Commons scrutiny committee—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that none of what I am saying now was said on 9 June—was overridden in its opposition to several of these initiatives. Indeed, it has produced excellent reports to confirm that. Some of those reports would be really quite funny if they were not so serious. For instance, only two years ago the Government started by agreeing with the committee that Article 308 could not be used to pass the control of civil contingencies to Brussels. The Government replied, in time-honoured fashion, that there was nothing to worry about because the other member states did not want it either. However, when they discovered that they were alone in COREPER they wrote saying that they did not dare to veto the proposal and wanted to abstain, but they did not dare to do that either because they thought an extension counted as a veto. The Government did not even understand the veto procedure. They believed that unanimity required every country to vote for a proposal, whereas in fact an abstention is just that, and always has been since 1957. The committee wrote back putting the Government straight and pointing out that just because they were alone did not mean that they were wrong. It was too late; the Government had already voted for it. That is the sort of thing that has been going on, away from public scrutiny of course. It is supported by the judicial activism of the Luxemburg court. As long ago as 1996 the court gave a judgment on the use of Article 308 that simply ignored the requirement that the clause could be used only in the course of the operation of the Common Market. The court did not even mention it but ruled that what mattered was to obtain a Community objective that was not covered elsewhere in the treaties; in other words an illegal Community objective. I might add that that sanctioned the use to which this clause has been put. There is no appeal against such rampant dishonesty in the court. That is why I fear the amendment will not make much difference to the juggernaut’s process, but I support it none the less.