European Affairs

It is a great honour to follow the right hon. Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague). Many of us in the Chamber have spent years debating matters European, and I hope that I will be forgiven for returning to some matters that we have talked about before, because this debate comes in the wake of the European elections. We cannot ignore the fact that, yet again, we have had European elections in which voters have cast their vote on anything other than the matters of Europe. It was the same in the four European elections in which I took part from 1994. The electorate go out and cast their votes in dwindling numbers on something that is not on the ballot paper. This time, we should be worried about the fact that around one third of the Members who represent this country in the European Parliament have an agenda based on not co-operating in any way. None of the major political parties can be proud of what happened a couple of weeks ago. I also hope that the Foreign Secretary or his ministerial colleague in his winding-up speech will address the fact that, were the Lisbon treaty to be ratified, it would create an extra MEP for the United Kingdom. However, I am not entirely sure how the Government intend to deal with that, if the treaty were to be ratified. I have thought about how we could deal with the complete disengagement from Europe. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane) and others keep telling us that we need to learn to love Europe, and I thought, "How do you learn to love a foreign country?" I cast my mind back to what it was like when I arrived here 30 years ago, and I remembered that three things struck me then that probably still apply to Europe. One was that when people say, "How are you?" they do not want to know how the other person is—it is a kind of ritual. It took me a long time before I realised that one does not answer; one just says, "Fine, thank you." Similarly, European elections may be called elections, but they are not what we might think they are. They do not result in a Government whom people recognise or in a change of political direction, so although we call them elections, they are not elections. European elections are something in the democratic process that we have not yet learnt to define—they are almost like a Europe-wide opinion poll on something. We call them elections, but people simply will not engage if they do not have a definable influence. The second thing—again, it took me a long time before I realised this—was that neither Danny La Rue nor Dame Edna Everage were what they seemed to be. That is so obvious to the natives, but no one ever spells it out to those who come here as foreigners. Eventually, one finally realises Dame Edna ain't no dame—and certainly no Edna either—and the European Parliament is pretty much the same. We call it a Parliament, but it does not do anything that we would recognise a parliamentary democracy as doing. The European Parliament is a caucusing body that is incredibly responsive to lobbying institutions, but it is completely unresponsive to public opinion. It may have been a long time before we got the message of what people thought about how we organise ourselves in this place, but, whatever one says about the past few months in the British Parliament, we did get the message. There were mechanisms that meant that we had to respond to the public, but the European Parliament and the Commission almost take pride in being unresponsive to what the public think. The third thing—this one probably took me the longest—struck me while listening to Mornington Crescent on "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue". For those who do not live in the metropolis or are unfamiliar with the tube lines, it can take a pretty long time to realise what the true rules of Mornington Crescent are.