European External Action Service

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe on his appointment. I am sure that we will be having many useful discussions, dialogues and even cross-examinations as time goes on. I regard this whole decision as a triumph of European aspirations and European parliamentary ambitions over reality. I am deeply worried about the manner in which this game of multidimensional chess will play out, and I have already indicated to my hon. Friend the Minister my concern about the overlapping functions and the contradictions that will emerge between the necessity of maintaining our bilateral relations with other countries and the extremely ambitious proposals in this decision on global reach. It is phenomenal to imagine an external action service on this scale that would in any way be regarded as not interfering with our domestic diplomatic service. I sense that my hon. Friend the Minister and my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary know this. We debated the Lisbon treaty together, we were united and we had a remarkable rapprochement during those debates—contrary to the debates over the Maastricht treaty, when I stood in this very spot and had much to say about what I thought would happen. Many people might think that some of the things I suggested would happen have done so, and this is one of them. I treat the whole issue of the external action service with great concern for the reasons that I have given. It will induce a recipe for confusion—