I thoroughly endorse almost everything my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has said, but I would go somewhat further, because I have a complete aversion to the whole concept of the transfer of our jurisdiction over matters affecting the City of London. I have said that for many years now. In fact, when the de Larosière report was published I wrote in the Financial Times that I saw it as a ticking time bomb, or words to that effect, and that if matters were allowed to continue we would find ourselves mopped up by European jurisdiction.
Following the statement my hon. Friend the Financial Secretary made to the House only last week, I asked a simple question: in the light of the vast amount of commitment and time that has been spent transferring jurisdiction over matters affecting the City to the European Union, how on earth will we be able to protect the City, the related single market aspects, including financial services, and matters of the kind now before the House in the market abuse directive when they are governed by qualified majority vote? Those are the realities.
The truth is that we have made the most massive strategic mistake in relation to matters of this kind, which are governed by qualified majority vote, under directives such as the mad directive otherwise known as the market abuse directive, which was bitterly opposed by the City of London in the early part of this century. I have to say that events then turned for the worse and those proposals have now been overtaken.
Before I turn to the specifics of the matter before us, I ought to mention that the veto on the fiscal compact, which the European Scrutiny Committee said was effectively unlawful on the evidence we received, has not been followed up. The Government and the Attorney-General are clearly of the view that the agreement on the fiscal compact between the 25 was unlawful, but in reality nothing has been done. We have just had a reply from the Government to our report on the question, and on which we held an inquiry, but in no way do they continue to do anything to put to the test the illegality that lies at the heart of the fiscal compact. We are therefore still in the position whereby the Government regard the fiscal compact of the 25 as being a matter of irregularity, but they do not do anything about it.
That is a dangerous situation, and it has gone beyond that—to the fiscal union itself being promoted and advocated by the Government. That will make things even worse, with an even deeper black hole, as I said on television yesterday. The banking union proposals, which are also now being pressed upon us, will come to fruition around the time of the summit on 28 June, and I fear that we are being taken down an extremely dangerous route.
The market abuse directive before us is one example of that tendency to legislate continuously on financial services matters, and my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset is quite right that we could legislate for ourselves on them. Bad markets, as I have said in articles I have written in the past, are bad business, and we have at our disposal in this Parliament every means to pass legislation on our own account, without necessarily or by any means having to leave it to the European Union. I would be going beyond the remit of this
debate if I went into that in any further detail, but I repudiate the idea that we cannot legislate for ourselves on such matters.
I am by no means convinced that the Government intend to make it entirely clear whether or not we will opt in, and that is the problem with the opt-in. I think my hon. Friend is of the opinion that the Government have decided that we will not. I am not sure, but I thought he said that.