Absolutely. And Muslims could vote on both, and the election could start on Friday. We could be very flexible. Cultural traditions might also be relevant. The Commission’s proposal fails the basic subsidiarity test. This does not need to be mandated, therefore it should not be, and there seems to be wide agreement across the House on that.
The proposals for the candidates for the presidency of the Commission are rather curious. I am proud to be a member of Cheltenham Liberal Democrats, of the Liberal Democrat party in the United Kingdom and of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, and intensely proud to be a member of Liberal International, where Liberals are fighting for things that we take for granted at risk to their own lives in many parts of the world. I know that other parties have slightly more hang-ups about being members of European political parties and have had some difficulties in that regard, but the proposals as far as they go seem to be fairly unexceptional.
The Commission’s proposals effectively talk about encouraging European political parties to nominate candidates, but actually they can already do that. A report by my colleague Andrew Duff, which the European Parliament will vote on at the start of July, goes rather further. It states that
“the candidate for Commission President who was put forward by the European political party that wins the most seats in the Parliament will be the first to be considered”
with a view to
“ascertaining his/her ability to secure the support of the necessary absolute majority in Parliament”.
That might be a legitimate and interesting way of interpreting article 17.7 of the treaty, but so long as they must only have regard to the candidate, the Councils of the European Union will not actually be obliged to choose that candidate or even to consider them in preference over others.
We need to create a situation that encourages more involvement, openness and accountability, and in that respect I think that it would be good to have greater democratic involvement in the process of promoting and choosing candidates, so long as it does not mandate it, because I think that a slight constitutional issue would start to emerge if we drifted into the mandation of candidates by political parties. That would start to blur the line between who are the Governments and politicians and who are the civil servants, which is a line that we draw very carefully in this country. In a sense, the Commission is the equivalent of the civil service and the permanent secretaries. In many respects, it should be the impartial servant of the political will of the Parliament and of the people and Governments of Europe in the Councils. We can decide at some future stage—this is certainly not something I support now—whether to have a European Government, but we do not have one at the moment and that is not something we should start doing in an accidental, piecemeal way.
I accept that there is a particular problem for the Conservatives on this issue. They belong to the fifth largest group in the Parliament—it feels rather good to
say that—and the Liberal and Socialist groups are rather larger. I think it is a problem for the Conservatives that they are not represented in the mainstream conservative grouping, or Christian Democrat grouping, in the Parliament. I think that it was a regrettable decision by the British Conservatives not to take part in that, because I think it has reduced British political influence within the European political forum.