I beg to move,
That this House believes that the UK should opt out of all EU police and criminal justice measures adopted before December 2009 and seek to rejoin measures where it is in the national interest to do so and invites the European Scrutiny Committee, the Home Affairs Select Committee and the Justice Select Committee to submit relevant reports before the end of October, before the Government opens formal discussions with the Commission, Council and other Member States on the set of measures in Command Paper 8671, prior to the Government’s formal application to rejoin measures in accordance with Article10(5) of Protocol 36 to the TFEU.
For 40 years, ever since the United Kingdom entered what was then just a Common Market, power flowed in one direction—from this country and this place, which ought to be sovereign but in practice is often not, to the institutions of the European Union. Since the referendum in 1975, not once was the consent of the British people sought or given for a series of treaties that gave more and more power to Europe.
The Government’s decision, which I announced in a statement last week, to opt out of around 130 European justice and home affairs measures, before seeking to opt back into those measures that we believe work in the national interest, will be the first time in the history of our membership of the European Union that we have taken such a set of powers back from Brussels. Let us be clear that, however complicated the issues we are about to debate—I will soon come to those issues—we are first and foremost talking about bringing powers back home. That is something—