Today’s debate should be about the very future of the United Kingdom’s democracy. I and many of my right hon. and hon. Friends believe that one of the great duties of a state is to settle on a fair and strong criminal law and to ensure that the crime-fighting resources are put in to maintain that law. We also believe that, in an increasingly global world of criminal activity, those functions can be properly discharged by the Home Secretary in Cabinet and by the police forces of our country only if we have proper co-operation and collaboration arrangements with other countries abroad. We need those co-operation arrangements, not just with other European countries in the European Union or the few countries in Europe not in the European Union, but with every country around the world. I am pleased to say that thanks to successive Governments and Home Secretaries we do have in place a set of pretty good arrangements with the major countries, and we have demonstrated our ability to negotiate successful arrangements for extradition and mutual crime fighting with those countries that are not in the European Union and to find ways of doing that with countries in the European Union.
Let me make it clear at the outset that those of us who do not wish to opt back in to European criminal justice measures are no more soft on crime than anyone else in the House. We believe that there can be an alternative way of ensuring proper co-operation and collaboration with France, Germany and the other leading European Union countries, just as we have those successful co-operation arrangements with countries that are outside the European Union.
Our objection to any of these measures, including the European arrest warrant, is not necessarily about the measure itself, and certainly not its purpose, but about the way in which the institutional structure is developed to back up the measure. We are trying to protect our democracy, this Parliament and future Home Secretaries from the event that the European Court of Justice, once we have opted into any of these measures, can use that opt-in as a device for making good criminal law in Brussels and in the Court that this House and the British people might fundamentally disagree with.