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Address in Reply to Her Majesty’s Most   Gracious Speech

My Lords, there has been something rather surrealistic about the recent general election campaign. Despite the fact that it has been about the choice of a government for a country which has the fourth largest economy in the world, which has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and which is a leading player in the European Union, almost nothing of any significance or novelty was said by any of the three main parties about international affairs or about the foreign policy of the country which they aspired to lead. That is not because there is broad national consensus on those matters—far from it. Over the future of the European Union and Britain’s role within it there is a sharp and fundamental divide between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats on the one hand, which favour endorsement of the EU’s constitutional treaty, and the Conservative Party on the other hand, which would reject that treaty and seek to re-negotiate substantial parts of our EU obligations. On Iraq, where opinions are divided differently, but where they are every bit as sharp, the debate has focused almost exclusively on events that took place over two years ago and in a setting which related more to domestic politics than to the fate of the country in question or to the paralysis of the UN Security Council at the moment of decision. Yet within a few months, crucial decisions will need to be taken which will affect the future development and effectiveness of two organisations, the EU and the UN, through which much of our foreign policy is now transacted. The European Union faces a daunting obstacle posed by the successive referendums being held to ratify the constitutional treaty and possibly, although by no means certainly, by the need to respond to a negative vote in one or more member states. The UN, at the summit meeting called for September in New York—I welcome the reference of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, to that very important meeting—will need to take decisions based on the reform proposals now on the table, or risk being increasingly pushed into the margin of events. Meanwhile, neither organisation can afford to focus exclusively on those systemic issues; each faces a huge and pressing daily agenda. In both, Britain, as EU and G8 presidency, has an important role to play and potential to affect the outcome either negatively or positively. The EU’s constitutional treaty is clearly living dangerously, with opinion polls in three of the countries where referendums are being held—France, the Netherlands and the UK—pointing to at least the possibility of rejection. Having carefully studied the text of the treaty and the useful, detailed commentary provided on it by the Government—I thank the Government very warmly for the documents that so far have been provided—I agree with my noble friend Lord Williamson that much more needs to be provided, but I believe that they have made a good start. I am in no doubt that it is in the European Union’s and in Britain’s interest that that treaty be ratified and that it should enter into force. While it is not substantively the most ambitious step the European Union has ever taken—the founding treaties, the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty and successive enlargements can all be said to have been of greater significance—it is, however, of great symbolic importance. It lays down a much clearer and more satisfactory basis for the future development of the Union than has ever existed hitherto. It moves forward in areas such as asylum and immigration and the common foreign and security policy, where the need for stronger common policies has been clearly demonstrated; it re-shapes the institutional balance to give more strategic direction from the European Council; it provides a role for national parliaments where none previously existed; and it does all that without making any changes to the need for unanimity in key areas such as taxation, the cap on spending, further treaty changes and the admission of new members. What if there is a negative vote in one or more of the countries holding referendums? To discuss that now is neither to show a hankering for such an outcome, nor to put forward some theoretical plan B which would be a perfectly satisfactory alternative to plan A. No such plan B exists. The rejection of the treaty would be a major setback, but, if it were to occur, it is important that the reaction to it should not further damage the Union and lead to even greater disunity than the divide over ratification would already have demonstrated. I cannot believe that it would be a realistic proposition to expect a member state which had voted ““no””, by however small a margin, to reverse that decision in a second vote in the near future. The circumstances under which that particular course was successfully pursued in earlier cases in the instances of Denmark and Ireland—with relatively modest measures of reassurance on a very limited number of national concerns and with no change to the text of the treaties being ratified—are unlikely to be applicable on this occasion. Nor do I believe that it would make sense to attempt an early renegotiation of the treaty. The text encapsulates a whole mass of hard-won compromises, the reopening of which would be far more likely to lead to discord than to agreement. Thirdly, I do not believe it is wise to seek to insist that countries further down the referendum chain continue that process. I notice that those advocating this course are generally from countries which are not holding referendums—asking other people’s electorates to dive into empty swimming pools does not seem to me likely to prove very constructive. So what would be the best way to proceed? First, the European Union will need to demonstrate that it is not going to lapse into a prolonged period of introspection and divided councils. Unity will be at a premium. That is a strong argument, if one were needed, against putting forward ideas of core or pioneer groups. It will also require that the European Union does not just use words about unity but actually reaches decisions on a whole range of subjects, from the completion of the single market and the Lisbon agenda, through the budget limits for the next seven years, to further enlargement and the pressing issues on the foreign policy agenda—Iran, the Middle East peace process and the revitalisation of the United Nations—and the need to steer the Doha round of trade negotiations to a successful conclusion. At the same time the European Union will need to go on adapting itself and its institutions, as it has done so often in the past, by means that fall short of the requirement for treaty change and ratification. Why should the Commission, for example, not give national parliaments an opportunity to comment on draft legislation and accept—voluntarily and not under legal obligation—to reconsider their proposals if a third or more of national parliaments were to make objections on the grounds of subsidiarity? It may—indeed, I sincerely hope it will—be that none of this will be necessary. But there is surely no harm in beginning to think these matters through. Then there is the process of UN reform, on which the Secretary-General has now drawn together the threads of the report of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and of the review of the millennium development goals established in 2000 for the period up to 2015. He has set out an ambitious but well argued agenda for decision at the September summit in New York. What is needed here is to make progress on a broad front, avoiding talk of artificial trade-offs between security and development but nevertheless recognising that the two are closely interlinked. It will be important too to avoid being distracted by the oil-for-food imbroglio which, in truth, merely underlines the case for UN reform. If it becomes clear nearer the time that a proposal such as that for the enlargement of the Security Council cannot in the short term make progress, it is critical that that is not used as a pretext for stalling other reforms whose validity and viability are not dependent on enlargement. If the UN can move forward by agreeing a comprehensive strategy against terrorism along the lines suggested by the Secretary-General in his March speech in Madrid and can reach agreement on a definitive outlawing of all terrorist acts targeting non-combatants; if a peace-building commission can be established to plug the gap in the UN’s armoury for dealing with failed and failing states and post-conflict peace-building; if multi-layered improvements in the various regimes preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction can be put in place; if co-operation between the UN and regional and sub-regional organisations can be put on a sounder and better-funded basis; if guidelines for considering the use of force and the responsibility to protect those whose governments are either unwilling or unable to protect them themselves can be settled; if a better flow of resources, and new instruments for mobilising those resources to help development, check pandemic diseases and roll back world poverty can be guaranteed; if progress can be made towards establishing a sounder basis for dealing with human rights abuses; if these policy changes can be made then the revitalisation of the United Nations will be on the right track. It may sound a tall order to look for all that, but that is the measure of the challenges that the UN and its members face. The two main areas of policy I have addressed have considerable overlaps. When the Prime Minister goes to New York in September he will do so not only on behalf of this country but as the president of the European Union. When he presides over the G8 meeting at Gleneagles in July he will also be representing the European Union and he will be handling a whole range of subjects that will crucially affect the outcome of the New York summit; and when he assumes the presidency of the EU in July, the handling of that job will influence the future development of the Union and its constitutional arrangements. So a lot is at stake; and both opportunities and risks are there in profusion.