---

European Council: 23-24 March 2006

My Lords, perhaps I may press the Minister even further on the question raised by the noble Lord, Lord Brittan. Some of us are sceptical about Lisbon for two reasons. One is that many of the proposals in the Lisbon agenda are outside the powers of the European Union as it stands today, so the agenda was to some extent bound to remain paper rather than fact. It is very different from the single market proposals. The other is that policies and policy cultures in different European countries differ. Lisbon has never taken sufficient account of those rather fundamental differences. Having said that, the problem now seems to be the truly serious issue of protectionism. I wonder whether it is good enough to rely on friendly intergovernmental talks when it comes to extremely serious developments. I shall not return to the services directive, but the directive that will emerge will at any rate not do the crucial thing: recognise the conditions obtaining in the country from which services or those who deliver services come. On energy policy, quite a few participants in last week’s meeting declared ahead of time that they do not intend to give any further powers to Europe in that field. I find what happens in the Polish banking system extremely serious. It is extremely serious not only because of economic nationalism but because of the extraordinary position in which the governor of the Bank of Poland, who is one of the most distinguished and, I believe, important figures in post-communist Poland, is placed. Even bilateralism of the kind practised in the pipeline agreement between Germany and Russia, which is trying to avoid members of the European Union—in other words, having a pipeline not going through Poland or Lithuania—shows to me that there is a truly serious tendency that you can call protectionism or economic nationalism. Should not that be brought out into the open? In so far as solutions are possible, is not the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, entirely right when he points to the powers that the Commission has in many of those areas? Should it not be encouraged to use those powers?