---

EU Constitutional Treaty

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blackwell on his courage in holding this debate and on the clarity with which he introduced it. The last time we discussed our general relationship with the European Union was on 11 February 2004, so I thought I would take the opportunity to repeat some of the absolute basics of that relationship by way of background to the predicament in which we find ourselves over the proposed EU constitution. If you want to know where you are going, it usually helps to remember where you have been and from where you start. The first thing to recall is the big idea which gave birth to the project of European union and which, almost unbelievably, still underpins it today. That big idea was that the nation states had been responsible for the carnage of two world wars and for the long history of war in Europe. The nation states, with their unreliable democracy, therefore had to be emasculated and diluted into a new form of supranational government, run by a Commission of wise and honest technocrats. That is why the unelected Commission still has the monopoly to propose EU legislation and to execute it once it has been through the Brussels system. That system is innately secretive and undemocratic.  After the Commission has proposed a new law, it is negotiated in secret by the Committee of Permanent Representatives—COREPER—or bureaucrats from the member states. It is then decided in secret by the Council of Ministers, where the United Kingdom has some 8.5 per cent of the votes, after which it must be rubber-stamped by the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House. The Commission also has the power to make regulations which have direct effect on the member states and do not even need to be rubber-stamped by their Parliaments. Disputes are settled by the Luxembourg court, against which there is no appeal. This is not a court of law as we understand that expression but, rather, the engine of European integration. The trouble is that a majority of our new law is now made under that system. The Government are being understandably coy about exactly what the proportion is, but the Germans have recently estimated that 80 per cent of all their new law since 1998 was decided in Brussels, and our own figure will not be very different. The heart of our democracy is the right of the British people to elect and dismiss those who make their laws, and so it has been betrayed by our membership of the European Union. Our party politics and general elections have become largely charades. The House of Commons and your Lordships’ House have become largely redundant. It is worth remembering, too, that once an area of our national life has been ceded to Brussels, the treaties ordain that it cannot be returned to the authority of this Parliament. Furthermore, no changes can be made to the treaties unless they are unanimously agreed by all 25 member states in the Council of Ministers. That is why many of us fear that renegotiation of the treaties is not realistic, and why we believe that the only way out is the door. We say, too, that the EU has not kept the peace in Europe since 1945, because NATO did that. We point out that as a top-down amalgamation of different peoples, put together without their informed consent and patently lacking democratic legitimacy, it is more likely to end in conflict than in peace. Add to that cocktail the spice of endemic corruption, and the future of the European project looks worrying indeed. The other principal justification for the project of European union is that it is supposed to bring prosperity. This claim does not withstand any sort of examination either, certainly as far as the UK is concerned. As my noble friend Lord Blackwell said, only some 9 per cent of our economy trades with the EU, 11 per cent with the rest of the world, with 80 per cent staying in our domestic economy. Yet 100 per cent of our economy is bound by the diktats from Brussels, forcing the failed Franco-German social and labour model on to our internationalist economy and preventing us taking the free trading opportunities which the anglosphere and the new world order so obviously offer. Let us not forget that the European Commission, personified by our own inimitable Mr Mandelson, has the sole power to negotiate our foreign trade arrangements, and our needs are quite simply not the same as the countries of continental Europe. It remains clear, too, that we could leave the political construct of the EU and still maintain our free trade for the 9 per cent of our economy which trades with the single market. If only because we trade in deficit with it, it needs our trade more than we need its; we are its largest client, so on leaving, we could dictate our terms. It is also clear that our membership of the European Union has become hugely expensive for us. The Government stubbornly refuse to carry out any sort of cost benefit analysis, as we can see from our debates on 27 June 2003 and 11 February 2004, so the Euro-sceptic movement has commissioned a number of independent studies. These suggest that the current cost of our EU membership is anything between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of GDP, or £40 billion to £100 billion per annum. Somewhat ironically—and no doubt unwittingly—the Treasury produced a report entitled Global Europe last October, which includes several lost opportunity costs and puts the cost of our EU membership at some 28 per cent of GDP or £326 billion per annum, but I do not imagine that the Minister will defend that figure today. So that is some of the background as we contemplate the proposed EU constitution. I submit that that background leads us to conclude that the project of European union has so far been a disaster for this country and that the constitution in whatever form it is eventually adopted, can only make things worse. I fear that it is inconceivable that the project will voluntarily go into reverse by handing back any of our democracy or allowing us to deregulate independently. Far too many bureaucrats and second-rate politicians depend on the project for their bloated lifestyles and pensions for that to happen. Official Answers in your Lordships’ House and in the European Parliament reveal that at least four major integrating initiatives are proceeding in the legal vacuum—the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the foreign service, which was mentioned by my noble friend Lord Waddington, the defence agency and the space programme; and to make matters worse, the Luxembourg court has also agreed that the EU has the power to interfere in our criminal law against the wishes of a large majority of the member states, including the UK. So the best thing for the people of Europe as opposed to its politicians and bureaucrats would be for the United Kingdom to leave the EU and pursue our interests in the wider world. That might start the project’s disintegration, leaving the democracies of Europe to trade freely together linked through NATO. Once again, in that happy event, we will have saved ourselves by our endeavour and Europe by our example.