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EU Constitutional Treaty

My Lords, this has been an interesting debate. I always enjoy listening to the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, who represents one of the most intelligent Euro-sceptic voices that we have. We need to debate much more actively what happens after the failure of the constitutional treaty and where we go from here. I regard the treaty as having been very much a curate’s egg; good in parts, but too long, too detailed and too infected by the French concept of the European project. I do not intend to go into detail on what I would wish to rescue from it; I agree fundamentally with what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said on that. We must recognise that the death of the constitutional treaty is also the death of the old European project, and that is why we have such a crisis of national identity and national politics in France at present with, as the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, pointed out, a great deal of comment about the Anglo-Saxons having taken over and having won. This is a crisis of the French political elite, of the role of the French state in the economy, and of the protection of the French public sector against globalisation. One of the arguments for lifting the veto in a number of areas, including over the future of the Community budget, is precisely to lift the French veto against change, and that is one thing that the constitutional treaty would have done. There is also a crisis of national identity in Belgium, which is why Belgian prime ministers are always so fervently Euro-federalist, because of the problems in their own country. We saw in the Dutch referendum to some extent agonising over the Netherlands becoming a much less significant player within a much larger Europe. That was one of the undertones in their referendum debate. Let us recognise that we also have problems of national identity and of British values, which we cannot resolve until we also resolve our relationship with Europe. We heard in the noble Lord, Lord Blackwell, the voice of authentic unionism of 50 years ago or more. I cannot remember whether it was Ernest Bevin or Anthony Eden, or both, who talked about Britain having to choose between Europe and the open sea, and that Britain would always choose the open sea. There was a faint echo of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the noble Lord’s references to the Commonwealth. I recall the debates of the 1950s, which I used to read about when I was a student—I was a boy at the time—in which it was said that this is a Protestant England, naturally free, facing a Catholic continent that is naturally authoritarian, dominated by hostile and conspiratorial France. The quotation by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, echoes Prime Minister Pitt, remembering that Pitt knew that he was a European and that Britain played a role in European politics. We need a debate on British identity, history and values as part of reconciling ourselves to being European. In his excellent British Council lecture 18 months ago, the Chancellor of the Exchequer said, if I recall correctly, that the confusion over British national identity is part of what gets in the way of a reasonable relationship with our European neighbours. That, incidentally, is why I asked yesterday how the Government intend to consult on the question of what sort of British values and British history will be taught in British schools. There is clearly a great deal of confusion and a substantial gap among the parties and others on which we need to build a new consensus. We are now in a different Europe from where we were. The whole sense that Europe was dominated by France, conspiring against British interests, no longer relates to an EU of 15, let alone an EU of 25 or an EU that will expand to 30 or 32. British political leaders should be contributing to collective debate about the future balance of policies and institutional structures. Our world has not stood still; we are a long way from the British Commonwealth and Empire of the 1950s. We now need rapid economic growth across eastern Europe. Some of the speeches from the Conservative Benches struck me because they did not mention the rapid economic growth in eastern Europe. Car manufacturing in Britain is not going to China or Russia, but to Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. That is part of what is happening in Europe. The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail sell large numbers of copies in Spain, Portugal and France to sceptical British who have retired there, but who, nevertheless, campaign to ensure that they get votes in local elections, according to the EU treaty. The pressures of immigration and of organised crime mean that we have an active interest in the success of the Spanish authorities in stemming the tide of illegal immigration from west Africa to the Canary islands and southern Spain. This country faces no direct threats, but the indirect threats that we share with our neighbours of the collapse of states in Africa lead to pressures—from asylum and immigration to drug smuggling in an uncontrolled Afghanistan. So we should be arguing within the European Union for continuing adjustment to both policies and institutions. To those who agree with the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, that we want more Europe on some issues and less on others, I say that we need more co-operation on foreign policy, defence and policing and less in the detail of the regulation of social policies or spending on agriculture. We need a different balance to the budget, which the constitutional treaty would have allowed us to achieve. We need a different Commission, a smaller college of commissioners and considerable further reform of the services of the Commission and its ethos. We need a different relationship between the European Parliament and national parliaments, as a number of noble Lords have said. I regret that some Members of the European Parliament, including one or two British Members, continue to resist allowing national parliaments to come in, as the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson said. We need fewer vetoes on common policies among the 27 or 28 members if we are to pursue British interests effectively within that larger group. One of the greatest failures of this Labour Government has been that they have not led a debate either in Britain or on the Continent about where British interests and those of our European neighbours can best be combined. The Prime Minister came to office nine years ago promising to take Britain to the heart of Europe and to make the British people comfortable with our position in Europe. Sadly what we have had are infrequent speeches at home or abroad, nine Ministers for Europe—although the current Minister is on his second time around—no coherent or consistent overall policy and, in a number of areas, policies in which the British Government have led but have not wished us to know that they are leading. I suspect that the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, does not know, for example, that the European Defence Agency was very much a British initiative, not a plot against the British, or that the British played an active and positive role in developing European security and defence policy—including the military staff in Brussels. As for our Conservative colleagues, the retreat to English nationalism and the reversal of the greatest achievement that Edward Heath made as Prime Minister is deeply regrettable. Even more regrettable is the retreat to the fringes of European party politics that the party is now attempting to negotiate. The suggestion that perhaps China and Russia are our future preferred partners, rather than France, the Netherlands, Denmark and others—not excluding Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Poland—seems a little odd. So we should reflect much more actively in public, at home, abroad and in other European member states. We should accept that the constitutional treaty is dead, but more efficient procedures for pursuing and managing common policies will nevertheless be needed in the British national interest. We should recognise that we share responsibility for failures of leadership within the European Union and that British politicians of all parties should be active in moving the debate forward. In that debate, we should be talking about British national interests and common European interests, and constructing common policies that serve all our interests together.