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EU Constitutional Treaty

My Lords, I join others in warmly thanking my noble friend Lord Blackwell for his eloquent opening of this debate and, like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, I have greatly enjoyed sitting here listening. I cannot say that truthfully about every debate—one usually says it untruthfully, but in this case it has been a most enjoyable experience. There have been highlights: I particularly enjoyed my noble friend Lord Waddington’s description of the gloomy but vast accommodation that the diplomatic representatives of the EU are building for themselves in Washington and elsewhere; I liked the vision of the noble Lord, Lord Harrison, stepping out to pluck the juicy cherries that he will put in his basket and offer to us all; and I enjoyed, as always, although I do not always agree with, the interventions of the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson. I loved how he said that the convention had been a great success; I was reminded of the surgeon who comes out of the operating room saying, ““The operation was a great success but the patient died””. That, I am afraid, is the analogy with the convention. Some of us said that the convention was the wrong approach to the needs of reforming and modernising Europe and would end in tears. It has ended in tears and the ““c”” word, the constitution, clearly was misleading, as my noble friend Lord Brittan rightly reminded us, and led people to think of the whole endeavour in the wrong way. So the debate was enjoyable, but the period of reflection is ending and it is right that your Lordships’ House and other parliaments and assemblies throughout Europe should turn their minds to what happens next. Like many people, I have a problem in that the Government have said many contradictory things and I do not know what to believe, trust or rely on. The Prime Minister stated three years ago in Warsaw:"““If the convention or IGC represented a fundamental change to the British constitution and to our system of parliamentary democracy, there would be a case for a referendum. But it doesn’t””." Many other Ministers spoke in even more virulent terms about the idea. Yet, along came the decision that there should be referendum. Later on, as my noble friend Lord Waddington reminded us, the same man, the Prime Minister, said that no-one knew what the constitutional treaty was for. It is hard to put any trust in what government Ministers have said, are saying or are going to say about their intentions on this matter. I prefer to stick to the Laeken declaration, to which the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, referred, which stated that the people of Europe were calling for,"““a clear, open, effective and democratically controlled Community approach””." Nothing like that came out of the convention, nor can we ignore the well made point by the respected Larry Seidentop in the Financial Times the other day. He stated:"““Nothing is more likely to confirm suspicions that the EU has become an elitist adventure than ignoring the French and Dutch referendum results and pushing ahead with a constitutional treaty””." There was much wisdom in that. My obvious conclusion is that the practical approach of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, is right—as is so often the case with great officers and high officials of state who have worked hard on these matters. We must turn away from what, in the world of Laurel and Hardy, would have been called ““another fine mess””—which is what the situation has turned out to be—and concentrate on practical issues for clearing up the mess, unravelling the damage caused by the wrong-headed approach to the convention, and see what is best for us and our neighbours in practical terms in organising the European neighbourhood and community, which we call the European Union. So I shall make my contribution as best as I can to those limited practical objectives. We say, quite simply, yes to clearer and smoother rules of governance for an enlarged European Union, provided that that enlarged Union is properly constrained in its ambitions. Obviously it requires different approaches: they were offered in the Nice Treaty but more changes will be needed. We say no to a further transfer of powers and more integration. On the contrary, we look for a transfer the other way—a reclaim of control and competences back to the nation state from the overloaded centre. Except in one respect, which I shall come to, there was no glimmer of any return or transfer of powers in the now collapsed constitutional treaty. If there is to be a new treaty document—perhaps it is coming—then, to the extent that it proposes a more significant transfer of powers, we would certainly require a referendum and we would like the Government’s reassurance that that would be their position as well. Continuing my theme of ““yes and no””, we say no, as many people have done, to an unnecessary Charter of Fundamental Rights. We can see it causing exactly the same problems as have been caused by the, admittedly unrelated, European Convention on Human Rights—namely, that judges and higher courts begin making and applying laws quite different from anything proposed by Parliament. It must be right that Parliament makes the laws and judges dispense them. The further we drift from that principle, the greater the popular contempt for our national political process. We can see that happening now. We say yes to much more democracy in the European Union, which means making national parliaments the anchor of the Union. I think that that means a good deal more than the ““yellow card”” idea in the draft constitution, which we thought lacked the necessary bite and teeth, and it means more than just talking about subsidiarity. That was a well meaning concept but it was somewhat flawed in that the initiation of the process seemed to come from the top, whereas democrats would look for more input from the nation states. We say no to the constant obsession in Brussels with making the EU into a superpower bloc with its own foreign policy and its own fully fledged diplomatic corps. My noble friend Lord Waddington reminded us where that was going, as did several other noble Lords. Obviously we want practical co-operation on specific international issues—that is fine—but the proposition that this country’s best interests are protected and promoted through our European partners just does not add up. It is absurd. I am sure that we could do far more for our international role and promoting and protecting our interests and far more to help our friends by giving the Commonwealth network a far higher priority in our foreign policy. I note in passing with the greatest regret that the latest departmental report from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not even mention the Commonwealth. There are pages and pages on the EU but the Commonwealth, all our connections and all the possibilities for this colossal potential network, containing most of the dynamic, fast-growing countries of the world, are neglected. To finish my list of yeses and noes, if new rules are to be drawn up, it would be yes to sensible neighbourhood and regional security arrangements, so long as they did not weaken NATO; no to the yearning for a legal personality, which is of course the old longing for the Rechtstaat; yes to lots of flexibility in co-operative arrangements between states; no to the two-speed Europe idea, because frankly we do not know what it is speeding towards; but it would be yes and yes again to extensive economic reform. Here, we obviously agree with the strong lead taken by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, but the exception that I would make to his observations is that endlessly revising the Lisbon Agenda will not do the trick. The future vitality of Europe does not lie in top-down governmental solutions but in the enterprise and innovation inside each state—at street level, so to speak. We obviously feel hobbled by the continuation of the large CAP, although, to be fair, there have been a considerable number of reforms, and we feel hobbled by the common fisheries policy, which ought to go. We see no gain in euro membership and wonder whether the Government now agree with people such as Professor Paul de Grauwe, the economic adviser to Mr Barroso, that,"““there is a fundamental flaw in the design of the Euro””." Perhaps we should all think about that. In the new global context with the rise of Asian power, we must be good Europeans but we cannot afford to be over-entangled with, and over-distracted by, local European affairs. Our interests and skills lie as much in our bilateral links with India, Japan, China and the transcontinental and multi-faith Commonwealth network as in our immediate geographical neighbours. We have always been good Europeans—perhaps the best in terms of our record and the sacrifices that we make—but, if the Europe that we want is to regain the trust and confidence of people, it will need to do much less and set itself much more modest aims. It will need to be less greedy for more powers, less centralised and less ambitious to be a super-bloc and to strut the world stage. That is not the way to make itself loved or useful to Europeans in their everyday life. If the leaders of the original constitutional convention had understood that, the European Union would be in a lot better shape today than it is. That is a lesson that we should all keep in our minds for the immediate future.