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A Citizens’ Agenda

We have been debating something that does not exist, as there is no citizens’ agenda in Europe. The public—the voters—of Europe have always been treated as political adolescents to be patronised and then ignored by the political class who drive the project forward. Europe’s political elite—they are often very candid about this, at least on the continent—see themselves as having a vanguard role in building an integrated, centralised Europe around which the public must coalesce. If we add to that the fact that all multinational bureaucracies have an instinct to expand and never to reform themselves, we have a recipe for what we do indeed have—a remote, centralised, often corrupt and certainly wasteful form of government from which the public feel completely alienated. There is now a lot of evidence for that, including a succession of no votes, not only on the European constitution but in Sweden and Denmark and an initial no vote in Ireland on the Nice treaty. Moreover, the turnout in European parliamentary elections has, on average, fallen in every single election since 1979, despite the fact that the Parliament has more and more power. The stronger it gets, the fewer people vote for it. I think that what I have said so far is uncontroversial. It has been a general theme of this debate that something needs to be done to re-engage the public; so it is that we have in the documents before the House something called plan D. I do not know what happened to plans A, B and C, but perhaps I had something to with the latter, along with the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart). She and I had the honour of representing this House in the Convention on the Future of Europe, which was an attempt to tackle these issues of alienation. We were instructed to simplify the treaties and to create a Europe closer to its citizens. Of course, that instruction was ignored; instead, the Convention wrote itself a constitution, which was all about giving more powers to the very European Union institutions that had created the problem in the first place. Put simply, the constitution failed. However, although it was turned down by the voters of France and Holland, the Prime Minister, bizarrely, not only signed but still supports it. Presumably, therefore, the Government’s formal position is that that discredited document should be brought into effect in its entirety.