---

Summer Adjournment

In this debate, it is customary to raise constituency issues, but I do not want to do that this afternoon. I want to debate a Government Green Paper and a document that is not yet available, because this is the last opportunity before the summer recess to do so. The Green Paper ““The Governance of Britain”” is excellent and I welcome it. In it, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the House commit themselves to much greater involvement by the public and Parliament in our constitutional decisions. They state that they"““want to forge a new relationship between government and citizen, and begin the journey towards a new constitutional settlement””." The document briefly recounts how the British constitution evolved. It mentions at great length on a number of occasions the Council of Europe and the European convention on human rights. However, there is only one reference to the European Union, namely:"““in 1973, the UK joined the European Economic Community (now the European Union) and became a part of a multinational political structure.””" The document does not mention the Single European Act and the Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice treaties, which I think are extremely important in the evolution of our constitutional settlement. Page 19 briefly refers to the process of EU treaty ratification, but otherwise the EU is absent. For example, the document includes a list of public appointments that could be subject to affirmative hearings, but I think that European Commissioner is a classic example of an appointment that should be open to a scrutiny hearing. The document encourages us to reinvigorate our democracy, and it mentions"““the Government’s wish to ensure that decision-making is done at the right level: whether national, regional or in the local community””." It also discusses the youth citizenship commission and voting rights, but, again, there is no mention of the EU. We have a whole Green Paper on the governance of Britain that completely leaves out the source of some 60 per cent. of our domestic legislation in areas such as health and trade. When was the last time we saw Department of Trade and Industry legislation? There is no mention of the European Parliament, other than mentioning the change in voting rights, which is a sad omission in what is otherwise an exceptionally good document. One part of the document attempts to define the values of Britain, and it considers with some envy the way in which the French or even the Americans have managed to do that. In the UK, we could make much more of the rule of law as one of the key values by which we define ourselves. At least we can discuss that Green Paper, because we can read it. I think that the second document is called ““The EU Reform Treaty””. I want to make it clear that I am not against the European Union—far from it; my whole life has been a product of its evolution. However, it is sometimes disheartening how those on the Treasury Bench manage to pigeonhole anybody who has anything even marginally critical to say about it as being completely antediluvian—to want to withdraw immediately and go back to being little Englanders saying, ““Fog in the Channel: continent cut off.”” That is not the point. I am in favour of the European Union, but I would like it to work properly. We should have the right to discuss this, and not pretend that the elephant in the room does not exist. People say that the call for a referendum is an old Tory agenda, but I would have thought that it was a classic new Labour agenda. We are the party that has asked the people far more often than any other party has done before. The Conservatives never went to the people—they were afraid to do so. We have had local referendums and referendums on devolution. We had a referendum on whether Birmingham should have an elected mayor. I was absolutely delighted to go into the 2005 general election with a manifesto commitment that we would have a referendum on the then constitutional treaty, but it was extraordinary that the former Prime Minister did not give its constitutional implications as the reason for seeking the people’s opinion. Now we have the new treaty. In the past two and a half hours I have managed to skim through the first 26 pages of the 118-page document, which is still so far an unofficial translation. We are leaving for the recess and will not come back until October, when all the negotiations and deals will have been done, yet the purpose of this new democratic settlement, which started five or six years ago, was to involve the people and national Parliaments more. I do not want to get into whether this document contains 90 or 95 per cent. of the old constitutional treaty; all I will say is that I can see, having skimmed through it, that all the big items are still in there. I do not want to fall into the trap whereby we assume that anything that has been taken out must therefore be good and anything that has been put in is bad. That is not true. People really need to read this properly. One of the things that I just spotted is on page 26, where, under the heading ““Ordinary revision procedure””, it says that"““any Member State, the European Parliament or the Commission””" can bring forward proposals that"““aim to increase or reduce the competencies conferred on the Union in the treaties.””" That would be, for the first time, a mechanism for returning powers, which is extremely good. The new treaty also claims to give more power to national Parliaments, but that is extremely misleading. What it does is extraordinary. For the first time, the Union tries to put a duty on national Parliaments to behave in a particular way. We do not bind our successor Parliaments, yet we are being asked to accept a document that says:"““National Parliaments shall contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union””." There is a whole list of ways in which we are supposed to fulfil that role—we will be informed, we will be seeing to things, we will taking part, and we will be notified, but will have no teeth other than in facilitating the functioning of the Union. I am sorry, but I have never perceived having a duty to serve the Union to be my role as a national parliamentarian—I thought that it was supposed to be the other way round. The document still contains the citizens initiative whereby more than 1 million people across a number of member states are being given the right to initiate legislation—something that national Parliaments have not done. I suggest to the Deputy Leader of the House that the Government should stop going on about what percentage of the treaty is what it was before and look at it properly. The Government say that the red lines that we have secured mean that we do not need a referendum, but those matters were already protected in the constitutional treaty on which we were prepared to have a referendum—nothing has changed. Opt-outs are continually politically vulnerable to pressure every time a crisis occurs. This is now a question of trust. It is a question of having given a commitment to a referendum on a document that we say is good for Britain. We should ask the people to endorse that. If we are so confident that it is good, we should have the confidence to ask the people. The Foreign Secretary and the Minister for Europe deny that the treaty is substantial enough for us to be bound by that promise. Are they being deliberately disingenuous or are they ill-informed? I suggest to them some light summer reading—read the treaty, in English or in French. They can then come back and we can decide which one of the two interpretations is correct.