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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I want to address my comments entirely to the proposed EU reform treaty. As I outlined at length in the debate of 20 June on Europe, I am a natural pro-European. I thank the right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) for his kind comments about my enthusiasm for Europeans in general and eastern Europeans in particular. Nevertheless, I remain deeply sceptical of the direction of the EU at the moment. The Economist last month called the EU"““an institution desperately short of legitimacy and accountability””" and I agree. I am not someone who is opposed per se to European co-operation or even to the pooling of sovereignty in certain areas such as, for example, in the administration of trade policy. But I believe that any new and/or significant transfer of power to Brussels needs to fulfil two important criteria. The first is that the British people must vote democratically for it to happen; the second is that the ensuing structures and processes in Europe must themselves be democratic. Both are crucial, yet neither is being fulfilled by the treaty that we will be considering at length this Session. I wanted to focus my comments less on the process—it does not really need to be said any longer that the process of arriving at this treaty has been deeply dishonest and full of subterfuge, practised both by those proposing the new treaty and by the Government here in the lead-up to signing it—and principally on the contents. We are in danger of becoming too fixated on manifesto pledges and red lines—important though they are—and we need to get across what is wrong with this treaty and how it is against British interests. I will outline seven areas of particular concern. The first was talked about at length by my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond, Yorks (Mr. Hague); the role of the new EU President. As he rightly pointed out, the federalist vision is that the position be eventually merged with that of the President of the Commission. Giscard d'Estaing said:"““We will probably have to have at least two executives in the beginning””." The UK fought in the drafting of the constitution against any merging, but the new treaty will allow for it. The final text states only that"““the President of the European Council should not hold national office””" but it is quite possible for him or her to be the President of the Commission. Suddenly we would have a very powerful head of the Executive, combining the roles of the President of the Council and of the Commission, but crucially he or she would be unelected either by the peoples of Europe or even by the Parliaments. Giuliano Amato, the Vice-President of the convention that drew up the original EU constitution, has even explicitly called for the two positions to be merged before 2015."““Can an animal with two heads survive for long?””" he asked. On the EU Foreign Minister and the EU Diplomatic Service, the UK's hard-fought-for position at the top table of the UN Security Council is under threat. Under the treaty the UK at the UN"““shall ask that the High Representative be invited to present the position of the Union””" when"““the Union has defined a position on a subject on the agenda of the UN Security Council.””" The UK fought twice during earlier negotiations on the constitution to have this struck out and was twice unsuccessful. The clause is with us today. The third area of concern is the self-amending nature of the treaty, another important provision that was re-introduced from the constitution. At present, the EU treaties can only be amended by an intergovernmental conference, which must then be ratified in each member state, by Parliament or by referendum. However, article 33(2) of the new treaty allows the Council to vote by unanimity to change any of the text of part 3 of the treaty on the functioning of the Union, which is basically all the detail of the treaties. I could talk about the vetoes that have been abolished and the reduction in our ability to block EU legislation, but I will mention instead the single legal personality, which for the first time would allow the EU, rather than member states, to sign up to international agreements on foreign policy. I take the House back to the words of Tony Blair after the Amsterdam treaty:"““Others wanted to give the European Union explicit legal personality across all pillars of the treaty. At our insistence, that was removed””." Ten years later, it has come back. I want to talk about the duty of national Parliaments under the new treaty. The text says that the national Parliaments, including our own, will have a duty to""contribute actively to the good functioning of the Union."" National Parliaments, unlike the European Parliament, were not creations of the treaties and their rights are not dependent on the treaties. Indeed, the new treaty proposes, for the first time, that national Parliaments be subservient to the Union. The new treaty still says that"““National Parliaments contribute to the good functioning of the Union””" and that they are "seeing to it" that subsidiarity be respected. For the first time, European government is ordering national Parliaments how to behave, which is deeply worrying. The final and most important point concerns the charter of fundamental rights and the European Court of Justice. They will take from the UK Parliament a significant amount of our ability to govern ourselves, especially in areas of criminal justice and home affairs. On 18 June, Tony Blair told the Liaison Committee that the UK"““will not accept a Treaty that allows the Charter of Fundamental Rights to change UK law in any way.””" That was one of the red lines. The excellent report from the European Scrutiny Committee—of which I am proud to be a member—described in clear detail how this red line has been crossed. The charter of fundamental rights applies to member states when implementing Union law. Our report raised the question whether the UK would be bound by ECJ case law when the ECJ interprets the charter in relation to implementation and cases in other EU members—and particularly cases where the same measure has been implemented in the UK. In other words, ECJ judgments would form part of the case law which the UK courts would be obliged to follow in this country so that EU law is applied consistently across the EU. The Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), said of the protocol that Tony Blair and his successor as Prime Minister believe they have negotiated that"““it will leak like a sieve.””" The former Prime Minister said that the charter would not apply in the UK at all thanks to the protocol, but I am now certain that he was wrong. Moreover, the current Minister for Europe seems to agree. He said to the Committee on 2 October that the protocol"““is a statement of how the Charter provisions will apply in the UK””," which is rather different from saying they would not apply at all. In practice, the European Scrutiny Committee pointed out in its excellent report of 2 October how the red line has been totally breached. During the past two and half years since I have been a Member, the euro has been a neglected topic in this House. I wanted to compare the Government's handling of the treaty and the broken promises made to their commitments on the euro. I ask Members whether it is just me who thinks that the four red lines on the treaty are not unlike the five economic tests on the euro. They are lines and tests that are self-declared, self-policed and—in my view—destined to be broken. The commitment to the referendum on the treaty sounds not unlike the commitment to a referendum on the euro; the commitment was put in place to kick the issue into touch before a general election—in the case of the euro, the 2001 general election, and in the case of the treaty, the general election of 2005. I believe that the Government will ultimately renege on that commitment to hold a referendum on the euro in the coming years. I might be the only Member who has read the Cabinet Office document, ““Global Europe””, which the Prime Minister launched in this House to great fanfare on 22 October. There is virtually nothing in it, so nobody has missed a great deal. It is like a ““Brodie's Notes”” on how the European Union functions for one of the Government's very straightforward GCSEs. The only new ideas in it that the Prime Minister announced on 22 October sounded terribly familiar to me, so I checked and discovered that I had, indeed, heard most of them before. They were the same ideas as appeared in a speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), the Leader of the Opposition, in Brussels in March. I invite Members to draw comparisons. The Prime Minister told us last month that"““the priority for the European Union must now be the global challenges that we face in relation to employment, prosperity, competitiveness, climate change and security. Today—in a document, ““Global Europe””, published this afternoon and available to the House now—the Government set out how we will advance those new priorities in the future.””—[Official Report, 22 October 2007; Vol. 465, c. 19.]" He also talked about the EU's role in ““reducing global poverty””, climate change and competitiveness. Let us compare that with the Leader of the Opposition's speech in Brussels in March. He said:"““The EU should be focusing on three things. First, the economic challenge of globalisation. Second, the environmental challenge of climate change. And third, the moral and security challenge of global poverty. What needs doing? Globalisation. Global warming. Global poverty. I think of these as the priorities of a 3G Europe.””" The two speeches are almost identical. The big difference is that the Leader of the Opposition's speech came seven months earlier. Of course there are issues of trust, issues of manifesto pledges broken, issues of red lines being red herrings, red lines being breached and so on. But it is not just the process that concerns me. What is proposed are fundamental changes to our national sovereignty and the weakening of our role as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. We will have two foreign services, one of them UK, the other EU, and the latter will inevitably gain at the expense of the former The new EU President will, when the role is combined with the president of the EU Council, be an all-powerful Executive figure who, crucially, is unelected. Most of all, this Parliament and the UK courts will lose significant powers to the ECJ in relation to the interpretation of our laws in many important areas. As was said at Laeken at the start of this EU constitution process, we desperately need more democracy in the EU. Yet this treaty offers less democracy, not more. Moreover, I do not believe that this Parliament has the right to bind its successors to the surrender of all those powers.