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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 4)

We have heard from the hon. Gentleman and from the Secretary of State what the Government think. They can argue until they are blue in the face that all of this is of no great significance, but that view is not widely shared, especially by those who have fought long and hard to downgrade the competition provisions. They believe that they have won a great political victory. For example, President Sarkozy, magnanimous as ever in victory, has said:"““competition is now just a means, not an end in itself. This opens the way to a different jurisprudence, one that favours European champions and brings a true industrial policy””." In other words, he foresees a market managed by political deals. That is not a model of European collaboration that will bring prosperity to the British people, and ultimately it is will not bring prosperity to the French people, either. The Commission gains a raft of new powers to act unilaterally—for example, to enact regulations relating to agreements between undertakings, to regulate permitted state aid and to rule on the legality of national restrictions on movements of capital. The internal market becomes a shared competence, which under a new definition means that member states will not be able to legislate at all in a space where the EU has legislated. They will be unable to legislate in a way that conflicts with the EU, and that would include legislation to address matters of temporary national interest, or to supplement EU law. Britain's veto over regulations on the establishment of self-employed professionals is scrapped. The European Parliament gains vetoes over liberalisation of services and capital movements. International trade becomes an exclusive competence of the EU as far as it is defined by treaty provisions. In all those areas the UK Government fought to hold the line or secure exceptions. In every area they lost the battle, and now they seek to argue that nothing has changed. How the Commission and the Parliament will use their new powers is an open question. It is possibly the understatement of the decade to say that it is by no means obvious that they will use them to promote free competition. I, for one, suspect that President Sarkozy's vision of an industrial policy of ““picking champions”” will have an irresistible appeal in Brussels. What is clear is that at the end of the process a strong political signal has been delivered and the EU's approach to the development of the single market will change. It will be more interventionist, less focused on free and open competition and more focused on picking winners, imposing strategies and enforcing other EU social objectives through the regulation and manipulation of the marketplace. Only a rejection of this treaty by the British people in a referendum can now reverse that momentum. Finally, I turn to the legal implications of the changes to the treaty and the impact that they will have on EU jurisprudence. The Secretary of State said that there were none, and that nothing would change. But there are serious concerns that the changes to the treaty will undermine the political and constitutional support for anti-trust action by the EU and will inevitably have an impact on the ECJ's interpretation of EU law. It is true that the protocol has the same legal force as the treaty itself, but the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties emphasises the importance of objective and purpose as a guide to the interpretation of treaties. The ECJ has developed a ““purposive interpretation”” tradition to deal with conflicts. In other words, it considers the objectives and purposes of the Union in deciding which of the conflicting arguments should be given greater weight. In relation to how the Court conducts itself, it is a simple matter of fact that no mere protocol can achieve the same interpretative status as an article of principle or an objective in the treaty itself.