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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I think that it is high time that we gave the noble Baroness a break. The sheer length of her exposition is demonstration of the enormous complexities of what we are dealing with and the vast range of unfinished business that is implied—which, contrary to the assertions of the Prime Minister, will lead to more institutional change, more constitutional change and more treaties, probably in the next few years, certainly within the next five-year period. I admit that the amendment is extremely limited in scope; and intentionally so. It was simply aimed at opening the door to a variety of issues, which has been opened wider, quite rightly, by some of your Lordships in very interesting comments. I hope that it is not facetious to say that it is possibly better to open doors before you try to go through them. That is what I was seeking to do by moving my amendment. When we open the door, we immediately find a sort of goulash or pot pourri of issues, difficulties and matters to be negotiated here, there and everywhere about where power is going, who is going to hold it over us and how it is to be administered and called to account. All those things are left rather in the air. Two aspects came out in our debate. One was, frankly, not dealt with in the amendment. As I said, that is the wider question, which will come up again and again. We are moving to a scene in which, with the collapse of the third pillar, a vastly wider range of issues come within the purview of the rulings—apparently, I am not allowed to call them judgments—of the European Court of Justice. We will want to think about the mechanisms by which Ministers can interpret to Parliament the effect that those rulings—which may lie well outside what appears to be delineated in the treaty—will have on our laws, our behaviour, our lifestyle pattern, budget and all the rest. We will need to think very hard about that. That is coming up in later amendments and we must all think about that very carefully. The point is that the ECJ has become what the noble Lord, Lord Wedderburn, who is not in his seat, has called a creative court. It is a court that does not merely administer or seek to make judgments on existing laws, but seeks to make new laws and to interpret existing laws in wider ways. That is now being spread right across areas of home affairs and justice and may even intrude, despite what the treaty says, into areas of common foreign and security policy. We will have to see, but it is highly likely that it will. Some of our debates will be able to demonstrate that that is a possibility—even by interpreting, or trying to interpret, what we all recognise to be the inaccessible language of the treaty. That is the broader question that lies ahead. The narrower question, which the amendment directly addresses, is that of the role of the president. That is crucial, because here again there is the matter of where power lies, how it will be administered and with what powers the president will be endowed, as opposed to the head of state rotating president, as opposed to the President of the Commission and as opposed to the High Representative, which is the Foreign Minister with a new name, but with the same powers. All those things need to be sorted out because they affect us very directly. They are not remote issues that are considered boring and can be pushed aside, they directly affect how we live in this country and how we can decide who we hold accountable when things go wrong, or even give credit to when things go right. The Economist article that I cited earlier states that in the treaty, all the compromises have reduced the definition of the role of the president—the full-time president—to gibberish. That is probably right. Several other commentators, including the eminent and very effective Quentin Peel, in the Financial Times, talks about ““another messy compromise”” in trying to decide this turf war of who does what between the President of the Commission, the rotating head of state president, and all the rest. There is a lot to be sorted out there and it cannot be just pushed aside by saying, ““It is all right; we will sorted out by discussion in the next few months””. I am sure that your Lordships will feel that the time is getting near when we could take a break and have some dinner, but in all this discussion, it seems to be constantly forgotten by Ministers that this is an evolving process and a self-evolving—if that is not too odd a word—Bill and treaty. It contains within itself the power to move on, to carry whole areas out of the national veto field into the qualified majority voting field—sometimes to our benefit, I must concede that; sometimes not at all. But we cannot tell. We do not know how that is going to work. We are taking a step into the dark in the way that we would have done with the previous constitutional treaty, but perhaps not so much as we would have with the Maastricht treaty and previous treaties, although obviously they were highly significant steps forward as well. One is left feeling that there is a real danger that if we rely on the scrutiny and calling to account that we have had in the past, it will not be enough. We have set in motion a new vehicle that will move faster and will require much more agile supervision if we are to know what is to happen before it hits us and takes us by surprise. There is something deeply unsatisfactory about how our Parliament has, even in the recent past, been able to keep up with European legislative procedures, with the rulings of the court, with the decisions of Ministers in the European Council and with the instruments and regulations of the Commission. Everyone feels that we should do better in this Parliament. Just receiving information, being kept up-to-date and being told to tick the Brussels boxes is not enough. We want a European system that is more flexible, which gives a greater and more progressive role for the nation states—as I said the other day, probably the most progressive idea in the entire concept of European development. We want to move on from the current position and not see ourselves taken down the road to more centralisation and a reinforcement of the outdated European concepts to which Ministers and the Liberal Democrats seem to cling, under which they cannot see that we are living in entirely new conditions of a networked world in which the old idea of blocs and centralisation are completely out of date. Having said that, of course we will return to these matters.