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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I warmly welcome the thanks of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, to Chris Davies, who is indeed doing important work on the way that expenses work in the European Parliament, much as many of my honourable friends are doing in the House of Commons. The expenses regime in the European Parliament, as in the House of Commons, needs to be changed and made transparent; I agree with the noble Lord on that. I was with Chris Davies MEP at the end of last week and congratulated him on his good work. We agree on all sides of the Committee that there needs to be continued reform of the common agricultural policy. As the noble Lord has said, the Government themselves have a fairly radical agenda in that area. It would be useful, though, if we got some of the historical facts and the context right at the same time. First, the common agricultural policy is, wrongly, a huge proportion of the total EU budget. It has gone down—currently it is around 40 per cent—but it is important to remember that the EU budget is something like 1 per cent of the total EU GDP, which makes agricultural support throughout Europe from all nation states something like 0.5 per cent of GDP. That is probably significantly less than in some areas of industry where the single market, competition policy and state subsidy have not worked well enough. I agree with a number of the criticisms that the Conservative Front Bench made of the single market and its inability to complete the process that started some time ago. That needs to continue. We have to accept that if we are in a single market for agricultural produce, the last thing that I would want for farmers in my area, the south-west, is greater inequality in subsidy between agricultural regimes. Within a single market it is quite clear that states such as France and new states in eastern Europe would subsidise agriculture far more than any UK Government ever would. That would be to the direct detriment of British farmers. There is another area, which we have to put in some context. All of us would probably agree that the reforms of the CAP have not gone far enough, but let us not mistake the fact that the changes that happened through Agenda 2000—and all the other changes that took place when the current policy came in, in the early 2000s—were major changes. The European Union has moved substantially away from production subsidies, to other areas in terms of environmental cross-compliance and rural policy. All of us, particularly on these Benches, would agree that that process has not gone far enough, but to say that there has been no reform of the common agricultural policy would be absolutely wrong. What we do not have now, in terms of the food security issue, are grain mountains and butter mountains. With the change of the Common Market organisation on wine, a number of those areas are changing as well. Do they go far enough? No, they absolutely do not. I think we would all agree with that. While there is a single market, and some payment to farmers, I would be interested to know if other political parties are advocating a total free market in agriculture, with no subsidies whatever. If that is the case, they should make that very clear in their manifestos at the next general election, whenever that is. I am particularly struck by the Conservative Front Bench view on the involvement of Parliament in the common agricultural policy. From the standpoint of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, the European Parliament is probably an institution beyond redemption because of corruption, so he would have a valid argument. I cannot understand why any party that fundamentally agrees with democratic accountability would not agree that something as central to the European Union—outside the areas that are always exclusive for policy, such as defence and foreign policy—should not be part of the European Parliament’s serious responsibility. That denies democratic accountability; it denies the fact that there is no taxation, or expenditure of tax by budgets and institutional budgets, without democratic accountability. I cannot see how you get away from that. One of the things that I would argue about the agricultural committee—I give way.