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European Union (Amendment) Bill

No. I listened with great patience to the noble Lord and I shall not give way at the moment. I have hardly said a thing and I am not giving way. This is far too frequently being turned into a dialogue involving only whichever UKIP Member happens to be walking around, leaping up and thinking that he has inquisitorial rights in the Committee. I am not prepared to concede to them. The point that I was trying to make is that nobody in this House defends the CAP as it stands. It is clearly not a sensible mechanism with which to organise European agriculture. It was a sensible mechanism in the days when the treaty of Rome was written, when the greatest geopolitical problem that Europe had was the security of its food supplies. As we moved towards self-sufficiency commodity by commodity and failed to change the CAP, it became a less and less relevant way of organising European agriculture. However, whether we should support the CAP today is not the question in the amendments. The most important question being raised in the amendments is whether there should be a role for the European Parliament. One of the important things that the treaty of Lisbon does is abolish the distinction between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure. As soon as that happens, for the first time ever a real power is being given to the European Parliament, which has been able to indulge in every sort of unaccountable nonsense discussion because it had no power whatever over non-compulsory expenditure. In the debate so far, we have failed to realise that the people who have had the exclusive priority of determining agricultural policy—the Council of Ministers—have made a mess of it and have largely to be held to account by a European Parliament that will have equal say over the distribution of agricultural expenditure. The CAP is not supported by anyone. It needs to be reformed. I believe that the engagement of the European Parliament through the abolition of the distinction between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure will be the greatest impetus for change that we have before us. In those circumstances, for noble Lords to describe the European Parliament as the last bastion resisting reform—or, as one noble Lord said, as totally against reform—is a caricature of the reality. Once the distinction between compulsory and non-compulsory expenditure is abolished, the European Parliament will see agriculture in contraposition to all the priorities that it espouses—environmental policy, social policy, regional policy and so on—and on which it has been pressing for greater expenditure. It will realise that, with a capped budget, the only way in which it can gain more expenditure on social policy, on common foreign and security policy and on regional policy is by making sure that it exercises its responsibility for adequate controls on agricultural expenditure. That policy will be the driving motor for the necessary change in that area.