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European Commission

In fact, the role of the European Scrutiny Committee is not to discuss and make policy on the merits of an idea, but to ensure that the Government puts forward all the information necessary for Parliament, either in a debate that we hold on the Floor of the House or in the correspondence that we have with the Minister in relation to what the Government propose at the Council of Ministers, which is then reported in the form of statements to the House. Those statements are then on the record in Hansard and in the Library, and every Member should obviously engage with that process of debate if they are interested in the issues. Personally, I must say that there was a lot of strong argument that we should have joined the Schengen arrangements immediately. There were many reasons against doing so politically, but I can see very few reasons against engaging in all of the processes on immigration and asylum that are proposed under the treaty of Amsterdam. It is unfortunate that the political arguments basically scared everybody into thinking that, if we lost our own borders, we would have a flood of immigrants; we did not lose our own borders and then we had a flood of immigrants anyway.