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European Union Committee

My Lords, while giving my strongest support to all the other committees and the excellent work that they do, I query the balance and usefulness of your Lordships’ European Union Committee and therefore its reappointment today. I regret that there is no Motion on the Order Paper to that effect, but the committee membership Motion was tabled overnight and there did not appear to be an opportunity to table one. I objected to last year’s committee appointment because of its lack of balance. I could identify only one Eurosceptic on it, in the shape of my noble friend Lord Blackwell, who has now left the committee. Looking at this year’s proposed committee of 19 Peers, which we are now asked to approve, I can see eight of the most ardent Europhiles in your Lordships’ House, including the chairman, in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Roper. I do not know enough about the other 11 to be certain, but I cannot recognise a single Eurosceptic among them. That is worrying because it means that the committee will be very out of tune with the British people, whom your Lordships’ House is usually so good at representing. Our latest indication of the feelings of our people towards the EU came on 20 October in a referendum in Luton, which was run by ITV News under the chairmanship of Sir Trevor McDonald, no less. The result was a groundbreaking 54 per cent who now want to leave the European Union completely and 63 per cent who would have voted against the Lisbon treaty. There are, I am afraid, two other reasons for querying the usefulness of this committee and its sub-committees. First, we have the continuing scandal of the Government having promised not to sign up to any new law in Brussels when it is still under scrutiny in the committee of either House of Parliament, but breaking that promise or overriding the scrutiny reserve, no fewer than 180 times in the Lords and 157 times in the Commons between 2003 and June 2006. That is 337 new laws that have been passed into law in this country in breach of the wishes of Parliament. I have tabled a Written Question to find out what has happened since. However, perhaps the main reason for querying the usefulness of this committee was revealed in a series of Written Answers in the previous Session to my noble friends Lord Tebbit and Lord Vinson. They asked how often a recommendation of either House’s Select Committee had been incorporated into EU legislation in Brussels. After much prevarication about disproportionate cost and so on, the Government could come up with only one example, on 10 March 2008, when they revealed that your Lordships’ committee’s, "““recommendations on a restricted scope and the country of origin principle were incorporated into the Audiovisual Media Services Directive (amending the Television Without Frontiers Directive)””.—[Official Report, 10/3/08; col. WA200.]" There may be other examples in which the views of your Lordships’ Select Committees have been accepted in Brussels, but I submit that they must be very few. I am therefore left wondering whether it is worth going on with it and its many sub-committees. I would have thought that the undoubted skills of the noble Lords who sit on those committees, and of the clerks who so bravely and magnificently support them, could be better employed examining other issues to the benefit of the people whom we are here to serve.