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EU Legislation (EUC Report)

My Lords, two days ago, Gideon Rachman published what I thought was a rather naive article in the Financial Times on the requirement for world governance and therefore the need for world governance—and thus, he thought, the acceptability of world governance. As I read it, I thought of all those people on the nationalist right in the United States who believe that the United Nations is a conspiracy against American sovereignty. They think that black helicopters from the UN have invaded South Dakota and so on. In this country we have a similar belief about the European Union, which is now necessary in a whole range of areas such as economic and environmental co-operation and dealing with the interests of the almost 5 million British people who either live or spend part of the year wintering elsewhere in the Union. In spite of the fact that the Union is necessary and desirable, many in this country and beyond it believe that it is all a vast conspiracy. We have just heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who did not mention that, when one looks at the scrutiny work of the European Parliament, one sees that the contribution made by UKIP Members over the past five years has not been among the most distinguished or among the freest from various failures close to corruption. I regret that this is the last year during which we shall have a Law Lord as the chair of Sub-Committee E. When I was the chair of Sub-Committee F, I worked with two Law Lords, who were extremely co-operative, helpful and expert colleagues. We learnt a great deal from them and I regret that we shall see rather less of this distinguished group, which gathers twice a week in a sometimes rather closed circle in the Library. When I first came here I was deeply in awe of the Law Lords as a group slightly apart, but now that one of them is someone with whom my wife and I used to go to the pub as junior law lecturers at the University of Manchester, I am slightly less so. Perhaps it is because we are all getting older and more experienced. I must comment on a small point. The beginning of Chapter 2 of the report notes that the European Parliament is a legislature that does not propose legislation, as if that is an odd thing in a legislature. I had not noticed that much of the legislation that passes through the two Chambers of this Parliament is actually proposed by members of the legislature. We all understand, here as in Brussels, that necessarily the complex process of policy making is one in which those who propose a policy do not always carry everything through to its final conclusion. What we want of the Commission and the Brussels process is, as the noble Lord, Lord Brittan, said in his evidence, for them to do less and to do it better.