---

Asylum: EUC Report

My Lords, this morning I got down from my shelves the seventh report of Sub-Committee F of 1998-99 in which for the first time we addressed Schengen and the United Kingdom’s border controls. It states: ""Weaker United Kingdom influence over the development of European policies will mean that such policies will reflect the preferences of others, and fail to take into account particular United Kingdom concerns"." Well, we have come a long way from that. We are facing the possibility of the United Kingdom marginalising itself yet further in a developing European common asylum policy, and also tying ourselves up in an area in which there is a deliberate lack of clarity. I have followed this issue and was a member of that sub-committee for several years. I compare the United Kingdom with Denmark in its whole attitude to this: we are fully prepared to co-operate as far as possible provided that we do not have to admit it to our public or our media. What we want to do is to have a large formal opt-out and an awful lot of informal opt-ins which we hope the Daily Mail will not notice. That is what we have done and what we continue to do, and I suspect that the Minister will tell us—not quite so bluntly, though he is wonderfully blunt on occasion—that that is what the Government wish to do on this occasion. It results in increasing confusion and great difficulties for anyone trying to in understand, in a paradise for lawyers, and a purgatory for officials. That is the direction in which I fear we are now drifting. After all, Her Majesty’s Government do have options. They can say that they have confidence in the negotiating skills of our Ministers and officials as we move from Commission proposals to agreed directive. We have potential allies—like-minded partners—with whom we can find coalitions to support our preferences, and we have to have a certain willingness to seek mutually acceptable compromises. That is the way in which many of us think we have to work through European and international co-operation. On the other side there is the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph image that foreigners in Brussels cook up appalling new rules and impose them on the innocent and powerless English. We hear this occasionally from the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and others in this House. We recognise that at the moment there is a panic over migration in Britain and that the Government suffer almost as much as the Conservatives from pre-election fears of stirring-up fantasies of EU-enforced liberalisation in the press. Thus—I am sure that this does not apply to the Minister—there are many among the Labour Party’s spin doctors who are frightened of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and Viscount Rothermere, and even more frightened of Sir Andrew Green. UK interests are strongly at stake in this. Indeed, I recall Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, saying some years ago that Britain’s frontiers are now on the Mediterranean. We know that the trickle of irregular immigrants and asylum seekers comes through Asia Minor and North Africa. When I was in Greece last spring I discovered that it has a camp of illegal immigrants in Patras. People arrive, flooding into Greek islands, but want to get through there to the northern and western members of the EU, including, of course, the United Kingdom. We therefore have strong interests in working with others for common laws. Not only that, but we do actually work with others very closely. We have liaison officers in every other European member state and in others, and we have Border Agency staff working in France and in other countries. In practice on the ground, we know that that is in our interests. I have not yet met a senior British police officer who does not believe that the entire corpus of European co-operation, from Europol down, is actively in Britain’s interest. Indeed, I was surprised some months ago to sit in on a meeting of serving and former intelligence staff of various countries and to hear British participants saying how much European assessment co-operation is actively in Britain’s interest. Of course one hears none of that from the Government let alone from the Conservatives. The gap between the realities of co-operation and the sense that we are outside this continental co-operation—with its threats to English common law, English policing and British border controls—is at the root of our problems. I fear that in the run up to the general election the Government will accept the frightened option of deciding not to opt in, but I hope that the Government, with Ministers of the intelligence and judgment of the noble Lord, Lord West of Spithead, will accept that it is in our interests to opt in and then to negotiate carefully and positively.