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European Council

It is very hard for the noble Baroness to criticise when she is not able to tell us what her party would have done in our position. When the Labour Party was in a position to stand up for British interests, it gave away the opt-out on the social chapter, signed up to the Lisbon treaty and refused to ask the British people for approval, and gave away something like £7 billion of the rebate and got absolutely nothing in return. The Prime Minister was clear all along that he would protect our national interests. That is exactly what he did. It is in our national interest for the countries with the euro to fix their problems. We said that we could only agree a new treaty if certain modest, reasonable and relevant safeguards were obtained—safeguards for the EU as a whole, not just for the UK—but we could not get those safeguards. That is why the Prime Minister did not sign the treaty. The noble Baroness asked specifically about the EU institutions. At this stage it is very difficult to know exactly what role is proposed for the EU institutions, and therefore to take a view as to what will happen in the outcome over the course of the next few weeks. The noble Baroness asked, though she did not put it quite in these words, what we fear from the existing treaty. What concerned us was the huge damage that could potentially have occurred to the single market and financial services. We stopped Britain from signing up to something that was damaging. The noble Baroness asked what has changed since Thursday. The answer is, very little between Wednesday and Friday. We are still firmly part of the EU, as I, or rather the Prime Minister in his Statement, explained. The noble Baroness asked what safeguards we were asking for. We were not asking for very much. We were asking for legal clarity, that decisions on running and extending the single market would not be taken away from the EU as a whole and be made instead by the eurozone-led group. On financial services we asked for practical and focused proposals to protect the openness and competitiveness of the single market for all, especially for those outside the euro. We also asked for a proper role for our national regulators, scrutinising institutions from outside the EU which are present in Britain but nowhere else, and for freedom for our regulators to impose additional requirements on our banks, if we in this House, and in another place, so chose. These are the most humble safeguards that we could possibly have asked for. The noble Baroness should not be asking why, in her words, we were isolated, but why the 26 countries did not agree with us, or agree to give us these safeguards. The noble Baroness says that we are isolated and marginalised. But no, we are one of the biggest economies in Europe and one of the biggest contributors to the EU. We are one of the most successful countries, and we will continue to be so. That, my Lords, is why we did not sign the treaty.