EU Council

Ben Wallace Excerpts

Monday 28th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

There was some progress on banking union, but this is an issue predominantly for members of the eurozone. A single currency necessitates some form of single bank regulation and resolution system, and that is what its members are putting in place. They are doing so quite tentatively, however, because they are beginning to realise what an enormous transfer of sovereignty it could amount to—theoretically, of course, it would see German citizens standing behind Greek banks and vice versa. Some progress was made. Britain is not taking part in this banking union, of course, but we have achieved some excellent safeguards to ensure that we have a real say over those parts of financial services regulation to which we are still subject. I suspect that progress towards full banking union will be fairly slow, but in any case Britain will not be involved.

[Mr Ben Wallace (Wyre and Preston North) (Con)]

I join my right hon. Friend in paying tribute to our security services, whose members not only risk their lives to keep us safe, but have to sit in silence while ludicrous conspiracy theories are often thrown at them. If the first rule of intelligence is the “need to know” principle, the second is do not throw stones in glass houses. At the European Council, did he have a chance to speak to his French counterpart, the French President, about his intelligence services’ record on industrial espionage, and will he seek assurances that the French will not use the Snowden affair as a political football for another agenda and therefore undermine the EU’s and Britain’s intelligence capabilities?

[The Prime Minister]

First, I insisted that we were clear that intelligence services were a national competence, not an EU competence, which was why the statement, of which my hon. Friend can see a copy, was issued by EU Heads of State and Governments, not the European Council or the European Commission. That is very important. Certainly, there was a lot of discussion at the dinner of the point my hon. Friend raises. Different Prime Ministers and Presidents made different points and I listened carefully to their contributions.