European Union Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Tuesday 1st February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Priti Patel]

That is genuinely a matter of record now. We have now seen how far the EU has gone, and that is the reason for my probing new clause. We need to look to the future and be more vigilant. This is not just about the past; it is about what is coming in the future.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

The hon. Lady is probably aware that the vast majority of the public do not care which Government gave away our powers. They are fed up with the fact that more and more powers have gone to Europe and they want those powers back. Does she agree that until this country faces up to the fact that for far too long the public have had no say in whether we want to stay in Europe or not, and that until we get a referendum on that, we will never clear the air and be able to go forward in Europe as progressive Europeans, or go out of Europe and go forward as progressive UK citizens?

[Priti Patel]

I thank the hon. Lady for her contribution. I entirely agree. The air needs to be cleared, and the British public naturally feel upset and uneasy about that. The issue is a sensitive one, hence the need for greater openness and transparency.

I ask the Minister to consider the points that I have made—fundamentally, the issue of openness and transparency. We have handed away far too many powers. The Bill is about the future, and I would welcome the Minister’s views.

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[Kate Hoey]

My name is also on the new clause. I was cheered when I heard the hon. Gentleman say that we had a long time to discuss it, because unfortunately I have to be out of the Chamber for about an hour on an important matter, and I want to be here for the vote. I therefore hope that the debate will continue for a very long time. Does he believe that this proposal offers a way out of the current situation whereby the one thing that unites all the establishment parties is that they do not want the British people to have a say on whether to stay in or move out of the European Union?

[Mr Bone]

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s intervention. Her views on this have been most helpful and supportive. I am sure that other Members will try to catch your eye, Mr Evans, and I hope that the debate will still be going on when she returns. She makes the fair point that when both sets of Front Benchers agree on something, it is almost certainly wrong.

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[Kate Hoey]

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd), who for many years has been a voice in Parliament for democracy and civil liberties. I share many of his views on the issue. It is a shame, in some ways, that we are debating such a hugely important matter as whether we should have an in/out referendum in the context of the Bill, because that is not what the Bill is about, as I know the Minister would agree.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) on persisting and pushing new clause 11. I am one of the signatories to it, and I am glad that we finally got a debate. As someone said about two hours ago, the debate is giving us a great deal more time to discuss these issues than we would normally get.

I said earlier that I hoped hon. Members would keep talking until I got back from an engagement. I am grateful that they not only managed to keep talking, but are still talking. I was opening a new climbing wall at the Westway centre in London, and I was reminded there of a practical aspect of the European Union that people find so irritating. Some time ago the European Union working at heights directive was issued, which seemed sensible. Everyone assumed that it would apply to people working in industry, building sites and so on, but our officials—our zealots—always want to gold-plate. They thought that those who taught mountaineering should be subject to the working at heights directive.

It took nearly three years to bring that to an end and to ensure that the way we taught mountaineering and climbing in this country would not be ruined by a directive that insisted, for example, that certain ropes should not be used. Hon. Members who are mountaineers will well remember that. While the Committee was debating the new clause, I was reminded of a practical example of where the European Union starts off with a good idea, a few people agree with it, no one is ever asked about the detail, and when it finally comes to be implemented, the officials, the bureaucrats and those who love to be able to impose things on other people strengthen the directive so that it sometimes goes way beyond the common-sense reason behind it.

[John Mann]

It was in the previous Parliament, as chair of the all-party mountaineering group, that I negotiated the end of the working at heights directive, or rather its subjugation in relation to mountaineering. Does that not emphasise the point that the regulations were easy to deal with—the meeting took five minutes—but the problem was how officials in Whitehall had chosen to interpret a straightforward directive that, in relation to certain professions, was extremely important?

[Kate Hoey]

My hon. Friend is right. I recall vividly that he was instrumental in that.

The same happens with practically every directive. It is all very well saying that the problem is just the officials. They are not elected. Ministers and Members of Parliament are elected. Directives are always gold-plated by civil servants. My hon. Friend remembers how long it took to get the argument across and to get Ministers to understand it and realise that the way the directive was being applied was not sensible. In other areas where directives are implemented, people may not realise that until the last minute or until it is too late. The European Scrutiny Committee is a brilliant Committee with its current Chair and with the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) on it, but it can never perform the necessary scrutiny.

I support the new clause, although, as has been said, it is not ideal or what we would really like. It has been a long time since the people of the United Kingdom had the opportunity to say whether they support the direction of the EU and where it is now compared with where it was when I opposed entry into the Common Market. I accepted that the country had decided to support it, but, over the years, what people voted for then has changed, as we all know, and now we need that debate again, not only as to whether the country supports the direction in which the EU has come and where we are now, but where it should go in the future.

I may be wrong, but my guess is that the vast majority of the British people do not like the direction that the EU has taken and the fact that this Parliament and this country have lost control over many areas. As I have said, there is no point blaming one party over the other. Both major political parties have, in their different ways and not always in the way they intended, conspired to stop the real debate. We saw that with the Maastricht treaty and with the Lisbon treaty, on which the Labour party acted disgracefully, having given a commitment to a referendum. Then the Conservatives, who had given a commitment to a referendum managed to get out of it because the decision had been taken. But, as has been pointed out, just because the decision had been taken to sign it, there was no reason why the British people should not have been allowed a referendum immediately afterwards to decide whether they wanted to continue with the agreement that had been ratified.

Even the most avid supporter of the EU, of which there are many on the Labour Benches, would have to accept that when the EU and the Commission do not get what they want in a vote they simply find another way to have another vote, as happened in Ireland. That is why there is no confidence in the EU. I have a lot of respect for the Minister, who, certainly in the past, will have been seen as not necessarily a Eurosceptic but a Eurorealist, or some other term. He may feel that he is doing the right thing, but the reality is that no one in the country trusts any of the politicians in power, of whatever party, on this issue. Something seems to happen to people when they are elected to Government and go to Brussels. They experience some kind of transformation. For some reason, they suddenly become part of it all. In many cases they become more ideological about it than some of the other European countries.

A long time ago, when I was a Minister in the Home Office and went with the then Home Secretary to meetings in Brussels, we would have a clear line about what we were doing on a justice and home affairs position. We would argue passionately. France would argue the other way and other countries would argue differently. Then in the tea breaks or wine breaks, they would ask us why we felt so strongly on a particular matter. They would say that they did not particularly like it, but they would support it, although they did not really intend to implement it. There was a general feeling that it did not really matter to many of those other EU politicians; they were part of it because they wanted to be part of the club and the whole European project. But they knew jolly well that when they went back to their own countries they would do the bit that they wanted. We were the exact opposite. We would fight our corner, but we would then have to give in because the Prime Minister would decide he wanted something else in some other department in Brussels. Not only would we agree, but we would implement the policy zealously.

[Mark Reckless]

Does the hon. Lady agree that we have this evening seen an honourable exception to that? The right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who was a Minister for Europe and might have adopted such a position having been there and seen that, said that it is for the British people to decide.

[Kate Hoey]

I am sorry that I missed the contribution made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East when I had to leave the Chamber. We were both in Europe for a short period when my time in the Home Office coincided with his time in the Foreign Office, so I know his views on the matter and I am pleased that he has them.

I genuinely do not understand what we are afraid of, and neither do the public, particularly those who are strongly in favour of a referendum. What is the problem? We can no longer put it down to cost, because we are having this ridiculous referendum on the voting system, which most people are bored silly with—they yawn when it is brought up, even at political party meetings. I accept that it was set out in the coalition agreement, but there is no huge enthusiasm for that referendum, and yet we are spending so much money on it.

A referendum on the European Union would revitalise the political debate within this country. We would enliven things and go back to days of having public meetings. I accept what my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) said about the economic problems the country faces, but I do not think that having a debate on the EU would be a diversion. It would be a way of showing that there are other ways of running this country’s whole economic policy. We would get that debate and get out there among the people, because I know that they feel strongly about it.

I will not speak much longer, other than to say that I have been quite proud—others will laugh—to be associated with the campaign on the in/out referendum run by the Daily Express. As some Members might already have mentioned, yesterday a number of us took 373,000 envelopes, which had been returned from across the country, containing the slips published in the Daily Express asking for an in/out referendum. Those were just the envelopes, so many more were sent via e-mail. I think that we should be proud of the fact that a newspaper has managed to arouse that debate, and I would not care whether it had been done by the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun or even the Daily Mirror.

The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) talked about a growing mood in the country. We can sit here in isolation and ignore that mood, or we can grab it and lift it as an opportunity to get some decency and honesty back into politics. We should get that debate and have a referendum at some stage on whether we are in or out of Europe. I know that the Whips do not want Members to vote for this small new clause, but I say to Government Members that I have opposed my Whips on many occasions and am still alive and still here. To vote for it would send out a little signal that the issue will not go away.

[Mr Cash]

For me, the debate is not about the wording of the new clause, but about a question of principle. It is also about whether we are a democratic nation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) pointed out, and as many of us have argued for so many years, the question of why we are here in this House, ultimately, is entirely dependent on our relationship to the electorate. This is about democracy, not government.

We began our proceedings on the question of sovereignty some time ago, when we debated clause 18. In that debate, I made it clear—I believe that we won the argument—that the real question was whether this country would be able to govern itself or would end up being increasingly governed by judicial supremacy, and the European Scrutiny Committee report clearly demonstrated that point. For those of us who watched, for example, the recent BBC 4 programme on the Supreme Court, there is no doubt at all about the attitudes of some of the Justices in the Supreme Court and of many senior academics who are deeply influential in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. I know that the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), understands that extremely well; I have heard him say so.

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[Mr Lidington]

Assuming that the Bill gains parliamentary approval and Royal Assent in the normal way, it will apply during this Parliament from the time when it comes into effect. As I said earlier today, one illustration of that is that the treaty change proposed by Germany and being taken through EU institutions at the moment will have to be ratified by primary legislation rather than simply by a resolution of both Houses, as would be the case under the current legislation, which was introduced by the previous Government in 2008. What distinguishes this Parliament is that the Government have said, as part of their coalition agreement, that we do not intend to agree at European level to any proposal to amend the treaties or invoke passarelle clauses that would require a referendum under the terms of the legislation that we have been debating for a numbers of days now.

The referendums authorised under the Bill are intended to be final decisions. They will give people the opportunity to judge whether a particular proposal to give new powers to the European Union is in the national interest. One of the things that is troubling about the new clause is that it implicitly assumes that those who vote no to a particular proposition also want to challenge the UK’s membership of the EU, but I do not think that that can be taken for granted. As other hon. Members have said, there is a risk that some people could be influenced in how they vote on the substance of a proposal by a calculation of whether it would be likely to produce the end result of an in/out referendum. Such electors might take into account his or her views on the in/out proposal and not just the pros and cons of the measure on which they are being invited to cast a vote.

I think that my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough overlooks the problem of a possible succession of referendums on Britain’s membership of the EU. It is possible to imagine that under a future Government—not this one—referendums on moving to qualified majority voting for common foreign and security policy and on joining the euro might be scheduled for two successive years. The new clause would leave open the possibility of an in/out referendum after one—or, indeed, both—of those referendums, because under his new clause a rejection of the first proposition would trigger an in/out referendum, which might result in the public deciding to stay in the EU. A second referendum on a treaty change might come forward 12 months later and also be rejected, and then, in the course of less than a year, we would find ourselves with two successive referendums on the UK’s membership of the EU. That is not a sensible way in which to conduct our relationship with the countries of the EU.

Nor does the new clause address what would happen if there were two questions on a ballot paper in one day, which we debated earlier. Why should a positive vote for one treaty change proposition and a negative vote for a second trigger a referendum? One cannot read into how people cast their votes on treaty change proposals what their view would be of the desirability of a referendum on membership. More fundamentally, however, the new clause does not capture the range of opinions held by the British people. The hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), whom I completely respect on these matters, said that she wanted people to be able to express a view on the direction that the EU was taking. However, that is not what people are being offered through the new clause, of course. They are being offered the opportunity not to express their view on the direction of the EU, but to say whether the UK should remain a member.

[Kate Hoey]

The Minister must know that it is precisely because of the direction of the European Union that people want the opportunity to say that they do not like that direction by withdrawing from the European Union.

[Mr Lidington]

Withdrawing from the European Union is not the only choice for people who are dissatisfied with the current arrangements. There are plenty of people around who want Britain to remain a member of the European Union, but to have certain powers currently exercised in Brussels repatriated to this country. After all, that was the combination of views expressed at the last general election in the Conservative party manifesto, which sought the repatriation of certain powers, but said:

“A Conservative government will play an active and energetic role in the European Union”.