Justice and Home Affairs Opt-out

Mark Reckless Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My right hon. Friend is fully aware that Parliament can overrule any court in this country by an Act of Parliament. That is how our constitution works; it is the absolute essence of our constitution and our democracy. He, of all people, must know that. We have in this House, and together with the House of Lords, the ability to change the law if there has been a judgment that is alien to our understanding of how the law should be enforced. That is simply not the case as regards the European Court of Justice. It is a court that is outside the control not of Parliament but of the people of the United Kingdom, whose rights are being given up. The arrest warrant would be handed over as part of the creation of a state.

Tied in with this is Europol. Europol, in its current form, is limited, but once we have signed up to this measure, its development will be subject to the qualified majority vote. Europol exists to provide support and assistance to member states in the fight against organised crime and drug trafficking. What are we doing in this regard? Are we setting up the very beginnings of a federal bureau of investigation? Are we starting to say that we will have a police force in Europe with a power that goes across national borders? Are we therefore saying that British subjects may be subject to a law that this country has not agreed to—indeed, we may even vote against it—and that has emanated from a judicial system that is not controlled by the democratic will of the British people?

That ties in with Eurojust, which is about creating mutual legal assistance to aid investigations and prosecutions and how judicial action in a cross-border case should take place. What is happening? We are creating an arrest warrant, the beginnings of a European police force and Eurojust, which will allow co-operation in a judicial and prosecutorial capacity. That is not a million miles away from creating a European public prosecutor, which for some reason is singled out as the one thing that is a bridge too far and that we must never have without a referendum, but everything that is being put in place makes that the next logical step. If we do this, it would be no surprise if a future Government said, “We have the arrest warrant, Europol and Eurojust, so surely we don’t need a referendum to have a public prosecutor, because that is the next thing we should do.” This is further evidence of the creation of a European federal state.

The argument in favour of this measure is that it will help ensure that criminals get caught. Everyone is in favour of that: of course we want criminals to be brought to justice. Is there not, however, an ancient view of British justice that it is better for 100 guilty men to go free—I say “men” deliberately, because women very rarely commit crimes that get them sent to prison, much less so than men, and I do not want to upset any hon. Ladies—than for one innocent man to go to prison? That seems to be at the essence of our understanding of justice. This is about risking our belief in justice for the convenience of the Administration.

Is it not that the worst argument of all that their noble lordships have produced a report saying that public officials are too idle to do their jobs properly for us to have a system of bilateral negotiations? I know that our public officials are among the greatest and hardest working people in the land. When one sees them arrayed in front of us, one knows that they would be willing to burn the midnight oil and act in the nation’s interest to ensure that we have those bilateral agreements. Although it has not yet been done, there is nothing in European law to prevent a member state from having an agreement with the body of the European Union. The European Commission does not want that to happen, but that is a very different question from whether or not it is legal. It could easily be done by a relatively simple treaty change, if it is not provided for in the current treaties.

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

If we were to take that path, would the resulting international agreement be judiciable in The Hague rather than in the integrationist Court in Luxembourg?

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

In my view, it would be judiciable in our own courts and, like any other international agreement, we would be free to withdraw from it. It would not come under the European Communities Act 1972. I do not wish to cede power to the European Court of Justice, because that would be the means by which we would give up our independence as a nation state. If it is not our judges—who are subject to our democratic control—who make decisions, we will not be able to run our own affairs.

I want to continue with the point I was making about the United Kingdom’s understanding of justice. I think we get too tied up with the convenience of the law enforcement bodies. Of course, the views of the police should be taken very seriously, but they ought not to be writing the law of the land—they should be enforcing it as it is determined by this House and their lordships. One of the measures that the Government wish to opt back into is that of mutual recognition of judgments given in absentia. Page 57 of the European Scrutiny Committee’s report notes the Government’s view that the

“Framework Decision ensures that fewer criminals will be able to evade justice by arguing that their conviction was unfair”,

but what if their conviction was unfair? Surely we should not be depriving our fellow citizens of the right to argue that a conviction in absentia was unfair when it could have been. That must be an essential protection for the state to provide its nationals, and to take it away would be a fundamental error.

What we have and have not opted into is a relatively random collection of parts. I agreed with the shadow Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), in her mocking of some of the measures we are not opting back into. On the opt-ins, including that of taking account of convictions in EU member states in the course of new criminal proceedings, page 53 of the ESC’s report notes:

“The principle of taking into account overseas convictions in the same way as domestic ones exists in UK domestic law”

already, and:

“The mutual recognition principle it sets out is already recognised in statute and common law in the UK. Opting back in to this EU measure would introduce full Court of Justice jurisdiction into this area of UK criminal law, with unpredictable results.”

What is happening here? We are opting into something that already happens and that can continue to happen. All we are changing is that other European countries do not have to take into account our decisions, but they may if they want to—they are not prevented from doing so. Crucially, however, we are bringing the European Court of Justice into it. Therefore, if a judge were to pass sentence on somebody who had committed a crime abroad and the European Court of Justice deemed that it had not properly taken into account the previous conviction, sentencing in the United Kingdom could end up being a matter for the European Court of Justice. Does Her Majesty’s Government realise that, although some of these things appear superficially to be unnecessary and broadly irrelevant, they are agreeing to major transfers of sovereignty to the European Union?

My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary said in her introductory speech that several hundred questions have been tabled. I am delighted that my hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Immigration has just come into the Chamber, because he, poor man, had to reply to the many dozens of questions that I tabled. I thank him for the diligence with which he replied to my questions about the measures that the Government decided not to opt back into. Of those 95 measures, 43 were irrelevant, so there was no point asking any questions about them. I asked about the remaining 52, of which 24 turned out to be implemented already without any change; 11 had been de facto implemented with no change; two had been implemented and never used; and two had not been implemented. As the shadow Home Secretary rightly said, most of what we are not opting back into is, effectively, unimportant and irrelevant and cannot honestly be described as a reclaim of British sovereignty, because, as I said in my opening remarks, that sovereignty was never ceded in the first place, because the matters remained entirely under the jurisdiction of the British courts, the British House of Commons and their lordships.

I will quote the details of one of those matters in order to give a flavour of what is going on. Council decision 2005/387/JHA on the information exchange, risk-assessment and control of new psychoactive substances has been implemented to the required standard by the UK and, according to the response I received from my hon. Friend the Minister for Security and Immigration:

“Co-operation and information exchange with other member states and EU bodies will not change as a result of opting out of this measure.”—[Official Report, 17 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 823W.]

That has been broadly true of the overwhelming majority of the measures we have opted out of.

We therefore have this opt-out—the previous Labour Government, in a desire to get away from a referendum, negotiated it—which fortunately came to the benefit or aid of this coalition Government, who have used it. They looked at it, but they undoubtedly had a political problem. One part of the coalition is made up of Europhiles red in tooth and claw—although my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) does not necessarily look red in tooth and claw, he adopts that position on the European Union—who want an enlarged European organisation. They may quibble with me about whether it is a single state, but they want to see powers with Europe, because they believe that that is an advantage to the nation. They met the Conservative view—it has now been the Conservative view for a long time—that we do not want more powers to be ceded to the European Union. It was negotiated in the coalition agreement that no further powers would be passed to the European Union.

The time came to exercise the opt-out—it had to be exercised before the end of this year, 1 December 2014—and last year it was duly exercised. We are therefore in the happy position, the paradise, of no longer subscribing to any of the measures. That would be a happy place to stay, but the Government, throwing away the coalition agreement and abandoning what unites the Tory party, have decided to give away the things that most certainly create, build up and advance the federal European state that so many of us wish not to see. That contradicts the Prime Minister’s effort of renegotiation, as well as past statements by Conservative Ministers and politicians throughout the Front and Back Benches. It would be a grave error to opt into all 35 measures. It is against the national interest, and to do it for administrative convenience—because we cannot get officials to do the work—is a shameful way to treat our hard-working and admirable officials, who would all be delighted to do the work to preserve the independence of our country.

[Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)]

I must first explain to the House that I had to leave during the middle of this debate, after the opening speeches, to speak in a discussion upstairs about a statutory instrument that directly affects my constituency.

I have the pleasure of following the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). It is a pleasure because of his eloquence, but eloquence and judgment do not always walk together, and on some matters he is simply wrong, including about the European arrest warrant. My belief is that if 100 criminals go free in the absence of the European arrest warrant, that would be an extremely bad state of affairs for our constituents. That is entirely separate from the question of ensuring that no innocent person is convicted in our courts. Long may we strive to achieve that second objective.

[Mark Reckless]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Alan Beith]

It is quite early to give way, but very well.

[Mark Reckless]

In response to the right hon. Gentleman’s first point, how many of our own citizens—who had done nothing wrong and been convicted of no crime—is he prepared to see detained in foreign prisons in return for those 100 people going free?

[Sir Alan Beith]

One measure that we are opting into ensures that people do not have to be detained in foreign prisons, but can be returned to the United Kingdom to serve under bail conditions in the United Kingdom. That is another reason why I think that we should look at the measures individually and decide which are in the national interest and beneficial to our citizens because they afford some protection to our citizens abroad or because they help to protect our citizens in this country from criminals who flee elsewhere having done terrible harm.

[Mark Reckless]

rose—

[Sir Alan Beith]

I want to make a little progress.

I want primarily to speak about the Justice Committee’s work on this matter, but I cannot forbear to mention that the Government have handled their relationship with Parliament very badly in this regard. This debate is a somewhat belated and limited response to the view of the three Committees that there should have been an early opportunity to debate and vote on the measures so that the Government knew the House’s views, with that being supported by impact assessments at an early stage—we still have not had any—and a much earlier indication of the Government’s intentions.

There have indeed been intensive discussions. The hon. Member for North East Somerset implied that they took place at a table with all the Conservatives on one side and all the Liberal Democrats on the other. I know that it was more complicated than that on several issues, as I am sure the Justice Secretary is well aware.

I want to turn to the measures for which the Ministry of Justice is responsible, and on which the Justice Committee reported. Of the total of 16 such measures, the Government propose that the UK should rejoin seven. Our report examines the case for and against rejoining all 16 measures, and we concluded in broad support of the Government’s approach. There are six mutual recognition measures—on financial penalties, previous convictions, prisoner transfer, probation measures, judgments in absentia and the European supervision order, to which I referred a moment ago—and the Government propose to rejoin them all, except for the probation measures framework decision.

We agreed that the Government was right, in the national interest and in the interests of effective cross-border co-operation in criminal justice, to seek to rejoin five of the measures. The Government support particularly strongly the UK’s participation in the prisoner transfer framework decision, stating that a top priority is to reduce the number of foreign nationals in UK prisons, while the decision is also an important part of the overall reform package of the European arrest warrant. My support for the European arrest warrant is accompanied by the belief that it was right to take active steps in various areas to try to reform it and make it better serve its purpose.

One of the five measures, the European supervision order, enables a defendant or suspect under non-custodial pre-trial bail or other supervision to be returned to their home member state to await trial there. It would not of course apply to people granted unconditional bail, who would be free to return to their home member state in any case. We urged the Government to implement the measure without further delay, and their response stated that they intended to do so as soon as practicable.

On the probation measures framework decision, which provides a basis for mutual recognition and supervision of suspended sentences, post-custodial licences and community sentences, we noted the Government’s concerns about its practical operability, but we stated:

“In view of the potential value of the Framework Decision we consider that the Government should pursue the matter in their negotiations on the opt-in list to see whether these concerns can be dealt with. We would not wish to rule out participation in the measure if concerns about its drafting can be overcome as part of the forthcoming negotiation process or at a later stage.”

In their response, the Government spelled out in more detail their objections to the measure, including that it falls within the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, while saying that they support the measure in principle. I still hope that they will make some effort to deal with some of the practical difficulties, because the measure may be of real benefit.

There are six minimum standards measures, which set out EU-wide minimum penalties and sanctions for corruption involving officials, counterfeiting of the euro, fraud and counterfeiting of non-cash means of payment, and corruption in the private sector. Two of the measures will be replaced by a new directive, covering counterfeiting of the euro, which the UK has decided not to opt into. The Government do not propose to rejoin any of the remaining four measures. They pointed out that we already at least meet the minimum standards, and rejected the arguments that were put to us in evidence that leaving the measures could cause reputational damage. We stated that

“the arguments for opting into the…minimum standards measures are primarily symbolic, and our view is that those arguments do not outweigh the disadvantages of bringing wide areas of criminal justice in the UK unnecessarily into the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union.”

The remaining four measures under the aegis of the Ministry of Justice comprise one on data protection in police and judicial co-operation, one on a data protection secretariat, a Schengen agreement on road traffic offences and a measure on conflicts of jurisdiction. The Government propose to rejoin the first two, but not the last two. We broadly agreed with the Government’s line, although we stated that the arguments were finely balanced as to whether the UK should rejoin the framework decision on settlement of conflicts of jurisdiction, because it provides a framework of guidance for member states to put in place to protect against parallel legal proceedings on the same matters being taken in different member states. The Government’s position, which they maintained in their response, was that it had no additional practical value because best practice arrangements are already in place.

Our broad conclusion was to support the Government’s choice of opt-ins on Ministry of Justice measures. The Government closely coincide with our views. Those views are on the record for the consideration of the House to which we report, and it remains a matter of regret to me that we were not able to register our views in the House earlier and in a more concrete way. However, this debate has been a useful means of reminding the Government about where it has support, where there are differences of view and, in particular, where the Select Committees charged with such responsibilities have looked carefully at the measures and given their advice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Reckless (Rochester and Strood) (Con)]

It is a privilege and an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). He spent six years as a Foreign Office lawyer and has a family back story that is perhaps more exotic than that of many on the Government Benches. Over the past half hour, he has, with his searing intellect, differentiated the small print, which he understands as well if not better than anyone in the House, from the key principles, which he enunciated. In particular, he concluded that we can achieve outside EU structures, albeit slightly more slowly in a few instances, what we can achieve within them, but without the downsides to liberty and democracy that are implied if we remain within those structures. He has done us a great service.

My hon. Friend spoke of the European arrest warrant. I felt that he spoke from the current centre of gravity within the Conservative party. He mentioned that the Home Affairs Committee, on which I sit, concluded that the EAW was “fundamentally flawed”, but did not mention that the Liberal Democrat member of that Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), voted to remove the word “fundamentally” from our report. I am delighted that Conservative members voted that proposal down unanimously.

It was instructive to hear from my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). I intervened on him to ask how many people he would be prepared to see kept in custody wrongfully in order, supposedly, to bring 100 guilty people to justice, but he did not answer. He has great hopes that there will be some new EU directive that will stop all those bad things happening and properly protect everyone’s rights: as long as we legislate, people will be protected in practice and we need worry ourselves no more. However, we also heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois), whose constituent, Andrew Symeou, came to the Home Affairs Committee. My hon. Friend said that the proposals will not work and cannot be trusted, and that they will be judiciable by the European Court of Justice and subject to the proposals of the European Commission. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton said, the problems that have been seen in the old member states may be not just replicated but worse in the new member states. How many people would the Liberal Democrats be prepared to see wrongfully imprisoned to get 100 crooks bang to rights? Alas, there are no Liberal Democrats here to answer my question. They tell us that they believe in the civil liberties of the British citizen, but when it comes down to it they always put the European Union and their belief in Europe, right or wrong, before the liberties of the British citizen.

Today, we debate a motion on an opt-out. We have heard an awful lot of discussion on what we might opt into, but the motion actually reads:

“That this House has considered the UK’s 2014 justice and home affairs opt-out decision.”

It is important to understand that the opt-out has been agreed. Parliament has voted to exercise the opt-out. All this talk about opt-ins is speculative. We may or may not opt back into some, any, or none of these measures—that remains to be seen. The status quo ante is that we have opted out, we have exercised it and that we have that great repatriation of powers. We will have to see whether it will be undone, or whether it will be maintained.

The great worry of my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, who is not in his place, is that we may sleepwalk, or accidently fall, out of the measures he would like to be in. I think he underestimates the degree of planning that went into delinking the two matters. A number of motions and draft motions were put on the Order Paper, and others were discussed between the coalition parties. Ultimately, the motion we voted on was to exercise the mass opt-out. There has been no decision by the House to approve any measures to opt back in. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed, because the amour propre of Select Committees was also involved. The result of the decisions to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge signed up was that the mass opt-out and any opt-ins were delinked. Crucially, one came before the other.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge seemed to be concerned that there might not be agreement in this House on what we might opt back into. One fear was that, as he sees it, the Labour party might play political games and that it would like us to opt back into more than the Government might wish. If, as with the Syria vote, Labour Members vote for their own motion or amendment, rather than voting for the Government motion, and it fails, there might be no agreement on any set of measures to opt back in to. The Home Secretary told us about her negotiations with her European partners and the Commission. Have there been negotiations with those on the Opposition Front Bench on whether they will support the package the Government put before the House, or does she believe that she has enough votes from Government Members to drive through measures to integrate this country into the European Union in a way that we have not seen before?

My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge worries that this may come unstuck if the Government cannot reach agreement on what the measures should be. There has been discussion and there may be understanding but, as the Home Secretary rightly says, we do not know what we will be able to negotiate until we go through the process. We read in The Daily Telegraph today the concerns of a number of our partners about even a very modest proportionality test for the European arrest warrant. There will have to be further discussions between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats on whether an agreement can be reached in the coalition on what the Government want to opt back into and what is put before this House as a motion.

Those discussions and any decisions are likely to come after 22 May, when we consult the electorate in the European and local elections. That is when our constituents will have their chance to pass judgment on politicians, and, in particular, on the self-proclaimed “party of in”, which has made great play of these supposedly co-operative measures. The president of ACPO is quoted, and reference is made to whatever the police want. I remember the previous Prime Minister Tony Blair saying that if the police ask for something, there is nothing that any responsible Prime Minister can do except to give it to them. That, surely, is the definition of a police state.

We hear about the ACPO evidence, but I understand that people in ACPO have been fighting to avoid this portfolio. When Sir Hugh Orde talks about the ACPO position on EU matters—he may continue doing so for at least the next few months—it is not because the police consider them to be so terribly important that Sir Hugh must talk about them, but, I fear, it is because other chief constables have learnt the lessons from the noble Lord Blair. If they intrude into politics and tell the public and politicians that they have to vote a certain way so that they can lock people up for 90 days without charge—to say nothing of police vans festooned with “Vote Labour” stickers—there will be a backlash, because the police should not get involved in politics to that degree.

Unfortunately, with the European investigation order and the new statute for Europol, we have the prospect of our police being ordered what to do by politico-judicial structures in other EU countries where the separation of politics and operational policing is not what it is in this country. Do we, as a country, want to make a trade-off that allows British citizens to be arrested on the say-so of magistrates in Greece or Bulgaria and locked up for many months, if not years, in prisons that do not meet the standards that we in this country consider to be acceptable? Fundamentally, that is a matter for us as politicians, not the police.

[Mr Cash]

Many examples have been given of perceived injustices as a result of the European arrest warrant being applied in other countries. For example, is my hon. Friend aware that, under the European arrest warrant, a man from a neighbouring Staffordshire constituency was convicted in Italy, in absentia, for a murder that he could not have committed, because he was serving in a restaurant at the time, and sentenced to 15 years? It is definitely not just a one-way street.

[Mark Reckless]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing that example to the attention of the House. It goes to show that in principle we cannot sign up to the European arrest warrant, because we do not have a sufficient degree of trust in the similarity and protections of all EU 27 judicial and policing systems to allow us to do that. People in our country deserve and have had, over centuries, protections that are greater than those now offered within the European arrest warrant. It is for that reason that I hope and believe it is still possible that we will choose not to opt back into it.

The Home Secretary has given her view, but there are many views in the Conservative party. Those views are held not just on the Back Benches, but, I know, deep in the most senior levels of Government. I ask that we listen to the electorate. Once the electorate, on 22 May, passes its judgment on the “party of in”, and on how weak their arguments are, with the Deputy Prime Minister just recycling arguments he has picked up without giving any liberal thought as to what they are or what the principles should be, we will see that this is not what the people in this country want. Ultimately, we still have the right to make a different decision. What we have seen with the opt-out we have already made is that the opt-ins are still to come. One analogy that Members, at least in my party, may find instructive is with regard to what happened over the AV referendum and the boundary changes. We agreed, in good faith, to give the Liberal Democrats their referendum on AV. In return, they agreed to later give us boundaries that would give fair representation across constituencies. They banked their AV referendum, and then did not give us the boundaries that there was, at the very least, an understanding that they would give.

I would argue that the mass opt-out equates to the AV referendum in that analogy. I do not think that we would have any more reason to agree later to opt in to matters in which we do not believe because of that opt-out than the Liberal Democrats had to give us our boundaries because they secured their AV referendum; and I think that after 22 May, we will be in a different political situation.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Does my hon. Friend agree that this issue is of such constitutional importance that it might be better to delay it until after a general election? If we did not exercise the opt-ins, and if the Liberal Democrats left the coalition and we had an early election, there would be no great harm in that.

[Mark Reckless]

My hon. Friend has made a very sensible point. I think that, as we get nearer to the election, we need to differentiate between what we believe in as Conservatives and what we have been forced to agree to by the need to be in harness with the Liberal Democrats. Given that they have not fulfilled their promises to us, and as we discover in the course of our negotiations with our European partners that we may not be able to secure protections in every area in which we would like to secure them, we shall have to consider, in those new circumstances, the balance of the opt-ins that are proposed, and decide whether we, as Conservatives, wish to agree to them.

[Mr Cash]

There is yet another example. The Liberal Democrats and the Labour party agreed to allow the European Union (Referendum) Bill, presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton), to complete its passage in the House of Commons, but when it reached the House of Lords, those same two parties made certain that it would not be passed, and we now understand that the Liberal Democrats are refusing to allow a money resolution to be tabled in respect of any future Bill that may be subject to the Parliament Acts.

[Mark Reckless]

I think the Liberal Democrats will ultimately find that as we act to others, so they will act to us.

[Pete Wishart]

The hon. Gentleman is becoming awfully exercised about the Liberal Democrats, but the party about which he should be most concerned is UKIP, because it will probably trounce the Conservatives in the European elections. What will the Conservatives do in that event?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. We do not want to speculate on what will happen in the European elections. We do not want to speculate on whether they will be won by the Liberals or by UKIP. I think that we want to hear about the point of the debate.

[Mark Reckless]

The debate is about the opt-out, Mr Deputy Speaker, and other Members have spoken at length about what we might opt back into. I merely suggest to the House that, having opted out, we should not opt back into anything. A number of arguments support that view, but I believe that the most important argument is that anything that we opt back into will be judiciable by the European Court of Justice, and will be subject to the decisions and the enforcement of the European Commission. It is for that reason that the Home Affairs Committee concluded unanimously:

“If the Government proceeds with the opt-in as proposed, we note that it will not result in any repatriation of powers. Indeed, the increased jurisdiction of the ECJ may result in a net flow of powers in the opposite direction.”

We in the Conservative party, at least, have set our face against that, because we believe in bringing powers back from the European Union and, ultimately, putting the choice to the British people in a referendum. It would be entirely inconsistent with that if, having exercised this opt-out, we sought to push through opt-ins as a result of which the European Court of Justice and the European Commission took charge of areas that had previously been intergovernmental.

In 1990, our party negotiated the pillar structure of the European Union, but the Lisbon treaty puts an end to those pillars, becoming the “tree” that has stemmed from the earlier Dutch draft. We said that we would change Europe, and that there would be subsidiarity and intergovernmental pillars, but that will end if these opt-ins take place, and the European institutions and integrationists will have won. We have already voted to exercise the mass opt-out. We should leave things as they are, and then let the British people decide.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)]

I should like to start by expressing my thanks to all those who have spoken in the debate today. I shall address some of the points that they have raised, but I should first like to make a couple of observations.

My views on matters European are well known. British justice is the envy of the world, and I will not countenance any attempt to replace it with a pan-European justice system. It would be entirely wrong for Britain to hand over control of Justice and Home Affairs entirely to the European Union or its Court of Justice and, under this Government, that is not going to happen. Those who were here for the debate a couple of weeks ago on the three recent proposals from the Commission will have heard us putting forward this Government’s intentions loud and clear on matters that we all believe would be an unnecessary and unwarranted intrusion on our justice system.

[Mark Reckless]

The Secretary of State says that he does not want to hand over powers over Justice and Home Affairs to the European Union entirely. Is he happy to hand them over in part?

[Chris Grayling]

If I may, I shall answer that question by setting out for my hon. Friend where we stand.

The House will be aware that more than 130 justice and home affairs measures were due to come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice in December 2014, as a result of the Lisbon treaty signed by the previous Government. It is important to point out to my hon. Friends that this Government have secured the opt-out. Had we not been able to reach agreement on that, we would have been required under the terms of the treaty to participate in all those 130-plus measures. The opt-out has been a significant step—[Interruption.] I hear chuckles from the Opposition Benches, but I have to say that, although we have heard complaints and criticism from them this afternoon, it was the Labour Government who set up the process. They negotiated the opt-out, but they now appear to be trying to disown what they did, and to claim that the process we are now going through is nothing to do with them. It was they who negotiated the process, and it was they who set out the way in which we would have to address these issues. Their arguments on this are therefore completely bankrupt.

The Lisbon treaty clearly paved the way for the creation of a European justice area, and that system is now beginning to take shape. The European Commission is pushing ahead, with the latest justice scorecard just one signal of its intent. My hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) talked about some of the things that the Commissioner had been doing recently. She was explicit earlier this year when she said:

“We need a true political union. To me this means that we need to build a United States of Europe”.

She has set out her ambition to have a common justice area by 2020. Let me be clear: that is not something I want, it is not something the British people want, and with the Conservatives in government, it is not something this country will ever sign up to. Indeed, I trust that no future Government of any political persuasion would take this country down that route, despite the Opposition’s rather mealy-mouthed answers today on where they stand on these matters.

That is why it was important that the Prime Minister exercised our opt-out in July last year to ensure that Britain did not become part of a common European justice system, and that is why we continue to assert our right to opt out when Brussels brings forward new legislation in this area. This Government are protecting our national interest and standing up for Britain, whereas Labour typically just ran up the white flag over many years.