The UK’s Justice and Home Affairs Opt-outs

Michael Connarty Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

We discussed the measure the right hon. Gentleman refers to in front of his Committee and other Committees. There are a number ways in which we deal with these matters in terms of exchanging information. I want to be sure that I am looking at the measures to which he is referring and I think that they are Council framework decisions 2009/315/JHA and 2009/316/JHA. They require member states to inform each other about convictions of EU nationals and are an important tool for sharing data. The reason I am hesitating here is that we were certainly discussing the possibility of rejoining this particular measure. [Interruption.] It is in the 35. Yes, that is why I was hesitating. The right hon. Gentleman said we were not in it and I thought it was in the 35 measures we are rejoining, precisely because it gives us the opportunity to share this information.

We also wish to rejoin the Naples II convention, the principal tool for customs co-operation. Operation Stoplamp, which used this measure to exchange vital information with our partners, resulted in the seizure of 1.2 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of about £300 million—again, an outcome I am sure everyone in this House will welcome. We are also seeking to rejoin Europol, which played a key role in helping our law enforcement agencies to fight those criminals who tried to exploit British customers by adulterating our food with horsemeat. It is doing excellent work under the leadership of its British director, Rob Wainwright.

Those are just a handful of examples that illustrate why our participation in these measures is in our national interest. Today’s debate is not about the flawed treaty to which the previous Labour Government signed us up; it is about the decisions we must take now to protect the public and keep the British people safe. The Government’s policy is clear: we have exercised the opt-out and negotiated a deal to rejoin a limited number of measures that we believe it is in the national interest for us to remain part of.

I look forward with interest to the speech from the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), as it would be helpful to know the Opposition’s position on these various measures. Every time we debate them, we see a slightly different position coming forward. I am sorry that the shadow Home Secretary is not here to tell us herself, but perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will be able to tell us whether they would have exercised the opt-out that they negotiated. Would they have remained bound by all 130-plus measures, rather than negotiating a limited number in the national interest? Would they have changed the law to protect British citizens, as we have done in relation to the European arrest warrant? Would they have risked infraction proceedings by rejoining Prüm without fully considering the facts?

The evidence suggests that the Opposition do not share the determination of this party and this Government to reduce the control Brussels has on our criminal justice system. Their position has always been to say one thing and do another. There was a manifesto promise for a vote on the Lisbon treaty, but they refused to hold a referendum. They said they would protect British red lines, but they gave up our veto in policing and criminal justice matters. They negotiated an opt-out and then voted against using it. That contrasts with the position taken by this Government. We support, and have exercised, the United Kingdom’s opt-out. We support the return of powers from Brussels to the UK. We support acting in the national interest by rejoining a limited number of measures to protect British citizens and the victims of crime. This is consistent with our approach to the Europe Union as a whole.

[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

I notice that the title of the debate actually refers to opt-outs. Apart from Prüm, can the Home Secretary name one thing that they are not opting into that will make a significant difference in repatriating competence to the UK—one single issue apart from Prüm?

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[Mr Hanson]

The right hon. Gentleman will know that, as a Welsh Member of Parliament, I take a great interest in such matters. I will look at this from the perspective that I think the Home Secretary is looking at it from, which is: what is in the interests of reducing organised crime, child trafficking, prostitution, drug running and terrorist activities, and ensuring that we prevent future victims and have the best possible protections in place for the United Kingdom across Europe following negotiations?

[Michael Connarty]

My right hon. Friend has not dealt with the terrible accusation, which the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) has just made, that the EU is a foreign power. We are one of the 30 countries that control the EU. It is part of what we are. Idle talk of it as a “foreign power” shows where the right hon. Gentleman is. He should be in the United Kingdom Independence party, not the Tory party.

[Mr Hanson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing out that nuance in the intervention by the right hon. Member for Wokingham. I regard myself as a European and British citizen and part of—

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[Mr Hanson]

The Justice Secretary says that they did, but he needs to reflect more on the record. The Home Secretary has tried to indicate that some of these matters might be up for discussion, but ultimately, as she knows, they are in the interests of crime fighting, the interests of victim prevention and the interests of ensuring that we bring criminals to justice.

[Michael Connarty]

I think that my right hon. Friend is being kind to the Opposition and, probably correctly, to the Home Secretary, who has worked hard on this issue. The Justice Secretary, however, defended the position previously. They will accept minimum standards on organised crime, but they will not accept minimum standards on terrorism. It is totally illogical. The Justice Secretary has forgotten about that. I raised the issue on the Floor of the House previously and the right hon. Gentleman could not reply then and he cannot reply now.

[Mr Hanson]

My hon. Friend raises important issues, but my chief point to the Home Secretary is that she could have indicated her commitment to opting in to these issues more strongly and earlier, which would have put her in a much better place in the negotiations. [Interruption.] The right hon. Lady says she did, but I do not think she did. We will have to disagree and reflect on the issues again. The Home Secretary has tried to be Eurosceptic and to compromise with her Eurosceptic Back Benchers, but they will never compromise on these issues. She needs to take a firm stance to ensure that the House has a vote and agrees these measures because they are good for crime prevention, good for victims and good for bringing people to justice. She needs to bring the vote forward as quickly as possible so that we can shake off the Eurosceptics and show that we in Britain are committed to working with our European partners to crack down on crime and ensure that both Britain and Europe become safer places.

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[Michael Connarty (Linlithgow and East Falkirk) (Lab)]

As could be imagined, tailgating the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) on these issues in the European Scrutiny Committee on behalf of the Labour party is a tortuous but enlightening process. It is interesting to note that the original Command Paper 8671, which was published in July 2013 and which we discussed on the Floor of the House, has been slightly amended. Most people probably do not realise that what we are discussing now is a similar, but not identical, list of 35 measures set out in Command Paper 8897 on 3 July 2014, so there have been some small amendments along the way.

I recommend that interested people outside the House not only listen to the debates, which are enlightening but repetitive, but read the relevant documents from the European Scrutiny Committee, the Justice Committee and the Home Affairs Committee. Those documents give a flavour of the minutiae about which the European Scrutiny Committee in general differs from the Government. Although I have my concerns about the European Union, and particularly about the behaviour of the Commission, I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not support the hon. Gentleman’s often-repeated analysis that it has been set out in a dark room somewhere in the European Commission that this will all eventually lead to a united states of Europe controlled by a bureaucracy in Brussels that is helped by the European Court of Justice and many other manipulative organs of the European Union.

The fact is that the European Commission, at its heart, tends to have a competence creep mentality. In many areas the Commission is making everyone do things according to its will when those things do not require such direction. I am a great supporter of devolution in Scotland and other parts of the UK, and I am a great supporter of subsidiarity, but not the subsidiarity set out in the Lisbon treaty. It is a falsehood to say that the Lisbon treaty has given more power to Parliaments.

In that sense, I wonder about the Government’s approach to the opt-outs that we are debating. We know there is a block opt-out on all 133 measures, most of which, as has been articulately stated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), have been superseded or are redundant. On a few issues, we might want to argue about the final details of whether we should have opted in to certain justice standards, but at the heart of the debate is a feeling that the Government have not been willing to be open enough about that fact, which was a point raised by the Chair of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith). The reality is that there have been no massively significant changes to the competences that have been drawn back to the UK, because most of the 133 measures have been superseded, are redundant or have never been used. Therefore, the myth being created, which is that this process is about repatriating powers to the UK—one that has been put forward by the Government—is such an obvious falsehood that the public are becoming more and more disillusioned and sceptical about the Government’s position.

I think that the majority of the coalition Government are pro-EU and want to see us solidly at the heart of the EU and influencing it. I think that they are deeply committed, as I think we on the Opposition side are, to reforming the EU, making it more relevant and finding a way to draw back to the member states the powers that they wish to apply in their own right. But that is not what people are seeing in this debate.

For example, the Justice Committee reached the conclusion—on page 6 of its eighth report of the 2013-14 Session—that in the previous debate the House was not being asked at that stage to endorse the list of 35 measures that the Government intended to opt back into, but the Home Secretary used the debate again and again to claim that the Government had the support of the House of Commons for what they were doing. She gave the impression again and again, in writing and in the spoken word, that that is what we did. We started a process and considered a Command Paper, but we did not conclude that it was correct or endorse it; the public were given the impression that somehow we had.

The position taken by the Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee is supported by its members—certainly the 13 who were there, including myself. We think that the House should debate and vote on each of the 35 measures—I saw you flinch, Madam Deputy Speaker, when that was suggested. They might be all in the same order and, as the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee pointed out, there are key issues, so it might be possible to group them in such a way that Members can express their opinions by voting on groups.

However, I certainly agree that we should have some kind of debate—it is a pity that it is being done in this context—about the European arrest warrant, because I think that it is the right kind of measure. We would not want to replace it with a country-by-country arrangement based on applications to bring people back individually. I will give an example. I hope that my friend—and I do regard him as a friend—the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is listening. After the 7 July bombings, the fact that we could return one of the bombers to this country within three weeks was a massive example of why such an arrangement is fundamentally sound. However, it might have to be modified in some ways to stop the nonsense of having applications for cases of wheelbarrow theft or £200 loans with the wrong details and all sorts of trivia.

I want to expand on a case from my constituency. It concerns a family with a custody order over a child. The father, who is Polish, abducted the child and took it to Poland, so the grandfather and a friend went to Poland, took the child and brought it back to Scotland. The father then claimed that he had been assaulted during that process. A European arrest warrant was sought and the case was taken to a Scottish court, but it ruled that the warrant was not valid because the witness was clear that no assault had taken place and that what they had done was to apply the court’s ruling that the mother, who is Scottish, had the right to custody of the child and that the father had abducted the child. That seemed to be the end of the matter, and it sounded sensible to me. However, something went wrong with the process. Only last year the grandfather, who is now not in good health, and his wife decided to take a holiday in the Netherlands. When he stepped off the plane in Amsterdam, he was arrested and sent to Poland. He had a heart attack there and ended up in hospital. When the court in Poland eventually looked at the case, it concluded that there was no case to answer and that the European arrest warrant was not valid, so he was released. Now his health is even worse.

Why is there no process—I have asked the Home Secretary this—whereby all the agencies that sign up to the European arrest warrant can be informed when a court rules against an attempt to use it in the country in which it is attempted to be served? Why is there no transmission of that information? The grandfather could have gone on holiday anyway in the EU and he would probably have been arrested and sent to Poland, and for a European arrest warrant that a court had already ruled was invalid. It makes no sense to me that these things still stand. Apart from the trivia, it is the mechanism of how they are applied that worries me.

The basic fact of this debate is that the European Scrutiny Committee, the Home Affairs Committee and the Justice Committee felt that the Government were not giving enough information and that they were not willing to accept that it is not enough to bring back one blockbuster motion stating, “We’ve had a negotiation and signed up to 35 items. Take it or leave it.” It cannot be done like that. If it is done like that, it will undermine the Government’s credibility. The Opposition would then be in a difficult situation, because we would have to either support the motion, if it was all that was available, table a counter-motion of some kind in order to divide up the 35 items, or use some other process in order to respond to what the British public, Parliament and the three Committees want, which is a debate on the fundamental issues in the package so that we can vote on them individually and say, as I hope we will, “Yes, we are behind this move to sign up to the 35 items.”

Some of us might like to see some other things opted into, with a little bit of finessing by the Government so that we keep progressing along the path that I think we are on with justice and home affairs. My worry is not about justice and home affairs and a corpus juris for Europe; my worry is with the economics of the European Union that are destroying the economies of the subservient countries that have come into it and are under the fiscal compact and the eurozone’s stability and growth pact. That, to me, is what is damaging the project for Europe, not justice and home affairs. I am not worried about the fact—this was put to me in a private conversation with another hon. Member—that the Queen has to register and prove that she is a real British citizen so that her bank account can be used across Europe. What worries me is that we are damaging other people in Europe for the power of the economic giants, including us—we are a much-diminished giant, but we are still benefiting from it. I want the debate to take place in such a way that people can say afterwards that there is a united feeling in this House that the European Union is a good thing.

I will also put down a marker for those on my Front Bench. I want to see us sign up to a referendum on the European Union and to go out with like-minded people across the House and win a yes vote to remain in the European Union and build Europe for the benefit of British citizens.

[Sir Richard Shepherd (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

I have been in this House for seven Parliaments. Each has seemed to have a different character, but there has been one consistent thread across all that time: the integration within European processes. That has had support on high days, on holidays and in opposition. I see it as a fundamental task of the House of Commons to challenge perceived wisdoms and reflect the responsibilities and interests of those we are elected to represent.

I have also seen the continuing theme of membership of the European Union over all that time. It has never quite been a settled issue. For all the trumpets and bands, all the songs and the universal praise, there is a deep underlying tug. It is really about a sense of country. Who are we? It has always been about that. That, after all, is the first duty of a sovereign state, I would argue: to protect the interests, freedoms and liberties that we have enjoyed under our form of constitutional arrangements. What we are really seeing is a struggle over the British constitution. Oh, but does it not evolve over time? Yet, looking back, there has been one constant theme, which is that people profoundly believed in many of the central precepts of what constitutes a sovereign state. I am driven in my memory by certain observations, too. The German constitutional court made the observation that democracy lies not in the institutions of the community, the European Union, but in the national state, and yet everything that this House seems to do in recent years is to surrender and denigrate that nation state—the very concept by which we have authority in this House.

What is the criticism of the European arrest warrant? It is that it is promoted on the basis of a benefit, but to many people it is actually a degradation of the security of the British people. The fact that they can be taken away from within this jurisdiction by almost a mandate, which will, in time, be governed by the European Court of Justice is a loss of the authority of our own legal and justice system.

The House is well aware that, in recent months, a series of High Court and Supreme Court judges have been writing essays, making a plea about the way in which the discretion and the interpretation of human rights is conducted. The most central purpose of a Government is law and order and the effectiveness with which they protect the citizen, and no one can dispute that our Home Secretary is fierce in her determination to protect the British citizen. But, actually, the greatest protection of a citizen and a coherent society, which is what we call the sovereign state, lies within the commitment of the people to their institutions and their way of self-government, and that is what this measure undermines.

[Michael Connarty]

I am concerned about the nationalist tone of the hon. Gentleman’s contribution. Under his logic, Scotland should vote yes to independence in September, and I am totally opposed to breaking up the United Kingdom, which I happen to think respects Scottish subsidiarity.

[Sir Richard Shepherd]

I will not trade remarks on this matter. I was also born in Scotland, and I am deprived of a vote on something that affects my cousins and my relatives. This has been a Union for 300 years, and we have been united by the sentiments of those people. Not so very long ago—70 years—the Scots, the English, the Welsh and those from Northern Ireland stood together against the greatest danger of our time: the monolithic power of Germany. I see this not as nationalistic but as a reflection and a pride in who we are, what we are, what this nation has accomplished and our ability to govern ourselves. The Scots will make their own decision; I am not involved in that because I do not have a residence in Scotland. Anyone passing through who might temporarily have a residence there can have a vote. No, no that is not democratic, and it is not the spirit of the Union. The Union has fought together, worked together and made something together, and that is the Union I am concerned about, not the European Union. When we come to deal with these matters, we will find that we have surrendered our very sense of “these are our people.”

As a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, we looked at these extradition orders. The Home Affairs Committee and the Justice Committee have looked at these matters, too. No one has made any mention of this, but one of the best things in the process were the groups that have spoken and given testimony to those Committees. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee talked about those who are genuinely concerned about the way in which all of this has happened. I half expected to hear mention of the Staffordshire case in Genoa in which a man, under these extradition endeavours, was found guilty of murder, although he had never been there or even near there. No, the integrity of a nation is founded on its institutions and also the law. In this country, I maintain that we have a pretty high degree of acceptance of the process of law and judgment and the way in which it is made. What we are now confronted with is the triviality of a central bureaucracy that sets out to be a great state, which I know the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) for honourable reasons passionately believes in, but who in the end will protect us? That can only be the people of our own country and our own institutions.

I find no comfort in this succession of cases, which have been listed by the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, and which the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk also knows well enough about. We have all had constituents who have expressed a concern that the British Government—Parliament—seem to have no effectiveness in the world. I do not blame anyone for that. It is a crisis in our nation that we have to question who really governs us. I maintain that it is us who should govern us, and by that I mean our own Union.

I was deeply distressed when I heard the words of the Home Secretary, who fiercely defends us, in impossible cases, against treaty after treaty into which British Governments have entered. I even consider the United States treaty on extradition to be grotesquely misjudged. Of course the wonderful thing is that there will always be a judge who will find good merit in whatever the British Government are proposing. I will take issue, because my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, who is undoubtedly a doughty, valiant and fierce fighter, has achieved very little in the face of these international organisations that we have so joyously, easily and with great hallelujahs joined, and yet those organisations all sting us, because in the end they have taken away from the very sovereignty of our people. When we talk about the sovereignty of Parliament, we mean the people, and ultimately all of our fates are decided by them. In our grotesque shifting away from the authority of the people, we lose them, and that is why there is such a great disconnect.

I am glad to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) is in his place. He has catalogued many of these cases and understands their interconnectivity with what has happened. This is a bound Parliament now. It is bound not by the people but by our own passing views of the great affairs of the world. I fear that we have lost our nerve in some way. I watched a celebration of the end of war in Europe 70 years ago, and I saw elderly people, who had lost friends and colleagues, showing such pride that even alone Britain could stand for something; and we do stand for something. It does not need the buying of votes or the passing over of great sums of money. I listened with alarm that Albania will be “brought up”. This is a union that has been founded on the transfer of payments. Now, I believe, and my dad taught me, that we earn our own living. That is the truth that this country seems to be waving away. We pass over money in vast sums. I wonder why we are giving £9 billion net a year to fund European integration. We watched Ireland—I feel tremendously for Ireland—which had a near transfer of 5% of GDP to support the move to the future. It did that on its own, and the way it has come through the crisis has been an amazing feat of self-discipline and obedience to European precepts.

So we come to the substance of the debate. We are giving over to others the ultimate rule on the protection of our own citizens. This will come under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, which most people would agree is an integrationist court, governed by the central proposition of ever-closer union. I think of the glory of Europe historically—the nation states of Europe, the cultures, the universities, the interconnectivity, but not the throttling blanket that the European Union now represents to many of us.

Many people knock us and say, “But wasn’t there something we could have done?” We had a constitution that never doubted who was in charge—the people. We have transferred that role to international friction-making devices such as the European Union. We should be seen by our people as defending the interests of the people. I have always been cautious about a declaration from the Front Bench—any Front Bench—that says, “We act in the national interest.” The national interest is what this House decides, and ultimately what the people decide.

The whole course of the European project has been to avoid any engagement with the people over what is a non-democratic and largely unsuccessful Union, other than for the transfer of vast sums of money. We have to do something about that, and these opt-ins, opt-outs, see-all-round-abouts amount, in the end, to what the Government disguise and pretend is not really happening, as if it were a grand scheme. I have lost all confidence in understanding what central Government or the Foreign Office do these days, other than remaining quiet.