The UK’s Justice and Home Affairs Opt-outs

Debate between Michael Connarty and Richard Shepherd

Thursday 10th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[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.

European Union Bill

Debate between Michael Connarty and Richard Shepherd

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Shepherd]

That is the argument, and I am glad that it was so briskly conveyed. On that note, I urge the House to support the new clause.

[Michael Connarty]

I hope not to delay the House for too long. I am actually a signatory to this new clause, but I hope that the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison) will withdraw it. It was an attempt to ask for a process in which information should be provided to make sense of any proposal under section 4, which is mentioned in clause 5 on statements to the House. The truth is that there is a problem with the understanding of, and interest in, the decisions made in the European Council, which are then enacted by this Parliament and which affect the citizens, businesses and communities that we represent.

The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) is always keen for us to be more informed, but I am not sure that the new clause would achieve that. Listening to the debate, I have become more and more convinced that more and more documentation does not mean more and more information. We need to look carefully at how the House treats the process involved. There are, I think, six members and one former member of the European Scrutiny Committee here today, and we tend to take a lot of interest in these matters, but there is not the same breadth of understanding, information gathering or discussion of European matters in the generality of the House.

Much can be explained by changes in the structure of how Parliament deals with European issues. We used to have European Standing Committees, with specific designations as A, B and C, specific remits and a fixed membership of 13 each, and they debated every single issue that came from the European Council about which the European Scrutiny Committee was not happy. What happens now is that a randomised group of people chosen by the Committee of Selection turn up now and then and the Committees have no sense of a specific remit. They are still foolishly called A, B and C as if they still have specific remits, but when a Minister brings forward provisions to change our position and bring in new law on the basis of a directive, regulation or other proposal from the European Commission, very few people understand what that Minister is doing.