On Question, Bill read a third time.

Lord Campbell of Alloway moved Amendment No. 1:

After Clause 6, insert the following new Clause—

“Consequences of non-ratification by other Member States

For the avoidance of doubt, until the Treaty of Lisbon has been ratified by all Member States of the European Union, Her Majesty’s Government shall continue to act in accordance with the provisions of the existing Treaties and within the institutional arrangements established by those Treaties.”

6.30 pm
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I support this amendment but fear that it may prove to be of little practical value because for years the Government have failed to veto powers passing to Brussels that were clearly not envisaged by the existing treaties, and I do not suppose that they will start doing so now. Examples are too many to mention, but a particularly good one appeared in a letter dated 30 March 2006 from Mr Barroso to the admirable Daniel Hannan MEP, who had asked what was the legal basis for the new External Action Service. Mr Barroso replied that it was Article III-296(3) of the proposed constitution, which had been killed off by the French and Dutch nine months before. When Mr Hannan pointed that out, Mr Barroso agreed, but the project went ahead anyway in a legal vacuum. When I raised this in an Oral Question on 4 May 2006, the Government supported Mr Barroso. Perhaps the Government have been at their most spineless in their refusal to veto the consistent abuse of Article 308 to extend Brussels’ powers in areas that were not covered by the treaties. Your Lordships debated this abuse late in the evening last Monday, 9 June, when I regret I could not be present. I have raised it several times in the past few years in Oral and Written Questions.

By way of a tidying-up exercise, as we are now at Third Reading, I feel I should place the text of the clause on the record in your Lordships’ proceedings as the full infamy of its misuse cannot be grasped without knowing what it says. It was Article 235 in the original 1957 Rome treaty and was designed to allow Brussels to make minor tariff adjustments and so on in the then Common Market. It goes as follows:

“If action by the Community should prove necessary to attain, in the course of the operation of the common market, one of the objectives of the Community, and this Treaty has not provided the necessary powers, the Council shall, acting unanimously on a proposal from the Commission and after consulting the European Parliament, take the appropriate measures”.

One does not have to be a legal genius to see that Brussels can take power under this clause only in the course of the operation of the Common Market, but over the years, and especially since the collapse of the original constitution, Brussels has been put in charge of such initiatives as the grant of food aid to the least developed countries.

Lord Roper: My Lords, the noble Lord keeps referring to Brussels. It is in fact the member states acting unanimously, is it not?

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, more precisely, it is on proposals advanced in secret by the unelected Commission, passed in secret by the bureaucrats from the nation states in the shape of COREPER and passed, again in secret, in the Council of Ministers, who are the Ministers from the national states. The point that the noble Lord so eloquently makes for me is that that bypasses our democracy—your Lordships’ House and the House of Commons—completely. That is the method to which some of us object.

I was about to regale your Lordships with the uses to which this clause has been put. I think I started by saying that one of them was the grant of food aid to the least developed countries. Then there is the promotion of urban renewal in Northern Ireland, the provision of assistance to economic reform in Mongolia, a new translation centre for EU bodies, the co-ordination of our social security systems, the prevention and aftercare of terrorism and establishing the EU’s Agency for Fundamental Rights—the agency that will carry out the charter, which will only be made legal by the now-defunct Lisbon treaty. There is also a new €235 million information campaign, which some of us would call propaganda. That will certainly be needed after the Irish people have spoken and the way they are about to behave. Then there is the regulation of glucose and lactose and the control of civil emergencies inside and outside the EU.

Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, I am fascinated to discover that the Commission has allocated exactly €235 million for this information campaign under the original Article 235, now subtly renumbered Article 352. This is clearly a very deep conspiracy. I think it sounds rather like the Da Vinci Code.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I refer the noble Lord to the House of Commons Select Committee’s report on this matter. It was passed under Article 308, which is what I am talking about, if the noble Lord had listened with appropriate fascination to my opening remarks.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: My Lords, if I understand it, by his own admission the noble Lord is giving us the speech that he should have given us last week when he was not in his place to give it. Now he is abusing the procedures of this House and giving us a speech on something that is nothing whatever to do with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway. Could he perhaps come to the amendment and explain what his position on it is?

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I think I am entirely within the rules, which are to tidy up what has been said before. This is a new amendment in view of new circumstances that were not there when this subject was originally debated. I trust it is helpful to your Lordships. In any case, I have only got about another two minutes.

The House of Commons scrutiny committee—I say to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that none of what I am saying now was said on 9 June—was overridden in its opposition to several of these initiatives. Indeed, it has produced excellent reports to confirm that. Some of those reports would be really quite funny if they were not so serious. For instance, only two years ago the Government started by agreeing with the committee that Article 308 could not be used to pass the control of civil contingencies to Brussels. The Government replied, in time-honoured fashion, that there was nothing to worry about because the other member states did not want it either. However, when they discovered that they were alone in COREPER they wrote saying that they did not dare to veto the proposal and wanted to abstain, but they did not dare to do that either because they thought an extension counted as a veto. The Government did not even understand the veto procedure. They believed that unanimity required every country to vote for a proposal, whereas in fact an abstention is just that, and always has been since 1957. The committee wrote back putting the Government straight and pointing out that just because they were alone did not mean that they were wrong. It was too late; the Government had already voted for it.

That is the sort of thing that has been going on, away from public scrutiny of course. It is supported by the judicial activism of the Luxemborg court. As long ago as 1996 the court gave a judgment on the use of Article 308 that simply ignored the requirement that the clause could be used only in the course of the operation of the Common Market. The court did not even mention it but ruled that what mattered was to obtain a Community objective that was not covered elsewhere in the treaties; in other words an illegal Community objective. I might add that that sanctioned the use to which this clause has been put. There is no appeal against such rampant dishonesty in the court. That is why I fear the amendment will not make much difference to the juggernaut’s process, but I support it none the less.