Europe after Maastricht : interim report : report, together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices : first report [of the] Foreign Affairs Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Foreign Affairs Committee.
Date:
1992
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Europe after Maastricht : interim report : report, together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices : first report [of the] Foreign Affairs Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    27/96 (page 11)
    [Mr Canavan Contd] addressed this very complex Maastricht seems to raise. problem that Mr Harris 38. I want to first of all go back to the question of subsidiarity and ask whether you are confident that your concept of this ugly word, minimum interference, as you put it, coincides with the understanding of other Member States of what subsidiarity actually means. For example, do the Germans not see it in a very different light and they see it as a means of building a federal deci- sion-making process in the European Union? (Mr Hurd) I think the Germans have strength- ened their position quite strongly. They were one of the begetters of the article. They and we were one of the begetters of the subsidiarity article. Since then they have put great emphasis on this for slightly different reasons from ourselves, but the concept is the same. They do not want the Community to take upon itself the responsibility for itself inspecting, regulating in detail the carry- ing out of objectives which Europeans share. This is partly because of their Lander system, and that is perfectly right, but the result is the same so far as we are concerned, that they are strong allies in the search for an effective application of subsidiarity. 39. But are you expecting Birmingham to clear up any doubt about what the word “subsidiarity” means to ordinary people because there is this doubt? (Mr Hurd) Yes. 40. Are you expecting a sort of ringing declara- tion saying, “This in plain English, plain French, plain German is what it means”? (Mr Hurd) We will try to have a declaration in plain English, which shows what it means, what it means now, what it means even before the Treaty is ratified, and how the different bits of the Community should start putting it into effect. Then the declaration (and this remains to be nego- tiated) can say that at Edinburgh the different institutions should come back and report to us on how they have carried out this idea. 41. Although we can say it will be plain English, will the others agree that that is what it means in plain English in their language? (Mr Hurd) There we are, the question illus- trates the difficulty! 42. Is that what you are after? (Mr Hurd) 1 understand that. We are trying to get this thought expressed to meet the actual anxi- eties you are talking about, national identity, (we have not talked about national parliaments but that comes into it), to take the different aspects of this and to set out in terms of a plain document how we think the different institutions should go away and operate them, and then with a report back at Edinburgh on the three things I have men- tioned: the procedures the different institutions will follow, the tests to be applied, and the first fruits, the examples of what falls by the wayside as a result. We may not get all these but that is what we are aiming at. Chairman: It is not just a question of setting it out in plain English but deciding who decides what the plain English means when particular cases come up. That is where the worry is. Are we going to leave all this in the future to lawyers and judges in the European Court of Justice and so on, or are we going to get more of a political decision making process in which this national parliament plays a much clearer and more decisive role? I think that is the question Sir John Stanley wanted to pursue. He may want to put it in a different form, but that is the question. Sir John Stanley 43. I was going to ask the Foreign Secretary, as our Prime Minister and President Mitterrand have recently called for a direct involvement of national parliaments in the formulation of Community pol- icy as opposed to being purely reactive at the moment, how does the Government see that involvement by the UK national parliament? (Mr Hurd) One of the changes that has hap- pened, even since Maastricht, is that more and more Member States are speaking in your sort of language, Sir John, and the language you, Chairman, used last week. It is there in Maastricht but it is coming to the fore: that is, the important role of national parliaments. I know that some members of our House feel that the Commission and maybe members of the European Parliament regard national parliaments as a sort of endan- gered species which ought to die out or pass on and their places be taken by the European Parliament; but that is clearly nonsense and runs against our whole idea of what the Community should be. It is not easy for governments to dictate to national parliaments how to operate in this. This House would resent it if we started to do that. There are various ideas, and one is that everybody, including the Commission, should pay more atten- tion to national parliaments. I do not know how that would be received this end. It is something the House would want to think about. It is something the Commission is thinking about: how you could have a more direct link Commission-Commons or Commission-Lords. Of course, the basic decisive body in the Community is the Council and not the Commission. That is why the Council as well as the Commission has to brisk up its proceedings and its tests on subsidiarity if it is to make any sense. I would think that the House of Commons has a reasonably tight grip on ministers who go to Council. It is true in Denmark, but it is not true elsewhere. If national parliaments across the Community want to establish themselves clearly as part of European decision-taking, they have to work out their own grip on their own ministers. No names, but I think of Ministers who are cer- tainly not conscious of any particular grip at the moment as they come and go. Then there is the