Clause 1 - Electoral regions in the United Kingdom
European Parliament (Representation) Bill
5:15 pm
Mr William Cash (Stone, Conservative)
Indeed.
Amendment No. 20 would insert into clause 4 a similar provision for a corrective. It would be a corrective not only as described in the protocol in terms of numbers or the gravitational shifts of power that are implicit in the powers of co-decision and the way in which alliances can be built up—so that Germany ends up with more than others—but with regard to the democratic way in which we deal with the matter in our procedures in the House.
I have already made the point that the process starts with the European Commission. The explanatory notes state:
''The European Commission will inform the UK what their representation will be''.
I do not want to be curmudgeonly about this but, interestingly enough, and for reasons that completely escape me—I am sure that they do not escape the Minister—that point does not really relate to clause 4, which in my opinion is the more important provision,
but to clause 2 only. Under clause 4, the Lord Chancellor, taking orders from the Council and the European Commission—the Electoral Commission has only to be consulted, which we will come on to later—may make an order to
''give effect to a change under Community law in the number of MEPs to be elected for the United Kingdom by amending . . . section 1(1) of the 2002 Act''.
We shall later come to the use of the words,
''give effect to a change under Community law'',
so I shall not go into that at this stage, but I put a marker down that that is important in relation to the manner in which we expect orders to be made in this House or in the other place.
Clause 5 contains supplementary arrangements, again to be discussed later, which specify the manner in which the power to make those statutory instruments is to be exercised and the procedures that will be available; negative for some orders, but affirmative for the more important ones. Clause 5 uses—surprise, surprise—the words:
''If a motion for the approval of a draft order is rejected by either House or withdrawn by leave of the House''.
Do I hear myself correctly? Are these provisions not set in concrete? Yes, that is implicit in the procedural arrangements prescribed in clause 5. We have an acknowledgment that there is a democratic procedure to be followed, but not much opportunity for it to be followed through. We are all tied and bound not only by the Government's majority, which we must accept, but by the superior law that some of us do not find it so easy to accept. Some would reject that altogether as a mechanism in law that makes a mockery of such provisions as those in clause 4.
If the Lord Chancellor, in making an order, can have it rejected or withdrawn, I suppose that it follows that there is a concession of some description here. The superior law that I have described—the Council and the European Commission making decisions and informing the Lord Chancellor that he has to do something—could in fact be rejected under this Bill. The Minister has previously said to me that we will not be able to get the amendments through, which I understand. I have been grappling for many years with the problem of how to achieve a position in which we as a Parliament could reject a provision of Community law. Can she tell me how we would arrive at such a position under this order-making power?