Intergovernmental Conference

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 9:41 pm on 21 March 1996.

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Photo of David Davis David Davis Minister of State (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) 9:41, 21 March 1996

No. If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I do not have enough time.

The court should enforce the law that Governments have agreed—not make it, change it or add to it. That is the clear point of view of the British Government. Judgments should be sensible and proportionate and should not interfere in matters where they do not belong. Our strategy in dealing with the court has two strands: reform of the court and reform of the treaty articles that have been the principal source of the problem.

I now come to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Mr. Forman) raised. The White Paper says that we seek to limit Community action, especially where that action has gone beyond that which was intended at the time we signed the treaty. The most notorious article in that respect is 118A, the health and safety article. There is a certain irony in that, as we have probably the best, or second best, health and safety record in Europe on the basis of our national legislation alone, and we should not forget that when we are arguing these cases.

Most recently, article 118A was used for the working time directive, with the unfortunate result in the court last week. That will impose a maximum 48-hour working week. In our judgment, that will harm jobs in this country and especially damage small businesses at the most fragile stage of their development, when they are under stress, and in that way deny people jobs. The 48-hour week will become zero hours a week.

Before that, we had the young workers directive, which, if we had not obtained a derogation, would have made youngsters' paper rounds and Saturday jobs illegal. Our view is that those are not properly health and safety matters. If our partners are determined to proceed along those lines, they should do so under the social chapter. I am about to discuss that point.

I am about to discuss the scope of qualified majority voting—another issue that is a point of the difference between the parties—but first I want to deal with something that the hon. Member for Livingston raised. Despite an intervention by my right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary, the hon. Gentleman refused to correct a misleading partial quotation. He tried to give the House the impression that my right hon. and learned Friend had called for more qualified majority voting. He omitted to say that my right hon. and learned Friend said: We should like to see more majority voting under those clauses of the treaty that already provide for majority voting … We do not wish to see a change in the treaty".—[Official Report, 20 June 1985; Vol. 81, c. 470.] I wanted to place that on the record to show that my right hon. and learned Friend had been unreasonably traduced in that manner.

The Government will oppose further centralisation of decision making that would make it easier to override national concerns; that means that we will oppose extension of majority voting. My right hon. and learned Friend the Foreign Secretary has already demolished the fatuous claim that more QMV is needed to make enlargement possible. He highlighted why those changes were being made—to create forward momentum towards a more federal Europe.

The foolishness and the unnecessary nature of QMV extension are clear when we consider the areas where more majority voting is proposed. Let us look at some of them—I shall come to the point raised by the hon. Member for Gateshead, East (Ms Quin) as to why the Opposition are stuck on the hook where the Leader of the Opposition put them. In the Chatham house speech, the Leader of the Opposition called for the extension of qualified voting and the abolition of the veto in four areas.

The first of those was environmental policy. The areas of environmental policy that are currently subject to veto under article 130 include fiscal provisions and measures relating to town and country planning, land use, and energy sources and supply. The Government do not believe that Britain's vital interests lie in allowing our partners to outvote us on damaging fiscal measures, for example, under the guise of environmental policy; nor do we want our partners to be able to impose their models of land use and town and country planning. We are opposed to banning the veto in that area, and we are not alone in that view.