E.E.C. INSTITUTIONS AND THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

HL Deb 27 June 1973 vol 343 cc1987-2056

3.29 p.m.

LORD O'HAGAN rose to call attention to the institutions of the E.E.C., particularly the European Parliament; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, when I first put down this Motion on the Order Paper I had no expectation that it would come up so soon, and seeing the vigorous and lively mood that the House is in this afternoon I hope I shall not be too much of a Christian in the arena in the way that I am treated in what I am trying to do. It is rather more modest than some of the things that your Lordships have been asking for in Question Time. I am not trying to make a broad historical sweep or to give a great lecture on the development and future of the institutions in the Common Market. I am just making a report on what I have observed in nearly six months of working in one of the Community institutions, and using this experience to put some questions both directly to the Government and to the House as to what we should set as our priorities over the next few years in the evolution of these institutions. What are they now? And where do we want them to go? I do not think that this is a question which should be left to professors of European studies, because these institutions are going to affect us more and more in our daily lives, not only in the wide sweep of monetary union but also because we may find that the type of toothpaste that we like has been harmonised out of existence by some directive coming from the Commission. So it is just as well that we should think deeply about what we are in for. Change is very much in the air at the moment.

I should like to make it quite clear that I am not attempting to pre-empt or to rival the very important Report that is to come from the Select Committee on European Instruments, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King. His Report, and the debate on it, are parallel to rather than different from what I am trying to do to-day. We are both looking from different points of view at the way we should run our affairs inside the Community, and the way I would link the two debates would be to say that while the European Parliament—of which I am a member and where I go for about ten days every month—is still weak and flabby national Parliaments must be really strong in pursuing the vagaries and the weaknesses that are sometimes to be found in draft Community legislation.

May I start with the most European institution, which is the Commission? It has a good European name, in that it is not readily confusable with anything that we have here. Every time I go to Brussels I find there is something odd about it which I did not know before: either about the way it works, or the way it is selected, or about its powers. Its powers are extraordinarily wide, in that it is the only institution in the Community which is allowed to initiate proposals for legislation. That right of initiative is quite something. Also, in many circumstances it implements the legislation. So in that way it is a very fierce guardian of the Treaties of Rome. On its own, in certain limited circumstances, it can make up its own regulations and directives. It has all sorts of other aptitudes, so that Sir Christopher Soames, for example, is acting on behalf of the Community from time to time in negotiations with third countries or other world bodies, because the Commission has the job of acting as the negotiating organ of the Community institutions. We have a very mixed stew in the Commission. It is hard to see how they manage to resolve all these different tasks, especially when I discovered, to my surprise, that the total manpower of the Commission in Brussels is 8,000. All these tasks are being pursued for nine countries by 8,000 people. They are a very high-powered lot, and because they work under this intense pressure and are very closely linked to the European development of the Community as something new and different they are in a way the conscience of Europe at the moment, for they embody many of the most progressive and European forces that are represented either in the Parliament or elsewhere. But they find their power base inside the Commission today.

There are many things the Commission cannot do. It cannot raise revenue; it cannot act in foreign affairs on its own; and it has no power to approve major legislation. It is quite a hefty body, even though it is small, even though it is selected and run in what we might consider to be a peculiar way. The civil servants at the top levels are chosen on national quotas and the 13 Commissioners are also appointed by the member States—in practice, if not in theory—with more than one Commissioner for the larger member States. At the top, therefore, there is a type of Cabinet—we must take that word away quickly—a sort of collegiate body where they are all responsible for what each ether does; where everybody can interfere with each other's portfolio and where everybody is doing so all the time; and where they are strictly ruled by their headmaster, President Ortoli. They are a very coherent and dynamic group. But beneath them they have their own private Mafia in each case, five men whom the Community pays for, who are really handpicked to fight their way through all the rules and regulations to make sure that what the Commission wants is achieved.

These people are in constant productive conflict with the people who work within the Commission itself. The people who work in the Commission itself are of all nationalities: some are professors, some are technocrats and some are businessmen. They all get on in a ferocious but amiable way and are delighted to talk to any serious investigator who comes along to waste their time. It is extremely easy to find out what they are doing—at least it appears to be. That may be a subtlety that escaped me. It is, therefore, invigorating to go and visit them, because these are serious people who have lost their blinkers, have become European, and are working in a constructive way, on the whole, even after the recent arrival of the British civil servants at a lower level which has caused a little upset here and there.

I should like to know what plans the Government have to reinforce the Commission. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Tweedsmuir of Belhelvie, can say what stance they take on this institution. Do the Government recognise that there is an article in the Treaty of Rome, Article 149, which was meant to increase the power of the Commission but which is a boomerang, because that article said that a Commission proposal going from the Commission to the supreme authority, the Council, could be altered only by a unanimous vote, which was anticipated to be very rare. As it is almost de rigueur that there is a unanimous vote all the time, something that was intended to strengthen the Commission actually weakens it; and as the intention of the Treaty of Rome is not being carried out, can the Government say how they would like to see that position rectified?

Speaking hierarchically, sitting above the Commission is the Council and they are the people towards whom the Commission is constantly lobbing these proposals. The Council is the oddest body of the Community. It is really very strange because it is not so much an organisation that goes on from day to day at the highest level but it is a landing-ground for parachutists. Ministers come in, make a decision and go out again—and that is the Council meeting. They have not been there before and they do not go there again for weeks or months. But the Council has a continuous existence, when in fact people who are top-level members of the Council are there only three or four days a month. It is hardly surprising that with this system of making decisions about the future of Europe these people do not get to grips with each other and think about the long-term problems.

In between these Ministers parachuting in and being catapulted out again, having come with a national remit in which they do not have a great deal of room to budge, there is all the work which is being done by people who are accountable to nobody. There is a whole staff. Each country maintains a permanent representative, an ambassador to the Community, with a team of people, a mini-Whitehall—the brightest of the bright from the major Departments—who are there all the time, waving our flag, to make sure that our national interests are not subverted by the others. But they have no political power. They cannot, when they are sitting round negotiating with each other, really change the cards in their hands, because they have to ring up home and say, "What do I do?"

With the two systems that operate there is real confusion; and, worse, there are congestion and endless delays. We regard the Council as something that exists; but in a normal way it does not. What it really consists of is a whole lot of very highly keyed-up officials who meet at Permanent Representative level, Ambassadorial level, twice a week, and deputy representative level twice a week, all day, or most of the day, and in hosts of other sub-groups. These are the people who are articulating our policy at the highest level in the Community, and they are answerable to nobody—or who are they answerable to? Perhaps the noble Baroness the Minister can say. Who can question whom, and where, about the activities of these people? Can she justify, for example, or explain to me, why it is thought necessary that 150 people should always be present at a meeting of the Council. Is this a good way to get dynamic decisions, to have this enormous number of people present all the time?

We must accept that this menacing farce (if I may use Mr. Foot's phrase) will continue for some time. But what alterations would Her Majesty's Government like to see in an ideal world? I was delighted to see that there was one institution of the Community which could actually tell the Council what to do: on June 11 the Court of Justice annulled a Council directive about their review of salary levels for the employees of the Council. I must say that I felt greatly reassured that the Court of Justice, about which I am afraid I know very little, did have enough authority to sit on the Council. I felt that this was a reassuring move.

The European Parliament's job is to fill the gaps the other institutions have left, and I have discovered that I have to make a big effort to forget Parliamentary traditions which I have read about or learned in your Lordships' House, because this is a very unusual sort of Parliament. There is no Government. Who is the Government? There is not one. So there is no sense of Opposition and Government supporters. We in the European Parliament have very few legislative powers, if any. We masticate away at the draft proposals that are sent to us, but because the constitutional position is very weak they are sent to us before the haggling between the Commission and the Council is finished. So when we come up with a view, after many labours in our committees about this or that, the view is almost always ignored, because we have no come-back. Our position, from the point of view of interfering, is very feeble.

What do we do with this strange body?—because I feel that, however weak it may be at the moment, and however anomalous the presence of people like myself, there is a need to stop the institutions of the Community being quite so remote from the ordinary peoples of the Community. Do the Government accept that there is a great disquiet and anxiety among all sections of opinion about the distance there seems to be between governors and governed. Do they not think that if this is repeated and exaggerated, and blown up on the European scale, it is a prescription for—though I hate to say this—at least something bordering on disaster. We see that there are these two bodies, who are to get more and more powers, because we are committed to economic and monetary union; we are committed to all sorts of things in the communiqué put out by the Heads of State last year.

If the Community, as a supra-national force is going to grow, is growing now, do the Government accept that the Parliament has to be made into something more real? For example, will the Government lend their weight to exploding the notion that the Community has a budget? The Community has no budget. The budget consists in theory of a large gamut of experience. A unilateral decision is made on agricultural prices once a year, in a way that is very removed from the Parliaments and the European Parliament, and that takes up 80 per cent. of the Community's funds. Even if my European Parliamentary colleagues and I are given more of a nibble at the so-called Community budget, and even if, under the Treaty of Luxembourg, we exercise, the year after next, our right to cut off the administrative budget of the Commission, to remove their secretaries and telephones and the like, we are very remote from the real power of the purse that the Community has; we have no way of attacking directly the hopeless confusion of money and policy that is the so-called Common Agricultural Policy. What support would the Government give—and this is very serious—to increasing the powers of the European Parliament over the purse strings of the Community? The Commission has come out recently with some elegant but trivial proposals for furbishing up what we have already. Would the Government stick up for the Parliament in expanding its powers in this field?

I do not claim to think that the Parliament would or could do everything for the Community. I do not see it as a whole selection of Euro-knights or Euro-white chargers, saving Europe for the Community, or anything as absurd as that. But surely these other institutions must be accountable to somebody. Surely their policies must be monitored. Surely their performances must be examined in a thorough and realistic way. Unless there is some body doing that job on behalf of the peoples of the Community, is the Community really assuming that human face of which the Paris communiqué makes so much play? The test of the Community's genuine desire to stop being a supra-national supermarket and become something which is at the service of its peoples is whether or not the European Parliament is pepped up and given a real job to do.

We in the European Parliament must improve ourselves. We could go on strike and refuse to be shunted around from one European country to another like an unwanted parcel. We should say, "This is where we stand". I do not know how we are going to do that, but I think it is a prerequisite for any serious activity on the part of the European Parliament. Would the United Kingdom Government lend any support to the idea?—because it is an illustration of the power of nationalism in the Community that it cannot agree on giving a stable and sensible home to the Parliament.

What nature should this new Parliament have? It must not be a suppliant or a dependant, or something that looks upon itself as grateful for every small bit of information and every favour in the way of minor legislation proposals. It should really see itself as a body which shows the human face that the Community is now meant to have. If it started to do that, it would in the long run be much easier for the other institutions to fulfil the policies to which, in the communiqué issued by the Heads of State, they are now committed. At the moment, the sleeping peoples of Europe lie, because all the implications of what is being done in their name have not yet burgeoned in their minds; but this will come, and they will need a bell-pull so that they can say, "My friends, shout about this one". If the other institutions are reluctant to hand this over I think it will be a very great pity.

My Lords, I have tried in this introduction to give a factual if provocative account of some of the working methods of these institutions. We have got to examine them. The British love institutions: they are always inventing them; they are always thinking them up; and if they are not doing that they are altering those that they have already. Why cannot we go on in this way but in the European manner? If we do not go on in this way in the European manner we shall be missing out on one of our major contributions to the evolution of a truly united Europe. Can the noble Baroness go through Clause 15 of the Communiqué, where various proposals are made for the reinforcement of the institutions of the Community, and tell us to-day what position Her Majesty's Government hope to take? My Lords, I beg to move for Papers.

3.51 p.m.

LORD CHALFONT

My Lords, I should like to begin, if I may, by apologising in advance if it should be necessary for me to leave the Chamber before the end of the debate. I do this with great reluctance; I know it irritates your Lordships' House. I hope it will not be necessary, but if it is I hope to have the indulgence of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, the noble Baroness, the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, and the rest of your Lordships' House. My Lords, I want to speak as briefly as possible, but before looking at the institutions which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has described in such a refreshing and provocative way, I think it is necessary to sketch in a little of the background, the framework, on which these institutions hang, and to see in the long term what kind of a Europe it is we want to see these institutions serving.

I believe that there is no halfway house in this matter. I, for my part, reject the Gaullist concept of the Europe of nation States. I do this not only because I believe that in general political terms the nation State is an obsolete concept. I believe its obsessive concerns with national sovereignty have been totally overtaken by modern developments in technology, in strategy, in communications and above all in the development of weapons of mass destruction. But whether there is universal agreement with this idea or not, I believe in any case that the nation State concept, the concept of a simple collection of sovereign nation States, the Europe des patries of General de Gaulle, simply will not work in Europe. My own belief is quite clear: I want to see a Europe politically and economically united and able to play a role in the world in which it is not dominated by or reliant upon the nuclear super Powers of the world.

I think, my Lords, it is no longer necessary to argue at any great length that the shape of the world is changing, that the familiar structure of the last quarter of a century with the two great super Powers dominating world affairs has now gone, and what is emerging, it seems to me, to take its place so far as the foregn policy of this country is concerned is, in a sense, two great international triangles—a triangle of confrontation between the United States, the Soviet Union and China; and a triangle of co-operation, again including the United States, but this time with Western Europe and Japan as the other two points of the triangle. This, of course, like all these attempts to reduce the world to geometric patterns, is vastly oversimplified. There are links between the triangles when, for example, Western Europe speaks to the Soviet Union of déetente or of force reduction. There is a dialogue between China and Japan, again between the two great triangles. There are attempts even to retain and return to the happy days of bilateralism when the affairs of the world were controlled and dominated by the two great nuclear super Powers—and I believe we were watching an attempt to perpetuate that state of affairs in the recent Summit meeting in Washington.

There is the Third World which has its problems also, but which does not come into that rather over-simplified schematic diagram. But even so, I believe that the theory of the two triangles is strong enough and valid enough to underline the need for Western Europe to be itself strong and politically united. We must evolve in Europe, I believe, common foreign policies—foreign policies towards the United States, China, the Soviet Union, towards Japan; foreign policies of a common kind about arms control, disarmament and all the other great international issues that face the world.

I believe that Europe needs a common monetary policy, and also a common defence policy. Although we may still regard, as I indeed do, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as the framework for the defence of the West, I am resolved myself, and I believe many others with me, that in that future relationship Europe should not be a client State of anybody, nor should it be a kind of ants' nest of squabbling nation States, but a strong single element in the Alliance.

None of this, my Lords, can be achieved in my view without a very high degree of political unification indeed. Whether you want to call it federalism, or whatever name you want to put on it, seems to me to be largely a matter of semantics. Certainly in my view it goes far beyond any concept of a Europe of nation States. So it is in that context that I should like to spend a few minutes looking at the institutions which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has described to us, asking ourselves how we can achieve some of our long-term strategic aims for Europe through these Community institutions. I submit that we should be doing this in two stages: first, in a short-term stage which may cover the next five to 10 years, that is to say, for example, between now and 1984—a very significant date in many contexts. Then I believe that we should have a long-term plan. While we do not make many of the detailed mechanical deployments now and we do not attempt to abandon national sovereignty overnight in the way suggested by some opponents of the European Community idea—while I do not think any of this is necessary—I believe that we must have a long-term strategy for the European Communities and their institutions.

Let us look first of all for a few minutes at the short-term requirements. The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has asked the Government whether they can give their views on how these Community institutions should be changed and reformed; and I should like, if I may, to help to concentrate the mind of the Government by advancing a few modest proposals of my own. The Council of Ministers I should like to take first—not following the order of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan. I believe that the Council of Ministers will never really operate effectively until it takes more and more of its decisions by a qualified majority. As your Lordships will know, at the moment it takes many of its decisions, especially any vote in which any national interest is at stake, on the principle of unanimity, that is to say each member of the Council of Ministers has a veto. Of course I recognise that if we move to universal acceptance of majority voting there will be times when the national interests will be damaged, or at least put at risk, and this we must bear in mind. But the present system inhibits any kind of action or any kind of progress at all, when every country, or its representative, "parachuting into the organisation", as the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, said very vividly, simply and solely vetoes anything that is not in the interests of his own national Government, quite irrespective of whether or not it is in the interests of Europe as a whole. Therefore, in the short term I should like to see the Council of Ministers adopting progressively the system of a qualified majority vote in all its important decisions.

The next institution that needs some careful and imaginative treatment is the Commission. The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, was very complimentary about the Commission. He said that he had found it a very impressive body, as I believe it is, but I suggest that it has not really yet found out what its role is. I think that the Commission has to maintain a careful balance between, on the one hand, being just a crowd of faceless bureaucrats producing tons of unread paper and occupying themselves with minute and pettifogging detail and, on the other hand, being a collection of arrogant technocrats who believe that they are the people who control the future of Europe. I do not believe that the Commission has yet found its way between those two extremes.

This country has appointed to the Commission as Commissioners, two politicians of very high standing. There are other Commissioners who are able and politically adroit and of the highest international standing, and the President, M. Ortoli, is one of them. It is surely important, however, that the whole of the Commission should be of a similar high calibre, because if the Commission is going to operate at all it has to have a real political role; but that political role must be under the strict control of the only elected organisation in Europe, which is the European Parliament.

Here I come to the third of the institutions. Like the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, I will not deal with the European Court of Justice this afternoon, because I believe that that is an institution that is to some extent outside the terms of our debate. The European Parliament is potentially the most important of all these institutions. In passing, I should like to say a few words about the position of my own Party. Personally, I am sorry that the Labour Party has taken the decision not, for the time being, to be represented on the European Parliament, and I hope that it will change its mind. Having said that, I shall say no more about that subject but address myself, in the strict terms of the debate, to what I think should now be done in the European Parliament to strengthen it in the short term.

As always when dealing with Parliamentary bodies of this kind, we have to consider both the composition of the Parliament and its powers. So far as the composition is concerned, although I have not had personal experience of this, I do not believe that the present system can work indefinitely. It seems to me that the necessity for Members of your Lordships' House and the other place to be constantly rushing between Strasbourg and Westminster, Luxembourg and Westminster, and Strasbourg and Brussels, is really too much of a strain to ask anyone to submit to for an indefinte period. There are ways by which, even without changing the system, we could make life for these unfortunate tribunes of ours a great deal easier than it is now. I should have thought that there might be something to be said—although this may be interfering, or referring too closely to constitutional procedures—for considering some system of permanent pairing, or voting by proxy. Certainly the Government should consider doing something to make their logistic life a little easier. I should have thought that it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that some kind of official air travel could be placed at their disposal, instead of requiring them always to travel under their own arrangements by scheduled flights.

However, I believe that none of this is going to solve the problem in the long term. We have to change the system whereby Members of your Lordships' House and the other place are also Members of the European Parliament, or at least the present system under which we do that. There is of course the kind of plan reflected in the proposals put forward by my right honourable friend Mr. Michael Stewart, who has suggested that there should be two lists in this country; one list of Westminster M.P.s, and another list based on a regional suffrage of Strasbourg M.P.s who would, by some device, also be Members of the Westminster Parliament but who would, in fact, spend most of their time, if not all of their time, in the Strasbourg Parliament. I believe that we have to examine some plan of that kind very carefully in the short term.

I believe, too, that the size of the European Parliament has to be increased. The present strength of 198 is not a large enough Parliament to represent the whole of the European constituency. When the Parliament itself made some proposals in 1960 for increasing its size, it proposed that it should be increased to 426. That was for a membership of six countries. By extrapolation, this would work out at something like 500 or 600 Members of Parliament for a Community of Nine. This seems to me to be something like the size really needed for the European Parliament.

However, all this is tinkering with the problem, because I would remind your Lordships that Article 138 of the Treaty of Rome, from which the whole of the procedures and legislation of the European Community flow, calls for direct universal suffrage in accordance with a uniform procedure throughout the Community. That is a quite clear specification in the Treaty of Rome to which we, the members of the Community, have all acceeded. I should say, in passing, that I do not believe this to be a realistic short-term aim. I do not believe that in the kind of time frame that I have intimated (the next five or ten years), that we are going to be able to move, in some dramatic way, from a system of national elections directly to a system of European elections, with a single voting day, a universal suffrage, and European constituencies. This is much too complicated, and too much of an historic step to be taken in the short term. I believe that the national methods of election will have to serve us for some time yet—perhaps for another three or four Parliaments. But in the long term there will be need for European Parties to organise themselves across national frontiers, and it is only when that has been done that we shall be able to look towards the ideal, and the idea, of universal suffrage, direct suffrage and uniform procedures throughout the Community. Mr. Mansholt, whose opinion on these matters always commands attention and respect, has suggested that we could move towards direct suffrage by 1977. I do not believe that that is possible. I think that the 1980s is a much more realistic target. But I believe that even in the short term we should be working towards the aim of direct election to the Parliament of Europe.

I should like to spend a moment on the powers of the Parliament, because I believe it important that these should be increased. At the moment, the Parliament is not powerful enough, and of course we always have the chicken and egg argument about whether you can increase the powers without changing the composition, or whether you can ever change the composition unless you increase the powers. However you resolve that argument, it seems to me that the powers must be considerably increased. For example, I think there should be what the Vedel Report has called "co-decision"; that is to say, full consultation between the Parliament and the Council of Ministers.

I believe that the Council of Ministers should be required to give a very full and convincing account of itself, if it wanted to do something that was against the wishes of, and ran counter to, the decisions of the European Parliament. I think, too, that the European Parliament should have a power of veto over the decisions of the Council of Ministers, so that it is able to delay a Council decision for some time in order to give the Council of Ministers time to think again. I believe, finally, that it should have very considerably increased budgetary powers, because that is where the real power lies. If you have your hand on the money-bags, your power increases in an astonishing way. So much for the short-term aims. I should like to see the Council of Ministers not crippled by the principle of unanimity. I should like to see a Commission with a proper political role, but subjected to the democratic process; in other words, subjected to the will of the European Parliament. And I should like to see that Parliament increased in size, with stronger powers and moving rapidly towards direct elections. In this way, we might be able to weld all three together into a very powerful instrument at the disposal of the Community.

Finally, my Lords, what about the long-term? Here I believe it is wise only to state certain desirable aims; that we should not be too rigid about how these aims are to be attained. We shall need, over the coming years in Europe, to react very flexibly to situations that will arise—we cannot foresee them now—inside and outside the Continent of Europe. The ultimate aim, as I have said, is a united Europe in which all the institutions have a strong and indestructible democratic base. We should aim—I have already said this—towards a Parliament directly elected with European constituencies and European political Parties. We should consider—and it is not too soon to begin thinking about this now—the possibility of a Second Chamber in the European Parliament, its members to be nominated by the Member Governments. Of course there are difficulties of all kinds here, but difficulties are there to be overcome, not to be shrunk from.

It might even in due course—although I know that certain experts on the subject in your Lordships' House have views about this—replace the Council of Ministers. In any case, the Commission must be responsible to that Parliament. It must be responsible to the first elected Chamber of that Parliament, and that Parliament must begin learning now—I offer this piece of unsolicited advice to those members of the European Parliament who are present—to exercise its dominance over these high-priced gentlemen in Brussels, over the Commissioners. It is arguable that, in the long run, all those Commissioners should in fact be nominated from the members of the European Parliament. I should like to see a situation arise in the long term when no Commissioner was not a member of the European Parliament, nominated from that Parliament. In this way, the democratic process would be immeasurably strengthened. But in the meantime, I believe that members of the European Parliament have to ensure, in spite of the fact that there are some very high-powered gentlement in Brussels these days, that it is the will of the Parliament that counts. But they will not get those powers—no Parliament ever has—without fighting for them, and fighting for them very hard indeed. I believe that in this way we can build up in Europe a strong and an integrated Community system, democratically controlled and politically effective.

Incidentally, I really believe that all these institutions should be in one place. It seems to me crazy that we should have one institution in Strasbourg, sometimes in Brussels, and another in Luxembourg—and I believe the latest suggestion is that we should have a political secretariat stationed in Paris. This is lunacy. They must all be in one place. What we have been debating this afternoon, quite rightly, seems to me to be the mechanisms of Europe and its Community. But I hope we shall not concentrate so hard on the plough that we lose sight of the stars. There is a suggestion that Europe has lost its vision and its idealism. I do not believe that it has. Certainly among younger people there are still high hopes of what Europe can achieve and I must say that, for my own part. I have certainly not lost any of my own vision of the Europe of the future. I believe that this country in Europe can affect profoundly the kind of world that we shall bequeath to the next generation. I know that everyone would like this, whether he is pro- or anti-European.

There are real fears in this country about what is called loss of sovereignty. I confess that, although I sympathise with these views, I find it sometimes difficult to understand them, because sovereignty is meaningless unless you can do something with it. There is not much point in this country having an independent sovereign voice if no body is listening to it. There are differing opinions about this matter, and everyone is entitled to his own, but I should like before I sit down—and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for giving me the opportunity for doing this—to say quite clearly in a few sentences what my own views are. I believe that if in the next century, in the next chapter of the history of this great country we can play a full part in creating a community which will assure a peaceful and prosperous Continent of Europe; which will help to feed the starving and comfort the suffering of the poor nations of the world; which will help to bring about a secure international structure with intelligent relationships between the Communist and the capitalist worlds—and, indeed, the Third World as well—and if that community can begin to attack the besetting problems of civilisation, the appalling waste of the arms race, environmental pollution, the uncontrolled population explosion and all of the other problems which we shall have to solve if we are to survive, and if we can play a constructive and compassionate role in all of that—and I believe that we can in Europe—then the sacrifice of a measure of national sovereignty seems to me to be a very small price to pay.

4.17 p.m.

LORD GLADWYN

My Lords, we on these Benches very much welcome the initiative of the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, because it gives those Members of this House who are Members of the European Parliament some opportunity to tell your Lordships what they have been up to, and, generally, to give you the benefit of their advice and their feeling about the Community as a whole. If I may begin with a few details about what I have been up to myself, perhaps I may say something about the Political Committee, of which I am the Vice-President and the Rapporteur on Defence, which I hope will be of interest. This body of 42 Parliamentarians contains a selection of Christian Democrat and Socialist politicians of considerable reputation and distinction, as well as a notable Italian Communist. Its British members, apart from myself, are Peter Kirk and Tufton Beamish. It can hardly be denied that this is both an influential and a thoroughly representative Parliamentary body. Its reports should be, and indeed have been, of considerable political significance. The last one by a Dutch Socialist named Mommersteeg, who is now in the Dutch Government along with our late colleague Max Van der Stoel—who has become Foreign Secretary of Holland—is well worth reading. The resolution based on it, in the composition of which I had a certain say, made specific proposals, which I hope the Ministers will look at, for the elementary machinery that clearly must now be set up by the Council of Ministers if they are serious about harmonising their Foreign and, eventually Defence policies, which, as the report states, cannot in practice be dissociated, within the general framework both of the Communities and of the North Atlantic Alliance. It was the first time that the European Parliament had faced this rather vital question, and the significant fact was that the Mommersteeg resolution was approved by all the political groups—Socialist, Christian Democrat, Liberal, Conservative and, yes, even the Gaullists (with one reservation). Even the Italian Communists—who, cannot yet, as we know, form a group, since there are only nine of them—were not violently hostile. As we all know, they are much less Moscow-dominated than their French opposite numbers. I therefore ask your Lordships to reflect on the real importance of such developments, and even to glance at the Mommersteeg Report, a copy of which I imagine is available in the Library.

The next move in this sphere will be to prepare a report, which I hope will be voted on some time in October or November, on the sort of collective defence which might eventually be considered and the general situation arising out of the possibility of American withdrawal, or partial withdrawal, from Europe, the likelihood of advance in Helsinki and Vienna, and so on; and also putting forward certain proposals about how you get over the initial difficulty, if you are trying to harmonise foreign defence policies among the Nine, namely that one of them is neutral and another, Denmark, is not inclined to participate in any European defence. All those problems will, I hope, figure in our next report. Naturally, they should preoccupy principally, and do preoccupy principally, Ministers and Governments, but the Governments should be at least aware of popular and Parliamentary opinion as manifested in the European Parliament. After all, the politicians at Strasbourg may be in the Governments before long! Therefore, though the Governments may agree on political solutions, they have also got to get them approved, in the long run, by their national Parliaments; and if the various political Parties have managed among themselves to get some kind of agreement at Strasbourg, which we may hope to do even by next October or November, a common European policy among the Governments will probably be much more easily achieved. I certainly do not think that Ministers ought to play down the efforts which are being made in Strasbourg to concentrate political thought on these important subjects.

But, of course, it is not only in this sphere of defence and foreign policy that new thinking will have to emerge. In accordance with the summit meeting last October, the Political Committee has now been instructed to prepare repot is on, among other things, the following subjects: the development of co-operation between the various institutions of the European Economic Community; the strengthening of the power of the Parliament itself; the present possibility of organising direct elections to the Parliament; the relations between the Parliament and the Parliaments of Community members; and, finally, in the light of all this, the whole present prospects of achieving European union. Before the end of the year, therefore, we may hope to be in possession of a number of weighty proposals embodying the considered and agreed views on the prospective future of the Communities of the great political groups which are gradually in practice forming themselves in Strasbourg; namely, those of the Left, the Right and the Centre, although, of course, as your Lordships know, nobody on the Continent ever wants to be labelled as belonging to the Right, which creates certain difficulties in seating arrangements!

What has been happening in other fields? I hope that noble Lords who are members of the Parliament of Europe will give some indication to the House of what they have been up to, as I have myself been doing just now. I should in any case like, if I may, to pay a tribute to the zeal and efficiency of my Conservative colleagues and to Lord O'Hagan himself, who seems to have left the Chamber (I trust not because he thought I was going to congratulate him!), who have taken the initiative in pressing Commissioners and Ministers with questions and, under the dynamic leadership of Peter Kirk, in successfully trying to revise other rules of procedure. For his part, my Liberal colleague, Russell Johnston, has been most active on the regional front, and I have no doubt that he will persuade his fellow Scot, George Thomson, to take into consideration the very special needs of Scotland.

To sum up, my Lords, Strasbourg is a hive of creative activity; there is no doubt about that. Of course the European Parliament should not be any longer in Strasbourg; I entirely associate myself with what the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said about that. It is ridiculous, it is indefensible, that it should be located in Strasbourg. If and when the Parliament gets more powers—I shall come to that in a moment—and even more when it is directly elected even on a national basis—it will have to be so elected reasonably soon, otherwise I am afraid no Members of the House of Commons will present themselves for membership—it will obviously have to be removed to Brussels; it simply could not stay in Strasbourg any longer then.

I should like therefore to ask two questions of the Government. Are they in favour, in principle, of moving the Parliament from Strasbourg to Brussels, and are they in favour of its having more powers in accordance with what has been proposed lately by the Commission, or indeed in the Vedel Report? And, if they do not agree with these proposals, what sort of powers would they recommend? I do not see why the Government should not give some indication on this rather important subject. After listening to what my colleagues and I have said this afternoon some noble Lords may say—as the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, I heard a little while ago saying—that all this is pretty secondary stuff; what is its political importance? The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, was I thought rather unduly pessimistic about the present state of affairs in the European Parliament and about its influence generally, and it may well be said, as the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd asked, "What is it all about? This is all very secondary; has it any powers at all?"

LORD SHEPHERD

My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but he keeps referring to me. I have not yet spoken. I think he must be mistaking me for my noble friend Lord Chalfont.

LORD GLADWYN

My Lords, I heard the noble Lord some little while ago, in an intervention, say, as I understood him (I am not blaming him in any way; this point of view is said to be held by a number of noble Lords and indeed by many people in this country). that he did not think that this Parliament had any particular powers and he inquired what at the moment was the point of it—it was a secondary institution. Of course in a sense that is true. Is there any evidence at the moment that its advice is listened to? I think the answer to such doubts—and they are real doubts—is twofold. In the first place, although it is quite true that Parliament has not any real powers at the moment, by January 1, 1975, it will, as we all know, and as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, said, at least have to power to dispose of about 4 per cent. of the budget of the E.E.C., which will then amount to something like £2,000 million. And this 4 per cent. will represent substantially the proportion of the budget which is not specifically earmarked for such purposes as the agricultural or regional or social funds, which at the moment represent about 80 per cent. of the budget. In other words, it will give Parliament the power to approve or not to approve all the money spent collectively on the various European institutions, including the Council and the Commission and the Parliament itself.

Noble Lords may say that this is like the nuclear bomb: it is a deterrent which can never in fact be used. That may be so, but the nuclear bomb is still of considerable political importance; and the mere fact that the Parliament has these powers which cannot in practice be used is nevertheless a very important lever in getting the Governments, the Ministers, to give them more powers.

The latest Report of the Commission—the Cheysson Report—comes very near to suggesting that, perhaps not in two years time but soon after that, the Parliament will have the last word, as it is called, on the approval or otherwise of the whole of the Community budget, including the social fund, the agricultural fund and everything else. Now of course it is consulted, and gives its advice, and cannot be ignored. We hope that it will be consulted more and more. Ministers consult it more and more and I think there is no doubt that before many years are out the Parliament will have this power of accepting or rejecting—a negative power if you like—the whole budget of the Community. It might be anything. It might be £5,000 million. That is something which is inherent in the whole idea of the Parliament. That is the way it is going to go. I think it is recognised not only that it is the way it will go, but that it a good thing that it should go in that direction, if we are going to have the thing at all. In addition to this, there are strong reasons, or considerable reasons, to suppose that over the years the Governments will probably give the Parliament more direct powers—nothing to do with the budget of codecision mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, in such matters as the appointment of the Commissioners, the approval of treaties, the approval or otherwise of the great policies, the social policies or anything else. They have to decide by a large majority, say four-fifths, whether or not to approve it. It will be unlikely; but if there were Parliamentary review it would have this power and would have an effect on the policy of Governments.

In the second place, there is no doubt that even without specific powers, even as it is formed at present, the Parliament has influence both in the Council and on the Commission. I have spoken to members of the Commission, and they say that it does have that influence and they are grateful that we are trying to put pressure on Ministers. The Commission and Parliament are natural allies, and vice-versa. We have now the monthly "grilling"—for such it is—of both the Commission and the Ministers by the Parliamentarians; and from this it often emerges that Parliament has an ally in the Commission. On occasion, I think unconsciously, Ministers themselves welcome Parliamentary pressure which they can sometimes employ as an excuse for accepting solutions that would otherwise be held up on national considerations. Besides that, there is now the new invention, the thrice yearly colloque between the President, or Acting President, of the Council, the Minisers and the Political Committee. I can assure your Lordships that punches are not pulled in the colloque, which is held in private. It was evident during the last one what the Committee as a whole thought of the latest proposals of the Ministers for advancing along the "Davignon" procedure for harmonising foreign and defence policy.

At the moment, the truth is, I am afraid, that any such advance is held up to a considerable extent by speculation about the health of the President of France and the consequent possibility, during the coming year perhaps, of another Presidential Election. We all hope that M. Pompidou will regain his health; but there is no doubt of this fear of the possibility of elections. It is obviously difficult in such a case for any French Government based on the present majority to risk incurring the wrath of some of its supporters by embarking on courses not demonstrably in strict accordance with the well-known nationalist policies of General de Gaulle—to say nothing about the farmers. It is possible that there might be rather a similar tendency here in the months preceding a General Election. This is the sort of difficulties that prevent democracies from making any rapid progress towards unification. Nevertheless, progress is being made. "E pur si muove"—"Still, it moves," as Galileo said at his trial. The Ministers keep to the timetable laid down last October, and there is reason to suppose that some kind of union will emerge by 1980.

More particularly, the Parliament is now beginning to work. Any moderately objective person who visits it will reach the conclusion that something is happening. There is a kind of animation, a kind of suppressed excitement which is totally absent from such other Parliamentary assemblies as Western European Union, the Atlantic Council and the Council of Europe. It is the idea that it may actually, as was recently suggested by Mr. Roy Jenkins, be beginning to work that results in the almost frenzied denouncements of it that I myself have heard on the radio by such anti-European zealots as Mr. Peter Shore and others who think like him.

I regret to note also that the Leader of the Opposition in another place is beginning to show signs, I think, of allying himself with the basic anti-European —anyway, anti-E.E.C.—thesis so vociferously advanced by Mr. Enoch Powell. I heard him recently on the radio denouncing in sepulchral tones the extent to which, under the malign influence of Mr. Heath, the British Government were now surrendering to Brussels most, or many, of the powers of the sovereign British Parliament—in accordance with a programme that he (Mr. Wilson) himself had been the first to advocate when as Prime Minister he moved heaven and earth towards getting us into the E.E.C. What foundation there is in these pre-election declarations we shall no doubt be able to determine when, I hope shortly and before the present Session ends, we debate the Report of the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King.

As for the Union itself—and this is only a personal confession of faith and is not binding on my colleagues or anyone else—I do not believe that it will much resemble what the theoretical federalists believe, and the super patriots fear, that it will be. It may never emerge at all unless the Ministers manage within the next year or so to reform their methods of reaching decisions—notably the acceptance of a qualified majority vote in certain spheres. It could be a vast impersonal machine impervious of the popular will, but if it works in close relationship with an elected Parliament, that it will not be. It may be also—and I am trying to be pessimistic as well as optimistic—a rather vague association not strong enough to assert itself for good or evil in this strange world of the late 20th century. I should judge that this particular result would be unlikely. Either it will fade out altogether, in which case I should think our early democracies would probably not exist for very much longer, but under the pressure of world events over which we have no control it might be replaced by some form of directed economy whether of the Right or of the Left; or it might beome increasingly meaningful as time goes on. Either it will fade out, in which case it will have the consequences that I have suggested; or it will beome increasingly meaningful When I say "it", I mean an entirely new form of political animal not seen before devised by Europeans for European needs, in which by general consent certain decisions are taken by democratic nations in common by democratic means in which these nations will not be suppressed but will continue to exist and to flourish. I do not think that this is an idle dream. I believe that this is the only political objective worth fighting for at the present time. I believe it is the only framework in which we are likely to solve the problems which are beginning to plague our industrialised societies, and I believe it is also a logical basis for a long-term settlement with the Soviet Union and for the establishment of a common policy of advantage to the so-called developing world.

My Lords, there is one great sadness at Strasbourg, touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont. It is shared by all, of whatever political persuasion. It is the continued absence of members of the British Labour Party. I am not criticising my Conservative friends on the delegation. I think that they usually display great diligence, independence and sometimes courage, but they are Conservatives and Mr. Russell Johnston and I are sometimes lonely in our representation of the opposition point of view. We miss a strong British Left of centre voice even if it should be sometimes critical of various aspects of policy that we as Liberals might consider acceptable or even desirable. Surely, even though it may be wedded to renegotiating the Treaty in the next Session—and why not?—the Labour Party will soon find it possible to start this process in the very forum most likely to succeed; namely, the Parliament. At this moment the process is going on. It is not a simple question of renegotiating the butter quota or the sugar agreement or our contribution to the Central Agricultural Fund, with which though our present attempts to change them may not have a complete success, we can at least live; more especially if we get (as I think we shall) satisfaction on matters of great importance to this country such as the right conditions for pegging the pound and the constitution of a regional fund that is adequate and significant. For what is really needed, and what I think will be achieved—and it is a thousand pities that the Labour Party is not there to help—is a renegotiation of the famous "Luxembourg Compromise" of 1966 and, above all, of the democratic status of the present powers of the Parliament of Europe. My Lords, you have only to glance at the state of affairs in America to understand how essential such developments are.

I repeat in conclusion that I much welcome this opportunity of giving your Lordships my first impressions of the functioning of the European Parliament, and I hope that I have not bored you in so doing. You will conclude, I expect, that I am optimistic about its future and about that of the Community as a whole. Perhaps I am, though I hope not unduly. We have certainly not as yet got beyond the point of no return. There are still many formidable obstacles in the way of European unity in addition to Mr. Enoch Powell. Possibly they will be removed only by a sense of urgency—of fear, if you will—induced perhaps by economic circumstances or perhaps by an acute awareness of our strategic weakness resulting from the failure of the American will; or by some external threat to our Parliamentary institutions—who can tell? All I know is that we must have some objective other than the pursuit of purely national objectives if we are to survive in this, in some ways, appalling modern world; and what is more, if we are to make it a little better than it is at present.

My Lords, I repeat that I have four questions to put to the Government. Seeing that the present system must lead to a breakdown of the institutions, owing to the fact that Members of Parliament (other than people like myself, who have not much external or other obligations) are almost breaking down under the strain, would they not in principle be in favour of some system, either that produced by Mr. Michael Stewart or some other plan, whereby our Members were elected or nominated by new means, so as to enable them to function properly?

My second question is: are they in favour in principle of the Ministers abiding by the Treaty of Rome and adopting the principle of qualified majority voting, perhaps to start with only in certain spheres in which there cannot be said to be any vital interests, and gradually going up, say, in ten years' time, to foreign affairs and defence—who knows? After all, if they are, they have only to say so. Other people may not agree, but there is no reason why we should not be in favour of it in principle. My third question is: are they in favour, in principle, of moving the Parliament to Brussels in accordance with the unanimous view of all the British representatives; and fourthly, are they in favour of giving more powers to the Parliament, and, if so, what powers, in accordance with the proposals made by M. Cheysson, Professor Vedel, or anybody else? My Lords, that is all I have to say, and I thank your Lordships for listening to me.

4.44 p.m.

LORD REAY

My Lords, perhaps I should begin by apologising for the absence of my noble friend Lord Bessborough. He is, as some of your Lordships will be aware, Deputy Leader of the European Conservative Group, and he has asked me to express his great regret at not being able to be present this afternoon owing to commitments abroad as a Member of the European Parliament of which he is also a Vice-President. I think that the debate we are having this afternoon could be most useful, and that the very notable contributions we have already had from the noble Lords, Lord O'Hagan, Lord Gladwyn and Lord Chalfont, have probably already made it so.

It may seem to some a bit early to have a debate on this subject. After all, we have had only some six months since the Community was given a renewed life by its enlargement in January; and on all fronts but particularly in so far as the development of Parliament is concerned, much is in the pipeline. Nevertheless, the question of Europe's institutions has to be discussed, even though the targets are many years away. Perhaps I may remind noble Lords of what is said in the final paragraph of the Paris Summit Communiqué: The Heads of State or Government, having set themselves the major objective of transforming, before the end of the present decade and with the fullest respect for the Treaties already signed, the whole complex of the relations of member States into a European Union, request the institutions of the Community to draw up a report on this subject before the end of 1975 for submission to a summit conference. A report that is to be produced before the end of 1975 will probably be begun in 1974—that is, next year—so no opportunity should be missed, even now, for Members of national Parliaments to express their views as to how the institutions of a united Europe should be developed.

I can cover only a limited amount of ground, and perhaps the best thing would be if I gave some of my impressions, principally of Parliament, but to start with of the Commission. Given the staff problems with which the Commission was faced on enlargement, I think it is remarkable that it has been as creative as it has been. In April and May it produced, one after another, major documents on energy policy, technological and industrial policy, on GATT, on regional policy, on environmental policy, on social policy, on the future relations between the Community and the associated African States and the so-called associable States, on the second stage of the Economic and Monetary Union, on relations between the Parliament and Commission and finally, at the beginning of this month, on what the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, referred to as the Cheysson Statement on the strengthening of the budgetary powers of the European Parliament. In all these areas of policy, in accordance with deadlines set down by the Paris Summit Communiqué, the Commission has declared its own lines of thinking and has indicated to the Council the manner in which further progress should be achieved.

My Lords, apart from being impressed by the manner and the speed with which the Commission has managed in so many areas to declare its policy in outline, I should like to add that I am also impressed, as I think the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, was impressed, by the degree to which the Commission has been willing, even eager, to co-operate in establishing a relationship with the Parliament. At the Plenary Sessions, it is with the Commission, rather than with the Council, that the Parliament has been able to establish a relationship which, in its basic character, is recognisably that between a Parliament and a Government Front Bench. It is the Commissioners who make policy statements and who are now, for the first time and in accordance with our own Parliamentary practice, subjected to questioning on making them. It is with the Commissioners, each one an individual with an area of responsibility like a Cabinet Minister, that the Parliament conducts the main part of its dialogue in Question Time and in the discussions on reports and resolutions. In Committees also in my experience, the Commissioners seem anxious to co-operate. At the last meeting of the economic and Monetary Committee in Brussels—and these meetings are often spread over two half-days—no fewer than four Commissioners attended in turn to take part in discussions on those items on the agenda which fell within their areas of responsibility.

While I am on the subject of the Commission I should like to refer to the charges of "faceless bureaucrats", aimed off in the general direction of Europe but which I assume to be merited in the eyes of those who make them by nobody so much as by the Commission. Although this charge is generally vaguely linked with ideas of loss of national sovereignty, and the fact that Members of the European Parliament are not directly elected, and because we have not yet established the relationship we want between the European Parliament and our national Parliament—the question of accountability and so on—yet in so far as this is meant to be an appropriate description of the Commission, it seems to me to be very much off target. In the first place, the majority of the Commissioners are politicians with Ministerial experience in their own national Parliaments. They are eager to meet the public and they are competent at doing so.

In the second place, I am quite convinced that Brussels is nothing like so secretive and anonymous, so enclosed from outside eyes, as Whitehall is. Indeed, my Lords, its openness and its tendency to leak everything is almost notorious. When things of this sort are said about Brussels I sometimes wonder whether we are not projecting on to Brussels an image of what in fact is our own tradition of keeping civil servants as much as possible away from the public—a tradition that once we were so proud of, but which is now severely criticised and which is almost certainly archaic. In fact, it would not surprise me if it was from Brussels and from other countries on the Continent that in the end we learn how to relieve what is essentially a problem for us here at home.

The most recent concrete proposals for strengthening the powers of the Parliament came from the Commission. They came in three documents, the last of which, published on the 6th of this month (COM (73) 1000/2, for noble Lords who wish to pursue them), dealing with budgetary powers, is the most important. Until the Special Study Group and the Parliament itself reports, which I understand may not be until towards the end of the year, the Commission document is likely to be the focus of discussion on this question. In the slow way that these documents filter through, I have not had mine for long, nor, so far as I can discover, have other people whose appraisal would be valuable. In the meantime, I must confess that I do not fully understand what it is proposing. Perhaps there is a chance that my noble friend Lady Tweedsmuir in winding up may be able to contribute an interpretation. The doubt, as I see it, lies over what areas of future expenditure and revenue-raising the Assembly, the Parliament, is to be given a greater role. From my reading of it, it seems not impossible that under these proposals Parliament might be able to control the size of funds, which have not yet been established, such as the Regional Fund or the Social Fund. It looks as if the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, also takes this view: indeed, he seemed to be more certain about it than I am. But though there may be grounds for doubt over the areas to be covered, there is no doubt, as noble Lords will discover for themselves if they read the document, over the type of institution even the Commission want the Parliament to be. Again and again you will read, instead of saying "after consultation with the Assembly", they say, "with the agreement of the Assembly". Even in the eyes of the Commission the Parlaiment is to be transformed from a consultative assembly into an assembly with powers of control.

To look further ahead, I should like to say something about direct relations. There are formidable problems to be overcome before Members of the European Parliament can be directly elected. A Parliament that was powerful, or that was expected to become powerful, would surely need to be based on a common system of election for all its members: indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, showed us, subsection 3 of Article 138 of the Treaty of Rome makes this provision for the future. Yet the electoral systems within the Community of the Nine encompass a great variety. There are single-member constituencies and constituencies with several members. There is proportional representation without constituencies, in which the entire electorate is a single constituency, and there are such systems in which large constituencies return 10 or 30 members. There is a mixture of single member constituencies and proportional representation. There is a system which involves a second round of voting. There is a system based on the transferable vote. There is voluntary voting and compulsory voting, and so on. For the most part, proportional representation in one form or another predominates, not without its disadvantages. Some nations are less happy with their systems than others, but each has its different tradition and its different estimate of the value of what it has and of what others have.

There is another problem. It might be thought desirable, if not essential, that each Member of such a Parliament, or of one Chamber within such a Parliament, should represent a roughly equal number of electors. That is one of the historic principles of democratic representation, over which bitter battles have been fought in this country in the past. But to-day, if you based the ratio of electors to members on what prevails in Luxembourg, you would have a Chamber of approximately 2,250 members. If you treated Luxembourg as a special case and based it on the prevailing ratio in Ireland, you would have a Chamber of 750 members approximately. Ireland is three times as well represented as Holland and five times as well represented as Germany, which, with the largest population, is the least well represented of all.

But, my Lords, there is a worse problem. A Parliament worth its name should surely be responsible for its stability; that is to say, whatever the system for dissolving it, its majorities should not run the risk of being upset because parts of that Parliament were being re-elected at unpredictable intervals for reasons which did not derive from or relate to the constitution of that Parliament or to events within that Parliament. Therefore, whether elections to that Parliament were at fixed intervals or otherwise, they should not depend on national Governments dissolving their national Parliaments. But to arrange things otherwise would be to ask the electors to come out as a nation and vote in elections to the European Parliament in addition to the occasions—perhaps even shortly before or shortly after such occasions—when they had been asked to do so for national elections: unless of course national political systems were adapted to suit the European one, which is even less foreseeable. Consequently, I do not believe that an electoral system for the European Parliament, suitable to have a permanent character, can be introduced until such time as the electorate were at least as interested in the activities and composition of the European Parliament as they were in that of their own national Parliaments.

Those, my Lords, as I see them, are the principal problems that lie in the way of instituting direct elections. Whether an interim arrangement is possible, I do not know; perhaps it is. I should be most interested to hear the contribution of other noble Lords on this question—and, indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, has already provided some most interesting ideas. Certainly there are great inconveniences in the present system. The present double responsibility to the European Parliament and to national Parliaments is inefficient, and, particularly to my friends in another place is burdensome, even exhausting, and possibly politically dangerous. Clashes of obligation on this account are a commonplace for us all. They explain to-day the absence of my noble friends from this debate and the absence of myself and my noble friend Lord Mansfield from the Continent. It is quite usual for entire national delegations to fail to turn up at, or suddenly disappear from, meetings at which others who have arrived consider their presence essential. Individuals perform remarkable teats. One of my colleagues on one occasion left Strabourg by the same plane on two successive days, having visited Westminster in the meantime. For anyone who knows the air services between here and Strasbourg, that in itself deserves a trophy.

But I will restrain myself from being vivid on that subject in order instead to give more detail on a topic which has proved to be more controversial. On occasion, in discussion in this country, the allusions to the luxurious compensations of being a European Member of Parliament have got out of hand, and I should like to say something about our expenses. Our basic daily allowance is about £25, which in my experience (I must repeat that this is my experience; others may have different experiences) usually, but not always, exceeds the amount required for personal expenses during the time spent abroad. It can be appreciated that it does not always cover expenses when I give an illustration that the hotel into which we were booked for a meeting in Copenhagen the week before last cost £15 per night for a single room. Also, of course, there is sometimes the need to return hospitality. In addition, the method of calculating the amount owed for travelling expenses leaves a surplus. However, if account is taken of the fact that Members pay for their wives to accompany them, and that it would be demanding too much of a Member, who may be spending up to 150 days away a year on up to something like 50 different journeys, to require him to leave his wife behind on all occasions; if allowance is made for the secretarial assistance to control the inflow of paper; if account is taken, for Members of this House, of the allowances they forgo in not being able to attend this House—then I suspect that at the end of the year Peers, at least, will be lucky if they are not, on balance, in deficit. So I must warn noble Lords opposite who may find themselves in the position of being asked to join us in Strasbourg—as I hope they will, and the sooner the better—that they must expect a job which, for all its absorbing political interest, is unpaid, will occupy them for an average of at least three days a week, and those days so irregular in their incidence that the maintenance of other interests or public responsibilities is difficult and, in many cases, impossible. That is what they must expect for so long as the present unsatisfactory conditions obtain.

To conclude, I should like to come back to the idea of the future. When the next major problem on the way toward the political union of Europe will be solved, which problem that will be—whether it will be the problem of direct elections, new procedures in the Council, or in the monetary field or in the reorganisation of defence—is impossible to predict. It is also impossible to predict what the consequences of the solution of one problem will be on the appearance of other problems. Like the line of an advancing army, you do not know at which point resistance will be stubborn, at which point resistance will be broken first. But that the line is advancing, I have no doubt; and I hope this debate will have made its own contribution to the character of the situation we find ourselves in at the end of the day.

5.2 p.m.

LORD GORE-BOOTH

My Lords, this debate, more than in any other in which I have ventured to break silence in your Lordships' House, I find to be one in which someone in my own particular position can speak only in terms of what has already been said; and if, like the earth before its official creation, my remarks (which will not be long) might seem to be without form, I hope they will not also be void. I should like, if I may, to treat the subject rather in the way chosen by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, in what, if I may say so, was a very notable speech, and look at the situation a little from the point of view of the development of the Community itself and of the political institutions as a whole. Then perhaps I may go on to one or two practical points which have already been very largely dealt with by other noble Lords.

The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, to whom we owe so much for introducing this debate, expressed in general a certain kind of astonishment at what he found in Brussels; and this is not altogether surprising. On the other hand, I think the conclusion we should all keep reminding ourselves of in this context is that the institutions of the Community, in their nature and origin, are not imitations of British institutions gone a little wrong. They owe their origins to all sorts of other things: notably Roman law, the Latin approach to government, and the Continental view of the functions and status of Parliament; and what we shall undoubtedly need to continue to do is to seek to adapt those institutions so far as we can in terms that we, with our Parliamentary experience, know to work as a response to popular will. But we shall not be able to reform them into anything like the image or likeness of our own institutions. This is what makes the problem a very difficult one.

Perhaps I may explain what I am trying to say by an allusion to the origin of the Commission. One of the most influential people in the early years, as many of your Lordships will know, was Dr. Hallstat of Germany. He happened to occupy the position of Stats-Secreter in the German Foreign Office, and at that time the post was both official and political. In other words, he was the equivalent to a Secretary-General or a Permanent Under-Secretary, but he also had to appear in Parliament and present foreign policy. So from the very origin of the Community you get a body which in a sense is not official, technocratic or political, and yet all three at once. In some interesting way the Commission has evolved precisely because big decisions had to be worked out by someone, and the very high calibre of people in the Commission, together with the very great importance of the problems to be worked on, has kept that body at that level. Consequently, to talk about it as a bureaucracy really misses half, though not the whole, point of what one is talking about.

If I may go on further to talk of the Commission for a moment, we in Britain have appointed to it a really outstanding body of people in our public life—and we were absolutely right to do this. But if you look at the history of all international or federal institutions, it seems there may come a time when perhaps this body may become not quite of such a high standard. This again will depend on the evolution of the Council of Ministers. My only comment on what should be done about this—and here I pick up perhaps the only point made by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, with which I did not wholly agree—is to voice the thought that there may be some virtue in bringing in here one of the virtues of the American separation of Parliaments. It may prove in the future—and I put it no stronger than that—useful to have at or near the top a body consisting of people who are not necessarily chosen from people who have to be members of the legislature. In the United States it has meant, with all its disadvantages, that you can bring into government, and particularly into difficult government, people who have enormous qualifications but do not have either the talent or the ability to get themselves popularly elected. This would mean that one would then need to have confidence in the future of the Council of Ministers. If I may say so, I thought that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, did them slightly less than justice. After all, in all international work the big decisions are very often taken by a group of people with the real power who have to get together for far too short a time. They come and are briefed, and they must decide. They represent the real power.

But here I think there is a real question mark in the future of the Community as to whether it is the Council of Ministers who will retain the power by reforming their methods of procedure, by abolishing the right of the veto, and so on, or whether Europe in fact will develop so fast that in some way power must go to the Commission. In that case, the proposition put by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, would be right, in the sense that the Commission would then have to be elected. Those are some of the complexities. The only point I would make on this is that I think we must all make blue prints but always with the reservation that the matter will evolve in terms of opportunity, coincidence of personality, and so on.

Turning now to the European Parliament, here again if one goes back to the history of political institutions, the Parliament is bound either to fail completely or to gain power that it ought to have. I say "fail completely" only in order to dismiss it; but it is really the only alternative in the history of political institutions. Either a popular Government runs into difficulty and turns itself into a dictatorship, or a Parliament has acquired, at least nominally, the power that people demand it should have. I am absolutely certain that this will happen. I am in entire agreement with all noble Lords who have said that the sooner the Parliament joins up with the rest of the institutions the better. Perhaps noble Lords have been less than kind to people at Strasbourg—they will lose a great deal by this because of course paâteé de foie gras manufacture is no substitute for the European Parliament. On the other hand, I am sure that some way will be found of compensating them. If there should be this concentration, then surely Brussels has proved itself to be the right place, and the sooner it happens, the better.

In that connection, in my brief remarks I should like to put two questions which I hope the Minister will be able to answer. They are similar to questions posed by other noble Lords. The first is whether, in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the larger official framework, work is going on on a blueprint of how we should like to see these institutions develop. I am not suggesting it should be produced if this is not opportune. Experience shows that it is wise to have your own blueprint as to how you would like to see things go, at least as a point of reference when considering at any particular moment what is practical.

The other point I should like to raise—and this joins up with part of what the noble Lord, Lord Reay, was saying—is this: is there also being made what I can only call a logistic study and a general administrative study? One matter which emerged extremely clearly was the appalling exhaustion caused to those dedicated people who serve in both our Parliament and the European Parliament and have also to look in elsewhere in order to keep themselves briefed. Is some study being made of how, pending the move of the European Parliament and various other things, this matter can be properly handled?

Regarding the long-term, I also was much attracted by the idea of my former Secretary of State, Michael Stewart. I wonder whether we could evolve towards a system in which in the end Members of the European Parliament could be elected. But that would carry with it some special right of access to your Lordships' House and to the other place so that people thus elected did not feel that they had a whole-time obligation to both Parliaments, which is really too much, but that somehow the unity of ourselves and Europe could be expressed by their having some special position in our own Houses of Parliament.

What is this all in aid of? That is a question I find myself asking into the air. To some extent an answer was given, again, by the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, with his triangles. I would add another shape to his own contribution. I do not think it is a pentagon but it might have four sides. If one looks at the development of the world at this time one sees developing from Asia a shape of countries somewhat similar to the old 18th century or 19th century balance of powers, and one gets all sorts of question marks overhanging the relationship between, on the one hand, the Soviet Union and the United States, and, on the other hand, China, with an inclination, it seems, to look towards Europe. All sorts of combinations of that kind are developing. While it will take us some time to arrive at what one could call a European foreign policy, there is certainly a great need for European coherence in this moving and complicated situation.

If I may turn to the political side for a moment, I should like strongly to express the hope that those who believe that European coherence should not be anti-American, will prevail. I am sure that to believe otherwise would do us no good at all in the other side of the picture which was discussed earlier; namely, in the balance between the United States and the Soviet Union and its effect upon the defence and security of Western Europe. The decisive reason for debating this subject, for scratching our heads about it, and for the value in the initiative that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, has had, is that these institutions are our institutions. The people who get the most space and time at the moment are the people who shout very loud and who seem to want to see these institutions become confused, or our obligations towards them become blurred or even rejected. That is no longer possible, even if it is what we wanted. These are our institutions, and we must do our best, as part of them, to turn them into an efficient working democracy. If we do this with a certain understanding of why the Continental Europeans, having started dispersed, run things the way they do, I am sure we shall arrive at a coherent and constructive solution—if not a perfect one—of these problems.

5.15 p.m.

BARONESS GAITSKELL

My Lords, we have to thank the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for calling our attention to the institutions of the enlarged European Community, and for giving us the benefit of both his knowledge and his practical experience in an admirable speech—a speech noteworthy for its clarity and simplicity, even though it was tinged with a certain amount of pessimism. I have found all the speeches this afternoon interesting and instructive. Now that we are a member of the enlarged Community I cannot say that the anxiety I felt when I voted with this House for entry has been entirely dispelled. Anxiety lingers on among many people because of the absence of any tangible benefits for Britain up to date, and the constant reminder of dearer food, higher prices and irritating taxes like V.A.T. But may I add that this anxiety was considerably minimised, and I was reassured by the vigorous, practical and optimistic speech of the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, an optimism which was not cloudy and for which he gave chapter and verse.

But my interest in the expanded Community has grown apace since I have had the privilege of sitting as a member of the Select Committee on European Instruments, under our distinguished and patiently probing Chairman, the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King. This Select Committee has not finished looking into the complex institutions of the Community which mysteriously brought about the economic prosperity of the Six. This is always held up as a reproach to us. Though I have learned a certain amount, my education is not complete and my knowledge very fragile. I think that even if the Six had bolted the door against us, they were already in transit and what was a mainly customs union was bound to broaden its functions in order to achieve social, economic and political co-operation. We in Britain have a long history of international alliances so that we have much experience to contribute in this field, and the Community could gain from our experience. We all know that the Member Governments of the Community have different objectives and priorities, and that Britain and Denmark, for instance, have great pride in their national Parliaments, and that when they are confronted with the new challenge of a European Parliament, and are asked to share the Community interest by making radical changes in their own national policies, the going will not be smooth and there will be some very hard and difficult bargaining ahead.

At present the enlargement of the Community has only increased the political problems. The policy-making in the Community is bound to make inroads on national Parliaments. This is a very hard truth for many of us to accept, and the very detailed technical proposals put forward by the Commission and the Council detract from any romantic ideas we might hold about European unity. It is not easy to penetrate and clarify the different functions of the three great institutions—the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament—especially as the European Parliament appears to be, at least to me, the weakest one of the three. It all looks to many people like a secret society, and I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, pointed out how remote it seems to us.

The two books I have read recently, one by Donald Chapman and the other by Helen Wallace, are clear and informative. Donald Chapman underlines that the European Parliament is the only body meeting in public where the voice of the Opposition of the Member States can be heard and so it can influence the Ministerial Council. The need for strengthening the European Council is, I think rather urgent, and this need has been expressed this afternoon by practically everyone who has spoken. It seems to me that the European Parliament has too few Members from national Parliaments. I cannot tell whether the number of civil servants is adequate to run the Community, but I am pretty sure that the Members of Parliament who represent us are too few and too hard-worked. I think that, seeing them as commuters from London to Brussels, their constituents will become restive and will feel neglected. A change here is, I think, highly desirable; and this again is a point that has been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, and other speakers.

We have arrived at a phase in the evolution of the Community where it becomes more political and less technical, I believe. Most of us are bamboozled by the technicalities, especially as there has been so little explanation and simplification of the functions of the institutions. So it is left to those experts who can pierce the intricacies of the Council and the Commission to suggest that the power of the European Parliament should be increased and that the Commission would be well advised to consult the European Parliament before putting forward their proposals. This would give the Commission more political force.

My Lords, I am afraid that my comments are based, as I have said, on a very fragile knowledge. I know that there is much more I have to read and digest about the Community before I can envisage the benefits we shall obtain from the institutions and the benefits we can confer on them. At present I am reminded of an old Charlie Chaplin film in which he runs a watch repair shop. A customer enters and asks him to mend his watch. The man takes it to pieces, shakes his head sadly, and hands the pieces back to the customer. Finally, my Lords, when my enthusiasm for the ideal of European unity is at a low ebb it is revived by a growing revulsion I feel for the excesses and violence of nationalism, and this dissipates some of the anxiety I feel about our loss of sovereignty.

5.23 p.m.

VISCOUNT HANWORTH

My Lords, I am going to confine my remarks almost solely to the consumer angle and viewpoint, and I think therefore that perhaps I ought to declare an interest in so far as I am technical adviser to the Consumers' Association. I should like to make just one general remark before I start upon my main theme. We all know of course how strong the arguments were on both sides when we decided to go into the Common Market. One understands that there are many who are still strongly against it. Yet I believe there is one good maxim in life, and it is certainly one that I was taught in the Army: once you have adopted a course you must pursue it with the utmost vigour to try to make it successful. I appeal to those, to all those, who are still against the Common Market to do their best to see that our entry is successful. If it is not, then of course we can think again. But to spoil it merely by looking over our shoulders at this stage, is to my mind a disaster and not worthy of those who adopt that policy.

The interesting thing about the consumer angle is how little representation they had before we joined, and I am happy to say that the whole situation has changed greatly in quite a short time. I should like to mention the initial situation. There was no provision in the Treaty of Rome for consumer representation; negligible attention was paid to consumer views on the E.E.C. level. Only six out of the then 6,000 of the Commission's civil servants dealt with consumer affairs at all. Consumers themselves on a European basis were badly organised. In contrast to this, every industry had developed a very strong lobby in Brussels. The only semi-official consumer committee, Comite de Contact, collapsed in 1972, before we joined. In working out the directives the Commission consulted experts, but these were almost wholly producers or drawn from the producer interests.

What has happened since that rather sad and depressing state of affairs? A consumer with specific responsibility for consumer protection has been appointed; that is, Mr. Carlo Scarascia. Before this, consumer affairs were tucked away anonymously, under the Commissioner for Competition. We now have under this new Commissioner a Consumer Affairs Division in the Commission itself. BEUC (which is the Bureau European Union de Consumateurs) has begun to become something of influence. It now has an office in Brussels, a permanent staff and some money. But only £7,000 a year, compared with over £100,000 which we know one single national farmers' pressure group spends on its office and lobbying in Brussels. That is the imbalance which the consumers are up against. I fully realise that it is often a defect in the consumer organisation itself which makes this all the more difficult. In BEUC all nine countries are represented, the Consumers' Association of Ireland and the Danish Consumer Council have just joined: in all there are eleven organisations.

The Government must be congratulated on giving our Consumers' Association money to do research here in the United Kingdom on Common Market directives and other problems and to try to find out what the consumer view should be. We now have a small staff dealing with E.E.C. legislation and policies. The United Kingdom is ahead of all other E.E.C. countries in devoting resources specifically for such work. We in the Consumers' Association are providing facilities for 16 consumer organisations to meet regularly to discuss E.E.C. affairs: this we call our E.E.C. consumers' co-ordinating group. There are now three top consumer representatives in the Economic and Social Committee, one of them coming from the United Kingdom.

There have been, I think, a few successes already. Since going into the Common Market we have had to accept a grading scheme for fruit and vegetables at the retail level, and this is something consumers in the United Kingdom have wanted for years. From September there will be regular checking of the bona fides of wine, especially Beaujolais, Chablis and Nuits St. George; and here again we are represented on the standard body which will do this checking.

What fears have we for the future? We have not had any losses so far, but there is one matter that I should like to mention which is of some considerable importance to consumers. The Continent work on average weight, whereas we work on minimum weight. You may say, "Why does this matter?" I will give just two reasons, although there are others. First, when you are working on average—and it may be over quite a large sample—there is no incentive for manufacturers to increase their quality control and get nearer to a specified weight. Secondly, checking, or the possibility of checking, is almost out of the question for individual consumers because they would have to buy (let us say) 50 samples before they could get the average. Equally well, it makes life a lot more difficult for any enforcement authority, such as the weights and measures. So I feel that it is a retrograde step if we are forced to accept the average weights philosophy.

Then there is the question of harmonisation. In all negotiations there has to be a little bit of give and take, but we must stand firm when things of real importance—perhaps on safety—are concerned. I think people who know anything about electrical wiring and have seen the standards in France would think it inconceivable that we should accept their very low standards here. So there will be areas where, although we can sometimes compromise, we must stand firm and try to adopt the best standard rather than the lowest common denominator.

I turn now to a few specific proposals. I should like better consumer representation in CEN and CENELEC, and here I should like to say what an excellent job the British Standards Institutions are doing in this and in general in the European field. I should like a better effort from the United Kingdom trade unions. They could be a great help in the Economic and Social Committee. I am afraid I must say here that I only wish the trade unions would take their place in the modern world and be a little less self-centred. We want them in a modern world, not in the last century. After seeing their European colleagues in action, we now realise how unhelpful the unions have been in the United Kingdom on consumer work. Thirdly, we should like better coordination between the Economic and Social Committee and the European Parliament and a greater use of the powers each has.

Finally, I should like to reinforce what some other speakers have said about the E.E.C. institutions. We in the past have been very proud of our democratic institutions in this country and of our Parliament, and I think rightly proud. Nevertheless, there are those—and I am certainly one of them—who believe that changes are necessary in our own system to meet the needs of the present day. I would remind your Lordships that Parliament is not respected in the way it used to be, and I think it is not hard to see the reasons for this and to feel that some changes will have to be made. I therefore feel that we must not look only through our own spectacles at the European institutions: it should be possible to evolve something better than perhaps we have here, and we may be able to help to do this on the basis of our experience. But for goodness' sake do not let us just rely on the catch phrases of politics which are all too often mouthed in this country and in Parliament to-day.

5.35 p.m.

THE EARL OF MANSFIELD

My Lords, may I first express my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for initiating this debate in your Lordships' House to-day. It enables some of us who are Members of the European Parliament to give an account, as it were, of our activities in the last six months. My only regret is that the debate comes at a time when so few of our colleagues on this side of the House can be present. If I may say so, it does not speak very well for the somewhat rigid structure by which debates are fixed. In this instance, the debate could probably have been set for a time when the European Parliament will be in recess, which will come in a fortnight. Be that as it may, the opportunity is here and it must be taken.

I am not going to follow some noble Lords down the philosophical and indeed fascinating path of their adventures—if I may so call them—over the last six months, but will concentrate particularly on the three points of the triangle as they affect us politically at the moment; that is to say, the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the European Parliament. It may help those few noble Lords who perhaps do not know what goes on in the European Parliament if I say that it is very much more like a county council than a legislative body. The main work of Parliament is done in Committees, in closed Session and not in the public gaze—as I should have liked to tell the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, if she were here—and it is only the reports of the Committees which are forwarded to the Parliament meeting in Plenary Session either in Strasbourg or occasionally in Luxembourg, which are debated in public. This is an important, and indeed a vital part of the activities of the Parliament, because if I may perhaps gently take the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, to task, it is not a question of getting a pair or voting by proxy; the only way in which one can make one's individual and appropriate viewpoint felt in the political affairs of Europe is actually by being there and beavering away in these Committees.

LORD CHALFONT

My Lords, if the noble Earl will allow me, I was suggesting voting by proxy and permanent pairing in Westminster and not in Strasbourg.

THE EARL OF MANSFIELD

My Lords, the place where the votes are taken is Brussels, and it is only by sometimes altering the wording of resolutions or reports in minute detail that an effect can be felt. That is what is so important and it cannot be done unless one is there oneself.

LORD CHALFONT

My Lords, I am sorry, but I do not think the noble Lord has clearly understood me and I should like to get the Record straight. What I was suggesting, simply in passing as an idea to be considered, was that Members of the European Parliament should be allowed to spend all their time about their business in Europe by a system of permanent pairing or voting by proxy in Westminster.

THE EARL OF MANSFIELD

My Lords, I take the noble Lord's point. Of course it works all right in your Lordships' House, but it does not work very well in the other place because their arrangements break down. But may I continue with my theme. The role of the European Parliament at the moment is purely consultative. That of course is an honourable role as the Europeans see it. They have found it difficult to believe that we in the European Conservative group are serious in our complaints about the lack of power in the European Parliament in the way that it is run, because to them the power to ordain that one should be consulted is an honourable state and really is as much as we can hope for. In saying that, I have over-stated the position, but some of the opposition to the various reforms which we have tried to achieve over the last six months stems from a lack of understanding of the Westminster position of the Legislature as opposed to the European.

So far as the Council of Ministers is concerned, I would not perhaps take the same viewpoint as the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan. It is untrue, as I have found the situation, that a series of talented "Batmen" descend on Brussels for a few days, or even hours, and make decisions according to their national viewpoints. The various permanent representatives of the Community are, as it were, hard at work all the time and information flows back and forth through the various national Governments who make up the Committee when it sits at various moments. I have found, when I have asked any Government for either help or information on what is coming, that they are very ready to produce it. The difficulty that exists at the moment is that there is no, as we say, privity between the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament except in the matter of Question Time, which to my mind has yet to be made much use of so far as the Council of Ministers is concerned.

One can illustrate that. When the price proposals were first produced by the Commission, they were promulgated to the Agricultural Committee of the European Parliament, and the European Parliament was expected to receive the report from its Committee, debate the report, and give some sort of a blessing by way of a resolution—in fact without the Council of Ministers' even being aware that the debate had taken place. It is that kind of situation which makes the European Parliament so ineffective when it tries to influence what the Council of Ministers is thinking. There is no joining together, as it were, between the Council and the Parliament by way of consultation.

I am perfectly aware that the articles lay down that in certain circumstances the Council of Ministers has to take the advice of the European Parliament. But frequently, because of translation difficulties, because of the monthly meetings, and the delay which it takes to get a matter reported in Committee and reported back to the European Parliament, the Parliament is quite unable to express any proper opinion by the time the Council has to make up its collective mind. That is one way in which we can, and indeed must, try to improve the present situation. If, of course, the Council of Ministers is to give up any of its powers, any residual powers, in favour of any of the member nations, that can come about only by its own voluntary will and by the will of the various legislatures and Governments among the Nine, and I am bound to say that at the moment there is very little sign of it.

I now come to the Commission. For myself, I do not find them, on the one hand, quite as did the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, or, on the other, as did the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn. I have found them a delightful body of people to deal with but fairly inflexible—at least on agricultural matters, although it is fair to point out that the Common Agricultural Policy of Europe is the "sacred cow" of the institution, and the fact that it produces a profane butter mountain does not interest them very much. But so far as the Parliament is concerned, I merely repeat and reiterate what some of my noble friends and colleagues have said: they are anxious to make our acquaintance, so to speak; they are anxious to take us into their confidence; they are anxious to receive our advice, and they are less anxious, but nevertheless willing, to act on it.

To turn to the Parliament itself, a great deal has been said about whether it should have more powers, or why it should have more powers, and how those powers could come about. There is no doubt that at the moment it suffers radically because it has this consultative atmosphere, as has already been mentioned, and there are no Government and no Opposition, and so very little opportunity for an individual, or even a group, to initiate anything. It is quite impossible, as things stand, to question the Parliament as to any of its hopes or ways of going about its work, or how it should go about it in the future. It is almost impossible to initiate a debate unless it is in the form of a question. And it is at the moment thoroughly in need of new ideas and new methods. It is fair to say that since the entry of the three acceding nations in January the Parliament has become a great deal more streamlined, but much remains to be done. Speaker after speaker in your Lordships' House this afternoon has addressed himself to noble Lords opposite and has invited them, pleaded with them, to come in and join us. I would reinforce that because although we, the European Conservatives, try extremely hard to be objective and to take the broad viewpoint, inevitably we are confused as it were with the British way of thought. A good, solid chunk of Socialist thought and speech, the other side of the hemicycle, would be very good for Britain, and more so for the Community as a whole.

May I lastly, before I say a word about one's own personal position, turn to the powers of the Parliament? My own conviction is that the best way they can be increased in the future is by some form of budgetary control. For the reasons I have given, I do not think that the Council of Ministers is either ready, willing, or can be expected in the immediate future, to give up the power which is vested in it. I do not think that the Parliament is capable—because, as I have said, there is no Government and no Opposition—of taking the initiative so that it can usurp some of the powers and functions of the Commission. It must, therefore, at least for the next few years, remain in its consultative role. But if it has a power to require to be consulted over budgetary matters, and the power, above all, to withhold the budget, it will achieve real power and a real control of Community institutions and their way of thought and life.

Finally, my Lords, there comes the question of the Parliament itself, direct elections and the membership of it. For myself, speaking purely factually, I have spent 12 working days this month on the Continent, and if it had not been for this debate in your Lordships' House, it would have been 14 out of 20 working days this month. That may or may not sound a little or a lot. The difficulty is that, while going about in the way one does is not, for me, particularly physically exhausting—although it is time-consuming—far more importantly, and far more dangerously, I find that one is cutting oneself off from the mainstream of political thought in this country. I happen to be a member of my county council, and they are extremely worried, as well they might be, at the future of local government in Scotland. Because of my commitment to the European Parliament I have not been able to study in the way I should have liked the Bill which is shortly to come to your Lordships' House, and I shall not be properly equipped to play any part in the Committee stage of the Bill in your Lordships' House. It is that sort of activity which is denied one at the moment and which I personally find slightly distressing. I do not think, however, that it will be possible to have effective members of the European Parliament unless they have some sort of contact with their national Parliaments, because unless one has contact with one's own Parliament one is a political fish in quite a different pond.

My Lords, I remain optimistic about European institutions. I am quite sure that we shall gradually set things along a course which will be acceptable both to the citizens of this country and, perhaps more especially, to the citizens of Europe. One has to remember that a Parliament, a system of government, unless it comes about by a revolution, does not happen overnight. Perhaps we are a little optimistic if we think in terms of the next five, ten or twenty years. I myself am quite sure that we shall evolve gradually a system of government by which the nearly 200 million people, or whatever the number is, in Europe will achieve harmony and some form of unity among themselves. As I say, however, I do not think it will come overnight, and it is perhaps a little foolish and unproductive to suppose that it will. I suggest that we should try to achieve things slowly, and step by step. For myself, I should like to see the European Parliament first of all put its own house in order, then go forward to some sort of financial control, and, finally, take over as the Legislature for all the institutions.

5.50 p.m.

LORD STRANGE

My Lords, I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord O'Hagan, my noble friend Lord Reay and the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, on their excellent speeches, which have informed us all a great deal about the Common Market and certainly have "wised me" up a lot. I feel, from these speeches, that the critical period will occur next year; and we should try to go there as a fresh new country and stop some of the things that have been holding us back for a long time. We shoud think seriously about the take-over bid before we go there. I will speak—I think for not more than eight minutes—about the take-over bid as I understand it and know it, because I think this may be a very important point in our relationship with the Common Market in 1974. I pause for a moment because I am old, and when you are old you get dates mixed. I say to my family when I am fighting against their idea of voluntary euthanasia, "Because I am old I am interesting; I have been through this century; I am actually Victorian". I never get any further than that, because they say, "What you are going to say is that you remember everything that has happened, and you have done everything. We know all that. But you cannot even remember your children's birthdays. How can you remember anything that has happened in the past?" That is what one has to fight against in the family. But here I do remember enough for the purpose of my short speech.

I remember the start, on a very small scale, of the take-over bid, of which I have knowledge in a very small way. It is nice, after the grand ideas we hear in your Lordships' House, to hear little men talking about little things. Sam Smedley swam into my ken a very long time ago, when I was farming, and I agreed to go on to his contract for growing peas. I think Sam actually introduced pea canning into America; I think he called himself "National Canners Whether they were national or not I do not know, but Sam and I got on well together. I did what he said. I planted seed when he wanted it, and harvested my crop when he wanted it harvested. At his meetings there was a desperate and terrible row. People stood on benches and shouted and yelled. They waved the contract in Sam's face; they would not take any Hart of the contract. But I realised, knowing Sam, that if I was going hunting flies I should not go and hunt on Sam for them: he, with his contract, was supreme. So I did what he said. What he asked me to do was to buy his seed, grow his peas, plant at the time he wanted and harvest when he wanted. That was all. I did that. Sam had a very peculiar system. He put in two biners, which are expensive machines; he put them up and he put a shed over them. They belong to Sam: he paid five shillings a year as rent to make quite sure that they did belong to Sam. They were expensive machines, and they worked very well. As a result of my being nice and reasonable, he put me in "for free" a large slab of concrete at the other side; the silage came out and went on the concrete, and all I had to do was drive a mechanical tractor over it a few times and it made excellent silage.

Just one year, in all the years I was with Sam, everything went right. The rain came at the right time; there was no frost at the wrong time. I can remember this year very well, and this year we got enough silage to feed 120 cattle during the year—the usual number was 100 head. As I say, in that year we fed 120 on Sam's silage, which was "for free", and I thought that was good. We managed to get our catch crops grown again, and on that we fed sheep; we fed all our own hill sheep on it in the autumn, and we actually let the ground to other people. The final thing was that Sam sent me a cheque for just under £15,000, which to-day would be about £60,000, which seemed to be a worthwhile engagement. After I left the take-over started. I think Sam died, and the business was taken over first by some people who canned fish—though they had no objection to canning peas. Later, the business was taken over from them by the Imperial Tobacco Company. The Imperial Tobacco Company put on their experts, and they found that more people ate peas in England than ate them in Scotland, or bought them, which was remarkable. Possibly there is a bigger population in England than there is in Scotland. At any rate, the Imperial Tobacco Company shut up the Scots growing business, which was very easily done because Sam had only his annual contract, and when that did not come in the growers were finished. So the farmers there were left without their contract, and that was the end of Sam Smedley as we knew him. The farmers turned to the thing which was going on all over the country. Large crops were grown of wild oats and tares; and somewhere among them, I believe, was barley. And that is what I believe it has got down to now. That is just one little instance of how a take-over bid can spoil quite a prosperous little industry which was doing the land good.

I will go on to bigger ground. To-day I have here a friend, somebody in this House listening to the debate. My friend is in a very big way of business compared with me. He has works in different parts of the country which make drums, cans. It is a sort of unpopular and hopeless business to operate, because one cannot store air. Customers buy these cans; they have to be used. It is impossible to stockpile air, which is all it amounts to. The cans are made extremely well; people must have them, and they are very popular. It just happens that my friend is in difficulties at the moment because, although the demand for cans—for the Common Market, of course; for every sort of thing, petrol and so on—is very large indeed, he cannot supply the demand as he cannot get enough steel. As we know, this is a worldwide prob lem. No country is producing enough steel to meet the demand, but possibly the Italians, through strikes, and possibly our own British Steel, through strikes and other things—reorganization, for instance—is able to supply less steel to the world than we should wish. This is a little bit of a tragedy. It again comes back to the take-over bid; I think of it all as a sort of memorial. I see all these names of my youth written up, Stewart and Lloyd, blue chip, Colvilles, blue chip, Firth and Brown, blue chip, like a war memorial; and at the bottom I see the text which says, "They fought and lost, and fought again and won and lost and died, that British steel might live." And British Steel, as we know, is living to-day. That, I think, has rubbed it in hard enough.

I must say, in conclusion, that my friend has this product which is available. I have no interest, financial or otherwise, in this concern. If anybody wants a very useful thing, just ask me; I can get it for him, and it will cost him nothing. But the useful thing is to demonstrate how good his products are. It is merely a petrol tin that you put into your car; you screw it up, and you have petrol when that awful day comes when you run out. Just give me your names, my Lords, and I will see that you get a can. I think I have spoken long enough.

6.0 p.m.

LORD SHEPHERD

My Lords, the House has held the noble Lord, Lord Strange, in deep affection for many years, and therefore I hope I shall not offend the House if I seek to bring the debate back to the Motion that is before your Lordships to-day. We are indeed indebted to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for having moved this Motion and for having given us the opportunity to discuss the E.E.C. and to hear, in the form of a report, how some Members of your Lordships' House who are Members of the European Parliament see that Assembly and the other two big institutions, the Commission and the Council of Ministers. My Lords, I speak with some difficulty. I should certainly have liked to follow some of the noble Lords in their plea that the Labour Party should participate at Strasbourg. It may well be that one day we shall, and I have no doubt that Strasbourg will be richer and more powerful as a result of our attendance. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, spoke of the loneliness of being one of two Liberal Members. I wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, because he sits there as one Independent Member. He sits, if my memory is right, among the Communists, the Fascists if there are such—there are none.

LORD O'HAGAN

My Lords, may I correct the noble Lord? I was at first put next door to the Italian neo-Fascists. I objected politely and was removed to be put next to the Italian Communists, and I now sit between them and Mr. Taverne.

LORD SHEPHERD

The noble Lord has my sympathy. The noble Lord has a difficult task, unlike the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, and the noble Lord, Lord Reay, who sit with a group of fellow-Parliamentarians and other Members who sit in their own political groups. They have many of the resources, particularly of secretariat, of which we in this British Parliament would indeed be jealous. So I congratulate the noble Lord on what he does at the European Parliament and also the lightly humorous and yet very pertinent way in which he introduced this debate.

My Lords, I speak again with difficulty because I am a member of the Select Committee which your Lordships' House set up under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King, to look into the way in which Parliament could best scrutinise the activities of the Commission and the Council of Ministers. That Report I think can be said to be now in its final course of preparation. I hope it will be before your Lordships' House very soon. I say this, not because one wishes to see the end of some six months of labour in good company but because to me it is intolerable that this Parliament, for six months now and perhaps for a further six months, should have no machinery for scrutinising the tremendous quantity of paper, some of it immaterial but some of it of very great significance; and that all this should be done by those bodies with a British Parliament unable to consider it or influence its Ministers. I hope that this Report will be before your Lordships' House and that it will be the wish of your Lordships to ensure that machinery is set up so that at least this House may perform its functions as the other Chamber of Parliament. I think it was Mr. Kirk who, on the 16th January in Strasbourg, said that silence signifies consent. If that continues and Parliament remains silent on these matters we cannot complain if the Council of Ministers, the Commission and the European Parliament do things to which we, as a national Parliament, have an objection. I will come back to that issue in a moment.

There were a number of points that I should like to follow. First of all, I should like to take what is called the location of the Parliament. The noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, mentioned this matter in his speech. It was the noble and learned Lord who sits on the Woolsack who coined the phrase "stark, staring bonkers", but anyone who conceived of the Parliament of Europe being in Strasbourg on some occasions, meeting on others in Luxembourg and in committee in Brussels, with the Council of Ministers and the Commission in Brussels, cannot have been in his right senses. I personally feel that if the European Community is to be sustained and developed as a union and as a cohesive force, the two institutions, the Commission and the Council of Ministers, must be seated or sited alongside the European Parliament. There must be a recognition by all the officials of the European Community that the Parliament is there and is watching over them. I think it is highly dangerous that the sense of disengagement which now exists should continue.

Again, and I speak personally here, I think it is wrong that the European capital—because this is what it will be—should be in the capital of a member State. We ought to look to the creation of a neutral area, with proximity, of course, to ease of movement and transport. We ought to set up a European international zone in which the Commission and the Council of Ministers, with all their staff and their machinery, plus the European Parliament, can be established. Perhaps one day, when the European Union develops, this will come about.

The noble Lord, Lord Reay, and the noble Earl, Lord Mansfield, mentioned the problems of Members of Parliaments, their clash of interests between their national Parliament and their duties in the European Parliament. They are not the only ones that I have found to have had this same problem. Clearly, this is one of the factors that will perhaps put the pressure on within the European Parliament for some new basis of membership. My Lords, it is true that the Communities have agreed that by a certain date—I think 1976—there should be an elected Parliament on a universal franchise. Like other noble Lords, I must say that I really question whether this will be achieved. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Reay, who spelt out in considerable detail the different methods of election within the nine States, and clearly if there is to be a universal franchise there must be agreement by all nine, and this of course will take a great deal of time. My Lords, numbers are again important. If we kept the European Parliament at its present size I question how we could ever divide this country into 36 constituencies, seeking as we do a balance between size, type of locality and interests—industrial and agricultural—and also taking into account the question of distance. If we are going to have elected Members, clearly 36 elected members from this country would be so detached from the electorate that one could hardly call them Members of Parliament, at least as we in this country understand that term.

It may be that we shall have to evolve slowly here, but I do not think the target that has been set by the Communities is at all realistic. To me the real issue lies in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, when he said that there can be no halfway house. If we are going to have a European Community based on democracy, then we must have an organisation in which ordinary men and women throughout Europe can place their trust. I do not think that anyone who has had any close association with the institutions of the Community could ever say that they are to-day a basis on which this nation—and let us speak particularly of this nation to-night—could transfer its full and total sovereignty.

Clearly, the institutions need to evolve. The question is, which should come first? All the countries of the E.E.C. are democracies. True, their method of Parliamentary control is different, but, so far as I am concerned, democracy is not a question of influence and it is not a question of power, it is a question of control; the power of an elected Assembly to say "Yes" or "No" to a proposal. I suspect that for many years, whatever evolution there may be in the democratic procedures of the European union, it is unlikely that a democratic Assembly will evolve in which all the countries are prepared to vest that power. If that is the case, clearly the national Parliaments, the nine of them, have to be regarded as part of the European institutions.

I should like to develop this for a moment, because I think that it was a theme which, although it did not come through very clearly, is very important; and I think that it was my noble friend Lady Gaitskell who referred to the "facelessness" of the European institutions so far as the British people are concerned. Let us take the Commission as a particular case. There are thirteen Commissioners. I must say from what I have learned in the last six months from the Select Committee that, by and large, they are men of the highest capability and integrity. But how many British people know those Commissioners, other than perhaps Mr. George Thomson and Sir Christopher Soames? They do not know the names or the duties of any of the other Commissioners.

The Council of Ministers meet and make binding decisions, but all they do is conducted in secrecy. We know the decision, and on occasion, when the Minister comes to Parliament to explain them, we may know the reasons for the decision. But, by and large, the British public have no knowledge at all as to how that decision has been arrived at. I am convinced that, unless you can bring to the British public (and this will take time), a sense of the way in which decisions are reached and why proposals are made—and not just where the benefits accrue or where the hardships may arise—in the European context and that these were right in a European form, we are not likely to persuade the British public to go much further than they have gone so far.

Therefore, we need for the Commission and for the Council of Ministers—the latter is more difficult, but certainly this applies for the Commission—to be even more open looking, more information conscious, than they are to-day. I must say that the Commission is infinitely more outward looking. At least one has the ability to look in more than one does within the Whitehall machinery. I do not think that this is entirely the desire of the Commissioners; I think that it is the mere absence of the Secrets Act, and it may also be that there are national Governments who are seeking ways and means of influencing a situation. But I believe that the British people need to know a great deal more. If it comes to that, what does the British Parliament know? I have seen some of these yellow forms that are circulated with our papers. I doubt whether any noble Lord, even if he was able to give his full-time service to your Lordships' House, would have the slightest idea of what those papers mean, and how to sort out the important from the unimportant.

The issue about which I wish to be satisfied is the way in which the peoples of the nine States can, first of all, be satisfied as to what is going on, and to build up trust in the machinery as it evolves, and, until then, to ensure that the national Parliaments which, at the moment, are the only elected representatives, should have greater control than certainly we, in this British Parliament, have. I would not wish to go so far as our friends in Denmark, where they place their Ministers under fairly rigid disciplines. I think that there are dangers to the national interest in that respect, but I certainly feel that if the Government wish to make us in this country more European minded than we are now, there needs to be a greater transfer of information and explanation not only to Parliament but to the British people.

I cannot remember which noble Lord said that no Parliament has ever got power by gift. This is very true, and it may well be true of the European Parliament. The European Parliament has some latent negative powers which a good Parliamentarian, like Michael Foot, would no doubt exploit to the full and to the embarrassment of the Council of Ministers and the Commission. However, we need to find some way in which we can influence our Ministers, and it is this matter which the Committee, under the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King, will be putting before your Lordships' House. The institutions have just about worked when there were the Six; I think those who have had any connection with them in recent months know that they cannot survive with the Nine. Therefore, we shall listen with the greatest interest to the way in which the noble Baroness, Lady Tweedsmuir, answers the many questions that have been put, so that we in your Lordships' House will have at least a glimmer of the present view of Her Majesty's Government of the three main institutions, and, in particular, of the European Parliament.

6.20 p.m.

THE MINISTER OF STATE, FOREIGN AND COMMONWEALTH OFFICE (BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE)

My Lords, I should like to join with those who have paid their tribute of thanks to the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, for having given us the chance to have this debate to-day. I should also like to pay tribute, in particular, to those four Peers who have spoken who are our representatives in the European Parliament; I regret very much that the other three representatives have had to be away on business. I think this is the first occasion that your Lordships' House has debated the specific topic of the institutions of the European Community, particularly the European Parliament, but I am quite certain that it will not be the last. Few would deny that, of all the member nations of the Community, the British have the greatest attachment to their own institutions of government. We say that they have evolved over centuries in a continuous and almost unbroken process; and it is therefore natural, now that we are full members of the European Community, that we should take just as keen an interest in its institutions to see how they can be related to our own.

I was sorry, in a way, that the Select Committee, of which the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, is a distinguished member, was not able to report before this debate, or that we could not have had this debate a little later. Yet in a way, perhaps, that will give us an excuse to have two debates, one on the nature of the animal and the other on how this Parliament is to be able to consider proposals in draft before a decision is made, because that is really at the root of most people's concern. I would agree with those, including the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd, and the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, who have said that the public knows very little about the institutions and much less about personalities, except perhaps our own. I found this debate of enormous interest. It has given one a number of ideas, and it also gives me a chance to try to describe the Government's attitude to some very difficult, but very fascinating, problems.

I should like to start with the Summit Conference last October in Paris, because it was then that the Community was given a programme of work which could be called ambitious, considering the timetable and what they had to undertake. It included a commitment to reinforce the institutions, particularly the European Parliament, and we as a Government consider that this commitment is very important indeed. We also want to improve the impact of the Community as a whole not only on the people of Europe, but on those who we think will become associated in one way or another, on those in the Third World and on those who will not be associated but will, I hope, look upon the Community not just as a technical and economic arrangement, but in the terms described by the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, when he said that he hoped the Community would be known to have a human face. I was glad to hear what the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, said about the consumer interests, because it is encouraging to know that the Community has already done a great deal in that direction, as that will certainly help the public to understand more of what it is all about.

It is perfectly true that no institution can adjust to change without the political will to change, and that is really what we are talking about to-day. The noble Lord, Lord Chalfont, who I regret is not here at the moment, said he thought that any institutional development which took place would be over a period of time; in other words, it would evolve rather slowly. I should like to suggest that it will probably evolve within certain clearly defined limits. The Council of Ministers has been referred to by many noble Lords, particularly the noble Lord who opened the debate and the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn. I cannot see that the primacy of the Council Ministers in the enlarged Community will be changed for a considerable time, if ever. It is true that the Community's treaties provide for majority voting on various questions, but I do not foresee a departure in the near future from the present practice whereby decisions affecting vital national interests are taken unanimously. I say this really for the reason put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Gore-Booth. We can build the Community only on a firm basis of consent, which at the start, means national consent expressed in traditional ways. Over a period of time we may indeed be able to build a genuine Europe, but it must be based on the consent of the peoples who compose it. The noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, asked who could question the Council of Ministers. Of course they can be questioned, as he knows well, by the European Parliament, and the Council of Ministers are—

LORD O'HAGAN

My Lords, I did not ask that, I asked who could question the Council of Permanent Representatives.

BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE

I am sorry, my Lords. The Council of Permanent Representatives cannot be questioned by the European Parliament. That is perfectly true. But of course the Council of Ministers can be questioned. I shall leave it at that. I should like to consider the relations between the Council and the European Parliament, which were raised by my noble friend Lord Mansfield, and I shall refer to them in more detail when I come to the question of paragraph 15 of the Summit Communiqué, which the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, asked me about. The very important work of the Commission is also defined in the Treaties, and I do not see any reason why there should be radical departures here, because, as the noble Lord who opened the debate said, the Commission has really done very well. I thought he was rather attracted by what it is, by the people who serve on it and by what it has achieved. Of course it not only has this immense programme of work given to it by the Summit Conference, but it also has to cope with the administrative problems posed by the accession of the three new Members. It is bringing forward proposals to the Council on all matters requested by the Summit Conference, and I should like to join with the noble Lord, Lord O'Hagan, in paying tribute to the energy and competence of the members of the Commission, in which I hope the other noble Lords also join.

The noble Lord asked me about paragraph 15 of the Summit Communiqué, which referred to the reinforcement of the institutions. There are a number of relevant documents. The one from the Commission was put in the Library of the House about ten days ago, and includes the Commission's own proposals. The documents are very long and I do not think I could possibly go into them in detail. But, roughly, they comprise two main sets of proposals; one on the question of powers, and the other on the question of practical measures. To give just one example from that on powers, the Commission suggests that representatives of the Council should take part in a Second Reading, and members of Parliament should present Parliament's views to the Council before a final decision is taken. To take just one or two examples of practical measures, the Commission suggests that the Council should consult the Parliament on all important trade agreements; that the Council should not start work on a Commission proposal until the Parliament's opinion is received; and there are various other measures which are rather long. It is quite a big document, so I do not think it is suitable to discuss in detail, and I would say only that all of these proposals are being considered by the various institutions. None has yet been put forward. Her Majesty's Government are very interested in strengthening the powers of the European Parliament.

One must recognise that there is a feeling which is widespread that the European Community is not subject to a sufficient degree of democratic influence and control. I believe that so long as that impression persists, whether it is true or not—because it is all in varying degrees—it will be difficult for the Community to make the kind of progress and development that I think we all want. It is true that the members of the Community possibly look to us (because, after all, we have a very long Parliamentary tradition) to do what we can and to sug gest how we can strengthen the European Parliament. Successive British Governments have said that the pressure of events within the Community will bring about moves towards a representative democracy, which must of course involve the European Parliament; and your Lordships will no doubt recall that the previous British Government, in the joint Anglo-Italian Declaration of April, 1969, stated: Europe must be firmly based on democratic institutions and the European Communities should be sustained by an elected Parliament as provided for in the Treaty of Rome"; and the present Government have endorsed that declaration.

Now the whole question is: when? We consider that the European Parliament should first strengthen its own influence by using its present powers under the treaties to the largest possible extent. If it did so, it would be able to do a great deal in shaping the enlarged Community—above all, if it made the necessary procedural changes; and the very interesting document put forward by Mr. Kirk on behalf of the British Members of the European Parliament—

LORD SHEPHERD

The Conservative Members.

BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE

The Conservative Members, yes; and may I say, in relation to that, how much I hope that the members of the Labour Party will take part at the earliest possible moment. Otherwise, of course, we shall have it all our own way, and surely they do not want that.

I understand that the new Question Time procedure which has been introduced has enabled some searching questioning of members of the Commission and the Council, and I am told that this has had an invigorating effect upon the whole system. I hope that is true. My noble friend Lord Mansfield referred to this. As this debate has shown, there is no shortage of new ideas for further changes. For example, improvements in the committee system of the European Parliament which gave more attention to policy matters, to the study of the administration and to the exposure of anything which a Member might feel should be improved, and less to subordinate legislation, would be very good improvements and practical ones. It has also been suggested that there might be the ability to call witnesses and to hear their evidence in public; and, following a suggestion by one of the British Members, the creation of a Public Accounts Committee is also under consideration. Obviously there is undoubted scope for this kind of improvement; but we hope that the European Parliament itself will take the lead in considering these matters, as indeed has been done in Mr. Kirk's paper, and as a Government we shall certainly encourage them in this.

Now apart from some practical procedural changes such as these, there may well be scope for introducing other changes to involve the Parliament more closely with the decision-making processes in the Community. Some of these changes could be made without amending the treaties, and others could not. I understand that for the Second Reading procedure it would not be necessary to amend the treaties; but alterations in the budgetary powers of the European Parliament, for example, particularly referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Reay, and the noble Lord, Lord Gladwyn, would demand amendment of the treaties. I was asked about the distribution of this rather formidable document, about 50 copies of which were divided between the Vote Office and the Printed Paper Office about ten days ago. Perhaps I can summarise just one or two of the proposals. For instance, the agreement of the Parliament would be required to a decision by the Council to launch a loan; the whole resources could be created by the Council acting unanimously in agreement with the Parliament; and it would be the Parliament, rather than the Council and the Parliament together, which would give a discharge to the Commission in respect of the implementation of the budget. There are a great many of these proposals, some of considerable importance; and the time to consider whether amendments or revisions are required will be when the study is being made by the institutions of the Community in 1975 on how to achieve European union in 1980, in accordance with the summit proposals; because these budget proposals are not only complex, but they also take the form of a draft treaty. So I would say only that in principle Her Majesty's Government are in favour of strengthening the budgetary powers of the European Parliament.

My Lords, another very important factor is the balance between the European Parliament and national Parliaments, and that, of course, is why, as a Government, we attach such great importance to satisfactory arrangements, which we are sure will come from the Select Committee presided over by the noble Lord, Lord Maybray-King. As your Lordships know, we have already made a number of improvements to ensure that Members are kept informed, so far as possible, of the draft legislation from the Commission, such as by having a monthly statement to forecast the agenda and an explanatory memorandum of some documents. I think this will help considerably in keeping us informed. Even though the noble Lord did not think much of the Yellow Paper, at any rate it gives one a fair idea of the documents which are available. There is another factor which is of great importance, and it is this. It must be recognised that it is with the European Parliament that the Commission and the Council are in a direct relationship, and it is with the Community's work that the European Parliament is properly concerned. Therefore, the European Parliament's influence on Community policies is complementary to that of national Parliaments; and these of course, influence individual member Governments and their attitude on the Council of Ministers.

When we try to strengthen the European Parliament, we do not, by so doing, automatically weaken national Parliaments. What we want to ensure is that the European Parliament has the necessary powers to wield influence and control over both the Council and the Commission, in addition to the influence and control that national Parliaments have over their own country's representatives on the Council. Therefore this procedure is a complementary one between the national and the European Parliaments. It is true that as the policies of the Community which were foreshadowed in the 1972 Summit Communiqué are developed, there will be an increase in the importance and number of decisions taken within the Community. However, what surely matters, I suggest to the House, is the democratic nature of those decisions, which it is the European Parliament's business to ensure, to complement the influence and control exerted by national Parliaments. The object is that together they should ensure the fundamental balance between the Legislature and the Executive.

My Lords, your Lordships have referred to the question of direct elections to the European Parliament, and, as I have suggested, I do not think that this should take precedence over the many other improvements which can be made. But we accept the obligation—

LORD GLADWYN

My Lords, may I interrupt the noble Baroness for one moment on the question of direct elections? There are two issues, as I understand it. One is whether there is a possibility of organising direct elections on a European basis, on a general franchise, and the other is a possibility, as a pro tem. measure, of directly electing members nationally. Is the noble Baroness able to say anything on the latter suggestion?

BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE

My Lords, I think that at the moment I would say that the question whether we should have elections to the European Parliament on a national basis in other words, tied to our own national Elections—is not one which has yet really been considered because the Summit Communiqué talked about direct European elections, which is of course a very different matter. But I should like to say how very much I understand the problems which have been so vividly put before us by many noble Lords who have spoken, and particularly those who represented us in Strasbourg, about the almost intolerable strains which are put on them at the moment, particularly in another place. Having myself served for two or three years in the Council of Europe, which was a very different thing, and also for two years at the United Nations—a service that similarly involved departure from my constituency—I can understand that it is a very difficult decision to make. Quite apart from that, the work demand on our representatives, with the constant travelling involved, is tremendous. Speaking entirely off the record—although I am speaking from this Box and am supposed never to refer to the other place—I should have thought that at the moment the immediate practical need is for a system of pairing. I put that out as a thought, unofficially, from the Box.

My Lords, a great number of noble Lords who spoke referred to the site of the European Parliament and wondered whether it would not be better to have it near the seats of power in Europe—in other words, to have it located in Brussels. From the practical point of view I can see what this means, but according to the relevant Article in the Treaty of Rome any question of a new site (or a neutral site, as was suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Shepherd) has to be resolved by the common consent of Member States. Therefore from this Box to-day I do not think I am in a position to say whether I favour a neutral place, or Brussels or any other place. That is something which must be discussed particularly in the European Parliament and it is for them to bring pressure on the representatives of the national Governments. Certainly I think this is very important.

In conclusion, I do not think I can stress strongly enough that while we concern ourselves with the institutions of Europe and in the evolving Europe, the proceedings in this House and in another place remain fundamental; because Europe can be built only upon consent, and we have to carry the people of Europe with us wherever we wish to go.

6.42 p.m.

LORD O'HAGAN

My Lords, I should like to thank everbody who participated in or listened to this debate. I think it has been a worthwhile occasion and I hope everybody enjoyed himself as much as I did. May I change the mood slightly and say that while appreciating the care, courtesy and thoroughness that we have conic to expect from the noble Baroness I submitted before the weekend detailed lists of questions, and I warned her that I was particularly interested in the working of the Council. I asked questions in initiating the debate and there were questions by other speakers about the the actual machinery within the Council itself and not solely about what goes on at the meeting of the Council (of some 150 people) but about what goes on in between. There are great log jams and congestions; and proposals from the Commission get held up and major decisions get delayed. I should like to serve notice on the noble Baroness that I shall have to ask a lot of questions about this in the future.

BARONESS TWEEDSMUIR OF BELHELVIE

My Lords, if I may interrupt the noble Lord; it is true that he wrote me a letter with questions in it—I have forgotten how many. I have answered the questions that he put to me in debate. There were six. I answered every one.

LORD O'HAGAN

My Lords, I am not going to haggle about something the noble Baroness asked for. I asked in debate a question about the Commission and about Article 139 of the Treaty which was meant to reinforce the Commission but which, because of the unanimity procedure in the Council that has evolved, is a handicap. I hope that the Government will answer this point on another occasion. I think that we had some interesting commitments from the Government in that the noble Baroness said that she was interested in strengthening the power of the European Parliament and that the Government support in principle the idea of strengthening budgetary power; but I do not think your Lordships should be easily lulled by the dulcet tones of the noble Baroness when reading out proposals made by a Community institution which has not yet been approved by the Council and which are merely on the trampolene of discussion. This is not by any means a replacement for a firm commitment.

It is a little disquieting that the noble Baroness should refer to the remoteness of the institutions and that she should agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Gaitskell, about the lack of knowledge among people in this country and in other member States of the Commissioners, yet suggest no way of overcoming it. When she talks about direct elections she does not bring in this point; and when she talks about the European Parliament she does not put her finger on this as an institution of the Communities that can bring all other institutions into the lives of ordinary people. I do not want to make a pleasant afternoon unpleasant by being nasty, but I think we must continue to press the Government to apply their minds a little more seriously to some of the topics on which so many noble Lords have expressed themselves to-day. My Lords, I beg leave to withdrawn my Motion.

Motion for Papers, by leave, withdrawn.