Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“It pains me to point out that my right hon. Friend has left out the significant post-legislative scrutiny of the Charities Act 2006 that was conducted by my Committee, the Public Administration Committee, in the last Parliament, which was the prime precursor of this Bill. I also sat on the Joint Committee that performed the pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. Will he say something about recent controversies, for example those around charitable fundraising? The Select Committee is very frustrated that we are conducting significant inquiries that the regulator, the Charity Commission, should be conducting, but it does not necessarily have the power to hold its hearings in public in a way that would demonstrate its regulatory role.”
“The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee—or PACAC, as we call ourselves—is concluding an inquiry into charitable fundraising, alongside our other inquiry into Kids Company. I will not pre-empt the outcome of those two inquiries, but we are concentrating our inquiries on the conduct of trustees in these matters, and their responsibility to oversee and support charitable organisations so that they reflect their values in their operations as much as in their objectives. We are making recommendations on that because it might be insufficient to rely on processes and structures to ensure that things are ethically and properly run.”
“I am terribly sorry for intervening again, and most grateful to the Minister for being so generous in giving way. I regret that I cannot stay to take part in the debate. The House will need to know that my Committee will produce its reports in January, in good time for the conclusion of the passage of the Bill. Before he leaves the matter of fundraising, will he bear in mind the concern of many people about some charities that raise a substantial part of their income from foreign sources? Security services are concerned that organisations posing as charities might be receiving funds from abroad for nefarious purposes. Will he consider introducing measures to the Bill at a later stage to deal with that matter? I know that that is something that also concerns the Charity Commission.”
“Women want equality. Young people aspire to be educated at western universities. That is challenging the whole structure of the Muslim world, and the extremes of the Muslim world are striking back at us. They are not going to leave us alone if we disengage, so we have to engage with the problem. We might go on getting it wrong and making mistakes, but that is the nature of warfare. The attacks in Paris were an act of war. We have been suffering such acts of war against our country since 9/11, and even before. The west is going to have to become more coherent and more united in its response. Perhaps the most significant strategic effect of this decision is that we will be joining our coalition partners and helping to create that diplomatic and political process.”
“We are learning, we are discussing, and this debate is perhaps part of that process, but we have not yet got near the full and comprehensive understanding that will win us this campaign in the long run. Mistakes will continue to be made, but that does not mean that we can turn our back on the present situation. There are risks whichever way we turn. Another aspect that we have heard periodically in this debate is that what is now visited upon us is somehow our fault; that we are being punished for our own mistakes and errors; that the terrorist attacks on our own country are something that we have provoked. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the terrorist threat. The west is omnipresent in the Muslim world. We are beamed in by satellite. The people there are challenging their own outdated religious power structures.”
“Following the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford), I am struck once again that on the one hand in this debate we are grappling with what is no more than a minor tactical correction in the conduct of the air war against ISIS, and on the other hand we are trying to judge an overall strategic plan which has been formulated among a rather disparate and disunited coalition and which is necessarily chaotic, fluid and bound to change. That is in the context of a 14 or 15-year campaign that we have been mounting since 9/11 against a global Islamist insurgency, and we have not yet begun to get the measure of that campaign. In Northern Ireland, to which the hon. Lady referred, we spent 10 or 15 years getting it wrong. The west is now faced with a far more complex international problem.”
“I commend my right hon. Friend’s approach as set out in his statement, particularly that he is working with our allies. May I urge him to talk to President Obama to ask him when the United States is going to show more resolve? Is it not strange that during the Bosnia conflict it mounted perhaps 130 sorties a day and every aircraft was cleared to drop or shoot, whereas in Syria it is perhaps doing an average of seven sorties a day and only one or two aircraft are cleared to drop or shoot? Should we not expect more from the United States if this alliance is going to be successful?”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement. It is a very welcome declaration of long-term strategic intent on behalf of our country to remain a global nuclear power with armed forces that have global reach. May I remind him, however, that our defence industries are among our largest export earners because of what Her Majesty’s Government have invested in research and technology over the years? If we are to sustain that, and the ability of our industries to help us to produce the capability we need in times of emergency, we will need not only to continue but substantially to increase the amount we invest in those industries.”
“It is a pleasure, Mr Hanson, to serve under your chairmanship. May I ask the Minister why we support EU defence industrial policy when we do not have a defence industrial policy of our own?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that answer. May I remind him that in the 2010 Conservative manifesto we were going to pull out of the European Defence Agency? Then, under the coalition, we were told that we could not pull out of the EDA because we were in coalition. Now we are not in coalition, but we are still participating in the EDA. Why have we changed our policy?”
“It is interesting how much assertion and denial has to be done to explain why it is in our interest to be involved with this at all, but I commend my hon. Friend for starving the EDA of the cash that it craves. Other member states would willingly vote for that, but we use our veto to prevent it, which certainly keeps things in check to a degree. However, will he clarify why, when every strategic defence review from 1998 onwards described, as he just did, NATO as the cornerstone of our defence, the 2010 SDSR did not?”
“I am most grateful for that assurance. Rather than repeating what the 2010 review said—it referred to “our status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a leading member of NATO, the EU and other international organisations”, as though NATO and the EU were pari passu with each other—may I suggest to the Minister that we include the words, “NATO is the cornerstone of our defence” in the 2015 SDSR?”
“Will my hon. Friend clarify whether section 2 provisions of the treaty on European Union are justiciable by the European Court of Justice inasmuch as they affect defence and the European Defence Agency?”
“The answer to my question is that I believe they are and that there is no exclusion from the European Court of Justice. The European Defence Agency statute, established by article whatever it is, includes provision for qualified majority voting in a very substantial number of areas, which includes, as I will explain later, permanent structured co-operation and majority voting, from which we could be excluded or subject to qualified majority voting. These are serious potential developments. Does my hon Friend not understand the risk of participating in this at all?”
“When considering this instrument, it is worth noting first that the document is dated 26 June 2014. That we are dealing with it at such a late stage is an indication of how poor our scrutiny arrangements are and how incapable we are as a Parliament at keeping up with developments in the European Union.”
“I am very grateful for that information and I am sure the Committee is, too. I was about to say that this is the first occasion, apart from a Government statement after the 2013 Council of Ministers meeting, that we have debated the 2013 conclusions in any depth. That underlines a serious state of affairs.”
“That is because the EU wants standards and certification that will exclude US defence equipment from EU markets wherever possible. That is what EU defence policy is really about. I am sorry to tell my hon. Friend the Minister that I shall not be voting to take note of this document and will vote against if the opportunity arises.”
“The Commission again is invited “to set up a Preparatory Action on CSDP-related research”. Finally, “The European Defence Agency, in cooperation with the Commission (yet again), will prepare a roadmap for the development of defence industrial standards” which is what we are looking at today, and “develop a harmonized European military certification approach”. Those are the key means by which the EU can obtain control over defence. One of the key purposes of NATO was to ensure transatlantic standards and certification to ensure interoperability. The EU is duplicating that role in order to create its own separate and distinct standards that are not compatible with our US counterparts. Again, on this question of certification and standards there is no reference whatever to EU-US co-operation, which would make sense.”
“For all those capabilities, US interoperability is essential for the UK, but there is nothing in these documents about co-operation with our closest ally, because EU defence is about excluding the US wherever possible. That is why NATO is not an acceptable vehicle for those who want European integration. In the 2013 conclusions, we read that the Council “invites the Commission (again), the European Investment Bank and the European Defence Agency to develop proposals for a pooled acquisition mechanism”, which can only mean some kind of EU defence purchasing agency. It may not require much money to develop legal control over member states’ defence procurement programmes. How so? The proposals for “strengthening Europe's defence industry” are to be “in full compliance with EU law”. This is not intergovernmental.”
“EU defence is not so much about defence—because, as we see, defence expenditure across the continent is declining—as it is about protectionism of continental defence industrial interests whose technology rather lags behind their US counterparts. The Council proposes support for remotely piloted aircraft systems—a squeamish name for what we call drones or unmanned aerial vehicles—air-to-air refuelling, satellite communication and cyber. In at least two of these areas, air-to-air refuelling and cyber, the UK is already supreme in the EU—we have, for example, GCHQ in Cheltenham—so why should we agree to the EU directing our policy? That is what this amounts to.”
“A lot of that is already firmly in in the Commission’s legislative purview. That is another compelling reason for the UK to exercise its Lisbon treaty opt-out from EU home and justice affairs, which unfortunately we spurned last year. Finally, on military capability development, the EU intends utterly to eclipse NATO, backed by the two legally binding 2009 defence procurement directives that enhance the power of the European Defence Agency, which is becoming an embryo EU defence ministry. The EDA’s statute enables decisions to be taken by majority voting, and, where any single state can threaten a veto, a subset of member states can act unilaterally as a bloc in the name of the whole of the EU—that is what they call structure co-operation.”
“That underlines the squeamishness, futility, parochialism and vanity of CSDP. The potential to damage UK defence interests is in the detail. The call for an EU cyber-defence policy framework and for an EU maritime security strategy both involve the federalist EU Commission. Remember, the Commission is the EU’s most powerful legislative body, so, if the Commission is involved, that is anything but intergovernmental co-operation. To agree to that is to agree to a threat to the independence of UK policy in those fields. The fact that the Council will also call for “increased synergies between CSDP and Freedom/Security/Justice actors” opens the door to legally binding defence commitments to “tackle horizontal issues such as organized crime, including trafficking and smuggling of human beings, and terrorism”.”
“We work increasingly bilaterally with the French, and other operations are NATO operations under an EU flag. NATO remains far more significant because it has US backing, and its people at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe are practised at planning and generating force for multinational operations. However, NATO gets its first mention only as a “partner” in paragraph 6 of the 2013 conclusions alongside the UN, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and the African Union—as though NATO were equivalent to the African Union. There is mention of “strategic partners and partner countries”, but it is telling that the EU cannot bring itself to name the United States of America, the one military entity that dominates the world and the sole guarantor of European security.”
“Much of the 2013 conclusions appears to be the usual verbiage and high-flown rhetoric about the EU being a “global player” in defence and about the “strong commitment to the further development of a credible and effective CSDP”. The understatement: “Defence budgets in Europe are constrained” is a feeble attempt to mask the reality that member states, including the UK, are all cutting their defence budgets. The oft-repeated plea to “make use of synergies”—a common theme of such documents—to improve capabilities has so far proved a forlorn hope. The invocation of increasing the effectiveness, visibility and impact of CSDP is bound to fail. It is almost entirely down to France and the United Kingdom that EU defence means anything at all.”
“I appreciate that my hon. Friend has received that reassurance, but, as I will explain, it is not worth very much. The fundamental problem is that our Government like to pretend that the EU’s common security and defence policy is harmless intergovernmental co-operation that has no access to money or legal sanctions and is therefore a federalist paper tiger. The 2013 Council conclusions actually give the lie to that, and any Conservative Prime Minister should have been wholly opposed to them. To sign the UK up to the programme in the document is not just another step towards a Europe army, which has always been a dream of federalist nations such as Germany, but another blow to our already beleaguered defence industries and another nail in the NATO coffin, in order that continental defence industries should not be exposed to US competition.”
“After all the statements made by the Prime Minister, the Minister for Europe, the Foreign Secretary, and the former Foreign Secretary about being in Europe and not being run by Europe, and after all the pledges to restore the primacy of national Parliaments and to get an opt-out from the charter of fundamental rights to restore our borders, is that it? Is that the sum total of the Government’s position in this renegotiation? Is not the onus on those who advocate that we should stay in the European Union to explain why we should put up with being a second-tier country in an increasingly centralised European Union, paying more and more, and losing more and more control?”
“Now that so much is done by secondary legislation, it should not be too complicated to make sure that that principle in the 1911 Act is extended to secondary legislation, to avoid such misunderstandings in the future.”
“I thank my right hon. Friend for the announcement made yesterday and assure him that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee requires no instructions from the Government about what inquiries we will carry out, and nor does it require any prompting from the Opposition. At our meeting yesterday, we started to cross-examine witnesses about events on Monday, and we will be looking at what Lord Strathclyde is likely to consider, but there is a simple point to make. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the Parliament Act 1911 established the principle of financial privilege at a time when there was very little secondary legislation?”
“Ever since we adopted the cheap food policy following the abolition of the corn laws in the 1840s, that has been part of the fabric of our social settlement. It is the right of an individual nation state to continue to evolve its social settlement, and the conduct of Government and the imposition of taxes are inseparable from that democratic social settlement. The treaties as currently formulated are a denial of national democracy. This House should not have to go and beg 27 other member states in order to change a rate of tax on an issue that we think is socially important. This is a matter of national democracy, and that is why the treaties are unfit for purpose.”
“I very much hope that the Government will negotiate something fundamental on this particular tax, and I am looking forward to what the Minister has to say about it. However, I make no apology for raising the far more general principle that different taxation regimes in different countries represent different social settlements and the development of our societies in different ways at different paces. That is why we are separate nations and separate peoples with separate democracies. The attempt to use the pretext of the single market to harmonise taxes is one of the most democratically regressive manoeuvres the European Union could adopt. France puts VAT on food and children’s clothes, but this country would not put VAT on such items.”
“I refer the House to article 113 of the treaty on the functioning of the European Union, which says: “The Council shall, acting unanimously…adopt provisions for the harmonisation of legislation concerning turnover taxes, excise duties and other forms of indirect taxation to the extent that such harmonisation is necessary to ensure the establishment and the functioning of the internal market and to avoid distortion of competition.” So taxation has crept into the idea of being part of the single market. At the point at which this country signed up to the Common Market, or even at the stage of the Single European Act or of the Maastricht treaty, this principle crept into the acquis communautaire of the European Union rather than being something that was expressly agreed by this House.”
“That demonstrates an important point about how attitudes change. Whatever we might have agreed to in our original agreements with the European Union that lock this tax in place, albeit reduced by the previous Labour Government to the minimum of 5%—I celebrate that—we are now, within the European Union, operating in a system based on a different principle—the principle that taxes should be harmonised as part of the single market.”
“This debate is like history coming back to me, because not only does the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) now represent the constituency that I stood for in 1987, but I was first made aware of this issue by the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), who, when she was an A-level student in my constituency, berated me for the inequality of this tax. Ever since, I have been convinced that it is an unjust tax. Indeed, on that occasion I raised the matter in the shadow Cabinet, which was then under the leadership of William Hague. I got a very frosty and uncomfortable reception for raising such a matter in a semi-public meeting, including from some of our right hon. and hon. Friends who are female and hold extremely senior positions in Government to this day.”
“It is because of the European Union. Why could the previous Labour Government not abolish VAT on fuel, which they said they wanted to do after it had been applied by the Major Administration? It is because of the European Union.”
“That is absolutely correct. Having observed the history of 40 years of membership of the European Union, as it is now called, we know that it is not going to stay like this. The European Union will continue to develop. The trend of taking more taxation powers away from the member states, in the name of the single market, is enshrined in article 113, so it will continue to do so. Yes, we have a veto, but the European Court of Justice tends to accelerate the pace of tax harmonisation just when we do not expect it to do so. It is the ECJ that extended VAT to certain items and categories of goods when we did not expect it to do so. The group of amendments also addresses the renewables obligation incentives and seeks to adjust the feed-in tariff regime. Why are we able to reduce taxation on renewable energy products to only 5%?”
“My hon. Friend makes an interesting point and raises the spectre of a case to bring before the courts—perhaps even the European Court of Justice—on the basis of discrimination. Perhaps that would be one way of resolving this particular problem. I am shamelessly using this example as an opportunity to make a far broader and more important constitutional point.”
“I point out to the hon. Lady that my name is on new clause 7. I support it, but I will wait to hear what the Minister has to say before deciding whether to vote against my own Administration. I am sure she will understand that. There have not been many rebellions among the SNP yet. The point about being a political party in this House is that we are all individuals and we are all allowed to do what we choose. In fact, that is our responsibility.”
“We therefore have an anomaly whereby there is a zero VAT rate on sanitary products in the Republic of Ireland because it has never charged VAT on them. Had we started from the principle of charging no VAT on sanitary products, we would be in the same position as Ireland, but because we already charged it we cannot take it away. What a mess.”
“Our problem with the EU’s VAT directives is that they are a one-way street. Once the EU has adopted powers to regulate a particular tax, that power cannot be taken back by the member states. We are then left begging the EU as to whether we can set the tax rates for which the British people vote, as opposed to setting them ourselves. It strikes me as ironic that the Scottish National party wants independence from the United Kingdom in order to do its own thing, but it is happy to go on giving up more and more power to the European Union, so it will have even less freedom and less voice than it has in the UK. The problem is that once VAT rates on any product are set above 5%, the European Union does not allow any member state to reduce them to below 5% again.”
“I certainly acknowledge that what has happened in other member states has influenced what has happened in this country, but the hon. Lady enjoys no rights in this country that we could not have afforded ourselves through our own political processes. The question of the possibility of leaving the European Union is about taking back control over those policies, not deciding them in a different way from that which she would like. Long may we continue to agree on the importance of equal rights for women in as many areas as possible—in fact, in every area that we can possibly legislate on.”
“I am not going to give way again. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Paula Sherriff) on tabling new clause 7. She may be a little surprised at how many Members support it, but, sadly, we have to have this debate not because it is the British Government’s policy to levy the tax, but because it is the EU’s policy to do so. That is a fundamental freedom and control that we should bring back to this House in the future.”
“We should get away from such an unsatisfactory give and take to national interests by leaving the European Union.”
“I do not remember the hon. Lady giving way 20 years ago. She was at the very fine Colchester county high school for girls, which is a grammar school. In parenthesis, I am delighted that, through the reforms we are pursuing, this Government are doing more for educational opportunities for the least advantaged than any Government in living memory. Why does the hon. Lady think that Dame Dawn Primarolo was unable to remove the 5% VAT on tampons and sanitary towels when she succeeded in reducing the things that we had discretion over? Why did she not take this initiative to the European Union? It was because she found that the Government of the day felt that they had other, more important fish to fry in their negotiations with the European Union.”
“In response to the hon. Lady’s intervention, is not the point that there are so many issues we want our Prime Minister to raise in the European Union? There is an increasing number of myriad issues, such as how much contribution we make, the free movement of people and how we control our borders. It is these little things—I say “little” mistakenly, because of course it looms large as an equality item in our minds—that get set aside in favour of other things. This is a rotten way of running a continent.”
“I do not know about the hon. Gentleman, but I am here because I had to stand in an election and my constituents have the right to vote me out. How can people vote out the European Union except by voting to leave in a referendum?”
“Why is it the policy of the Government to argue that it is necessary to have any tax harmonisation in the EU in order for us to have trade with the EU?”
“When are the Government likely to provide time for a debate about the consequences of the agreements made with the Chinese Government this week concerning nuclear power, which are clearly very significant? Not only is the possibility of a new power station at Bradwell, overlooking my constituency, likely to have very detrimental effects on the marine ecology of the Blackwater estuary, but the ownership, construction and control of our critical national infrastructure appears not to have been fully considered by the National Security Council, and no proper assessment has been made of the consequences of these very significant decisions for our national security.”
“He is in rather a difficult position. We need to move on from this kind of debate to a different kind of discussion. We need far more dialogue and discussion, both in this Chamber and outside it, involving all the parties, Unionist and nationalist. We need it in public and in private, we need it in all parts of the United Kingdom, and we need to involve all four Parliaments and Assemblies. We need to choose language that seeks to build common ground, avoids divisive terms, does not prejudge outcomes, and makes each part of the United Kingdom feel valued, feel heard and feel understood. I fear that this debate is not going to do that. The Constitutional Committee is launching an inquiry into the future of the United Kingdom.”
“I draw the House’s attention to proposed Standing Order 83J(8)(b), which says that the Speaker “shall disregard any provision inserted by the House of Lords which, in the Speaker’s opinion, has the sole objective of ensuring that Standing Order”— blah, blah, blah. In other words, the Speaker is meant to adjudicate on what he thinks was behind the intention of an amendment passed by the House of Lords. We are in danger of putting the Speaker in an impossible position. I do not dismiss the risks of judicial review in these circumstances because we are inviting such controversy through these arrangements. However, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) cannot have it both ways. He cannot say that this is a massive constitutional change and then read out a whole lot of statistics and say it will make no difference at all.”
“The principle of English votes for English laws is clearly right. As I hear the objections of those who supported the settlements in Scotland and Wales that they are now going to be excluded from the consideration of matters in England that affect their constituents, I recall that that is exactly the same argument that we made against the establishment of Scottish and Welsh Parliaments, because those things are now decided in those jurisdictions whether or not they have any effect on my constituents. We have an unequal House already, and the question is how to address that. This debate follows the Prime Minister’s statement following the referendum. Since then, we have learned that doing this in this way is fantastically complicated.”