VERBATIM REPORT OF SPEECH MADE BY THE RT HON DAVID HEATHCOAT-AMORY MP Member of the Convention on the Future of Europe and Chairman of the European Research Group to the SEVENTH CONGRESS FOR DEMOCRACY held in London on Friday 1 March 2002

Convention on the Future of Europe

You are the first to hear, certainly from me, about what went on at the Convention that is taking place on the future of Europe. We started our opening session yesterday. It took place in the Parliament building in Brussels and at the same time there was a full session of the European Parliament itself, so there was an enormous amount of confusion. But maybe that is not a bad thing. I would rather have confusion than it all being decided for us in advance, so maybe that was encouraging.

Let me just say a little bit about what the Convention is, or what it is supposed to be, and then about my attitude to it and my chances of influencing the outcome. The Convention on the Future of Europe (grandly called – note Europe, not the European Union, there are continental ambitions there) was set up by the member states in the Laeken Declaration, although it is also referred to in the declaration attached to the Treaty of Nice. So it has all been set up very properly and formally, and it is going to take at least a year, with meetings taking place rather more than once a month. It is designed to look at pretty well everything to do with the EU, but perhaps more specifically at the institutional changes that they think are required. This is partly due to the enlargement of the EU which is to take place, but also because I think there is a realisation that the present institutions are not working efficiently, and certainly not democratically.

The Declaration specifically refers to the role of national parliaments and whether that should be changed. There has always been ritual references to national parliaments and their importance in all the Treaties – the Treaty of Maastricht, the Treaty of Amsterdam and now the Treaty of Nice all say that national parliaments should receive better information and be more involved. Nothing has ever happened and now this is an issue to be addressed again. And then, perhaps more fundamentally, the Convention is to look at the division of competencies, who does what, where the powers lie, with a view – and this is where we get very controversial – to drawing up some sort of constitution for Europe. The membership of the Convention is drawn from national parliaments (there are two from each parliament – I am one from the House of Commons, and there is a Labour MP, Gisela Stewart, who is the other), and the European Parliament has 16 members. The Commission is directly represented, national governments have one member each, and very importantly, all the applicant countries - all twelve of them, plus Turkey as an observer - are fully represented, all sending parliamentary and governmental representatives. So in total there are 105 of us and in addition to that we have alternates, or substitutes – if we do not participate our alternate can do so. So it is a pretty big Convention and I don’t know how it is going to be managed, but it is an enormous number if you add in all the observers, all the lobby groups, all the outside helpers and assistants.

There has already been a row over the rules, which you might expect, and that is why I am here. There should have been the first working session taking place this morning in Brussels but that was cancelled by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the President of the Convention. He said in that rather grand way he has that certain documents were not able to be produced on time. The truth is that the rules were turned down. There was a revolt, I am glad to say, because the draft rules under which we are going to work for the next year or so, were far too top-down.

As usual in Europe, it was all going to be orchestrated from above. The President and his Vice Presidents had too much power and also there is this body called the Praesidium which we have discovered. The Praesidium is composed of twelve members of the Convention but it has rather more power. You remember in Animal Farm that all the animals on the farm were equal but some were more equal than others. Well, the twelve Praesidium members are definitely more equal than the rest of us. Giscard actually changed the name of the Praesidium to the Bureau, but we quickly called that the Politburo, so I gather it has now been changed back to the Praesidium. But one of the really controversial things was that it was the Praesidium, in consultation with the President, which was going to draw up the agenda for each of our sessions.

We all know that he who controls the agenda controls the outcome. There was a kind of peasants’ revolt and the very widely held view was that the ordinary members of the Convention should have the right of initiative – we should have the right at any stage to put ideas forward for consideration. Otherwise we will find after a few months when we bring up ideas from the public or from our own parliament, we will be told "Oh no, far too late, I’m afraid it has all been decided, there are draft texts here, you can amend of course, but I am afraid new ideas are out of the question". So we are not going to have that. That view was widely shared so the draft rules were rejected and will be resubmitted at our next meeting later this month. So that is the real reason why we only had the opening session yesterday and no working session today.

I think it is fairly widely felt too that something is wrong in Europe. They have spotted it too! Giscard referred in his address yesterday to the fact that "the process of European union is showing signs of flagging". Well, some of us may think that is not a bad thing. But of course it signals problems in the European Union. So the analysis is fairly general, that something needs putting right but I personally do not think that they have yet admitted the scale of the problem.

Quite simply, the European Union lacks popular consent, that is my view. As I see it, the political elite that has driven the whole thing up to now has simply become separated from the European public. That is shown in many ways – the incredibly low turnout for any European elections, the lack of interest in European matters, the resentment that it causes when they do notice. When the electorate are allowed anywhere near an actual decision, as in a referendum, they do give these extraordinary results. This happened in Denmark when, as we know, the people defied almost all the political parties, trade unions, employer organisations, all the pressures on them and voted no to the euro. And the same thing in Ireland, they voted no wholly unexpectedly.

There is something happening and they have spotted it too. The gap needs closing in some way and Europe is now recognised, even at the top, to be too remote, too unaccountable, too wasteful and too interfering. But I think the danger of this Convention that I sit on is that it will become simply a kind of bargaining process between the existing vested interests, between the existing institutions of Europe. For instance, the European Parliament – now they have already met, their members on the Convention have met, and they have a simple answer. They say, "Lack of democracy in Europe? Absolutely right. Solution: easy! Give us, the European Parliament more powers." I know that that will simply intensify the problem and not solve it. After all, the European Parliament has been given more powers. Each of the recent Treaties has always given the European Parliament more powers, given them more democratic legitimacy, and yet fewer people vote for them now than when they didn’t have any powers. So that is not the solution.

The problem is that there is no European electorate, there is no European public opinion, there is no European demos, it doesn’t exist. Giscard is fond of drawing parallels between this Convention and that which took place in Philadelphia in 1787, which drew up the United States of America, and I think in his wilder moments he sees himself as drawing up a constitution for a United States of Europe. The parallel is completely bogus and misleading. In 1787 in what is now America there were 1.3 million people, they all arrived together, they all spoke one language, and they all shared a common set of assumptions about politics and the nature of man. And that is why when they drew up their constitution it was right that they should attempt a federal structure, that they should feel that they were better represented through adding to their existing states a federal tier of government. I should note, however, that 60 years later it took a civil war in which 600,000 Americans died before the republic was finally founded in its present form.

The point is that Europe is simply not in that situation that America was in the 18^th century. We are a continent of nation states, many of them very old, with our own democracies. We have come together for certain purposes but the public feel that they are represented primarily through their national parliaments. It is that desire to see the people who represent them and take decisions in their name that is the essence of democracy and, crucially, the ability to get rid of them. I know about that process. They got rid of us in 1997 and Tony Blair in due course will know what it is like as well. But that is a right that belongs to you. Once these powers are transferred upwards away from people whom you have elected and can get rid of to a tier of government where these decisions are made by people you have not elected and cannot get rid of, then democracy has been transferred as well.

We have to get these powers back and this Convention on the Future of Europe is an opportunity, as I see it, to do that or at least to demand that it is done. The European debate is essentially about self-government. Governments make mistakes, but it doesn’t matter because those mistakes can be corrected. But if those mistakes are made by people who don’t admit they have made mistakes, where nothing ever gets reversed or amended or repealed, then democracy has gone with it. And that is why these words in the EU Treaties "irreversibly" and "irrevocably" are profoundly undemocratic. Nothing should be irreversible.

I don’t think these problems are going to be solved by institutional readjustments, as Giscard puts it. Maybe there will be a plan to create a new chamber, a kind of senate alongside the European Parliament composed of representatives from national parliaments. That is one idea. It does not attract me because I don’t think that institutional changes are what the public wants. They don’t want another body in the European Union. Instead we have to stand back from this whole process and ask ourselves very fundamental questions about what Europe does and why it does it.

Let us take one example: the acquis communautaire, which is simply a word for the whole body of rules and regulations and laws that compose the European Union so far. That is sacrosanct. The Laeken Declaration which set this up actually does not quite make this explicit, but its wording assumes that the acquis is not to be reviewed. But why not? There are 85,000 pages of it and the applicant countries all have to sign up to it and they are trying to do it. They are transposing it into their laws, they are working overtime, the machines are pouring out paper, their laws are flooding all these twelve countries. A lot of it will not make any difference, no-one will enforce them, but that is what they are being asked to do. Why? Why can’t we just say why do we have this? Why can’t we just repeal whole chunks of it, dismantle parts of this European empire? It is that sort of creative, fundamental thinking that I think that the Convention needs, but it is at the present time something of a heresy. But I think if we do not tackle it in that way, then the Convention will fail.

Lastly, what are my chances? Well, I don’t know, it’s very early, we haven’t really started yet. Certainly I am very much in a minority. Eurosceptic opinion generally is dramatically under-represented in the Convention. But I am not alone, for two reasons.

Firstly, I have found some allies. There is a group called the Democracy Group, under the chairmanship of Jens-Peter Bonde MEP, who has attended the Congress for Democracy. He played a very leading part in the Danish No campaign, he is a Danish MEP and he has organised us into this loose grouping called the Democracy Group. It is very general, it goes from Right to Left. There is a Communist from Finland, there is a Green lady from Ireland, there is someone from the Centre party in Estonia, there are French "real Gaullists", as I call them, (they have some other name now, the sort of politicians General de Gaulle would have recognised), there are members from the Czech Republic and from Slovakia and elsewhere. So it is a real rainbow in that sense - not large, maybe there will not be more than 12 or 15 of us - but we are united in the belief that this empire of the Union must give way to a democratic and self-governing Europe of nation states and the people of Europe.

And the second reason I think I am not alone is that I believe I represent a majority opinion in this country and if that is true then it is certainly my duty and my strength to do what I am trying to do in that Convention.