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Bernard Jenkin MP: The total lack of scrutiny of the Lisbon Treaty shows British democracy is becoming an elective dictatorship

Bernard Jenkin, MP for North Essex and a member of the Defence Select Committee, explains how Commons scrutiny of the Lisbon Treaty is virtually non-existent.

Last week’s proceedings on the European Union (Amendment) Bill, better known as the Lisbon Treaty, underline the farce that the House of Commons has become.  No wonder so few MPs are bothering to turn up, when the chances of being called to speak are so small.  No wonder fewer and fewer people bother to vote at General Elections when there is so little constructive debate and so much about politicians feathering their own nests.  The Government’s manipulation of the Commons timetable has deliberately stifled debate on the Lisbon Treaty and means that voters are getting a very raw deal from their elected representatives.  Few of the younger Labour colleagues seem to grasp what powers have been progressively stolen from MPs over the past decade.

Despite the manifest importance of the Lisbon Treaty, its second reading (where the general principle of a bill is discussed) had a mere six hours of debate – the same as any ordinary bill these days.  The Maastricht Treaty had two days for its second reading, with the first day allowed to continue through the night, so that anyone who wanted to speak could do so.  Speakers had no limits on the length of their speeches, but for Lisbon, backbenchers were limited to just eight minutes, no time at all to develop an argument on a bill  implementing a treaty which runs to 294 pages!

Bernard Jenkin MP: A defence policy for the UK that matches commitments and resources

Bernard Jenkin has just authored 'A Defence Policy for the UK: Matching Commitments and Resources', published by Conservative Way Forward.

The MoD Performance Report’s “overall assessment” of its ability to “Generate forces, which can be deployed, sustained and recovered at the scales of effort required” is “unlikely to be met.”  We not only need about £15 billion extra in the defence budget (about 50 per cent more), just to maintain present capabilities and equipment programmes, but the government – any government – needs to understand the nature of real nature of the choice.  Defence policy has become divorced from the demands placed upon the Armed Forces by foreign policy.  Either we bulk up our defence or opt out of a global role.  If foreign policy demands intervention, the Armed Forces must be funded accordingly.  Labour’s attempts to subcontract UK foreign and defence policy to international institutions have manifestly failed.

When, in his Guildhall speech, the prime minister advocated the UK’s role as “hard-headed internationalism”, the BBC not unfairly asked what “soft-headed internationalism” might look like.  Though Mr Brown is anxious to distance himself from his predecessor, this is the same muddle which afflicted Mr Blair.  His foreign policy was characterised by the infamous ‘open mike’ incident, “Yo Blair!”  The embarrassment was not that President Bush appeared to forget the prime minister’s first name.  Rather it was that Mr Blair’s suggestions about the Middle East were just dismissed.  As he found over Iraq, in the end “internationalism” lacks leverage.

Labour’s so-called ‘ethical’ foreign policy failed to define the UK’s global role.  The 1999 Kosovo campaign was a one-off, but Mr Blair seized on it as a new basis for military intervention, in one of the non-sentences that became his rhetorical signature, “A just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values.”   Globalisation required “a new doctrine of international community” under which, “In the end, values and interests merge” – not a comment that would impress even a lower-sixth student of philosophy.  In the US, there is today a new realism about foreign policy, with some now advocating an “ethical realism” to be based upon old-fashioned enlightened self-interest, in tradition of Edmund Burke.  British foreign policy should comprise less messianic preaching of values: more listening and accommodating of others’ legitimate interests alongside our own.  Good results matter more than good intentions.  It is more intellectually honest to admit that the British national interest, above all, is what should underpin UK foreign policy, rather than some spurious doctrine of international community.  This is actually rather obvious.  British governments are elected by the British people to serve the British people.  Policy may well be designed to serve wider international interests, but it is pretence to suggest that we do not put our own interests first.

British foreign policy must protect our interests as the pre-eminent European global trading nation.  We have strong historic connections with both today’s greatest power (the US) and with new great powers emerging (China and India) and the old Commonwealth. Our language, soaked in British values of freedom and free enterprise, has become the global vernacular of trade and diplomacy.  In defining our global role, it would be rash to rely on others to maintain the international peace and security on which the global system depends.  Who would step into the breach?