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New Europe Minister fails to reassure MPs on Charter ‘opt-out’
Blears calls for voters to have a say on “big issues”
Speaking at the EU Scrutiny Committee yesterday, the new Europe Minister Jim Murphy consistently failed to reassure
MPs that the UK’s so-called ‘opt-out’ from the Charter of Fundamental Rights negotiated by Tony Blair is an adequate
safeguard. Following Blair’s announcement in Parliament last week that “Nothing in the Charter creates justiciable
rights applicable to the United Kingdom,” MPs pressed Murphy on the fact that the text of the UK’s opt-out reads
specifically that “nothing in [Title IV] of the Charter creates justiciable rights applicable in the United Kingdom,”
and asked whether or not that meant that everything else in the Charter is in fact justiciable in the UK. Murphy
struggled to explain the meaning of the opt-out – he could only say that the “Charter doesn’t create any new rights.”
He was asked over 10 times by MPs to give a straight answer “yes or no” to the question but he failed to do so.
Instead he repeated that “the legal advice that we have had is that this charter brings in no new rights”.
Comment: The new Europe Minister’s failure to answer this question on the Charter strengthens the growing
consensus that the UK opt-out is not worth the paper it is written on. Jacques Ziller, a professor at the European
University Institute in Florence, has said that the idea of one country opting out of the charter is “nonsense” and
would quickly be challenged in the courts. The Guardian reported last week that former EU Justice Commissioner
Antonio Vitorino has also questioned the legal basis for the British opt-out and, moreover, that the Commission’s
legal experts take the same view and expect the opt-out will be tested in the courts. The Government’s argument that
the new EU treaty does not warrant a referendum is unravelling at quite a pace.
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Blears calls for voters to have a say on “big issues”- “My overriding belief is that people are capable of
making quite complex difficult decisions”
The Guardian reports that Communities Secretary Hazel Blears has announced that the Government needs to let the
public vote on “big choices”. She said “I think the world has changed. I think voting every four years and
basically handing over responsibility and power to other people and then doing nothing again for four years, I think
our democracy is not like that any more... My overriding belief is that people are capable of making quite complex
difficult decisions, setting priorities, doing trade-offs if they are given the opportunity to do it. I have never
believed in a paternalistic society that tells people what is good for them.”
Comment: Just as Gordon Brown’s new willingness to “listen and learn” does not sit well with his attempts to
avoid a referendum, Blears’ drive to include people more in “big choices” will add to the pressure to let people have
a say on the revised Constitutional Treaty. Anti-referendum MPs have long argued that EU treaties are too complicated
for ordinary people to understand and therefore any decision should be left to them, but Blears has blown that out of
the water. Her “overriding belief is that people are capable of making quite complex difficult decisions”. In the
coming months it is going to be increasingly difficult for the Government to explain why people should be allowed to
vote on certain “big choices”, but not on the future of the European Union.