Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-09-20-Speech-4-018"
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"en.20010920.3.4-018"2
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"Mr President, the United Kingdom is largely outside the provisions of the Schengen
. The policy of the British Conservatives towards Schengen is therefore rather like our policy towards the euro. We wish our neighbours and allies well, but it is not our businesses to tell them how to run initiatives which we have no intention of joining ourselves. Accordingly, as is becoming traditional on these occasions, my party will be abstaining.
There is another matter which is becoming traditional on these occasions. No report on Schengen is complete without a ritual complaint about the failure of the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic to take part. Thus, in Mr Coelho's otherwise admirable report, we have paragraph 2, which in a somewhat brusque tone calls on those two states to abolish their border controls.
This Parliament has repeatedly expressed the viewed, echoed by Commissioner Vitorino, that the UK opt-out is illegal under the terms of the Single European Act. I believe that this is legally flawed, but that is not my point today. My point rather, is that by persistently seeking to challenge a derogation which was clearly understood by all sides at the time, this Parliament is acting in bad faith. It is worth recalling the circumstances in which the Schengen Accord was built into the treaties. That decision, like all treaty changes, required unanimity. Without the consent of the United Kingdom, Schengen would have had to continue to exist within a separate legal framework.
The British government took the view that if other states wished to go ahead on their own using the institutions and mechanisms of the European Communities then it was not Britain's place to hinder them. Accordingly, it allowed the other states to push ahead within the treaties, but only subject to a clear guarantee that the UK's own border controls would not be affected. That guarantee was written in black and white into the Amsterdam Treaty.
No sooner had Amsterdam come into force however, than the European Commission and Parliament began to question the opt-out. Not for the first time, the UK had allowed other states to use the common procedures of the European treaties only for those states promptly to start clamouring for Britain's inclusion. As with Schengen, so with the social chapter and so with economic and monetary union – in all three cases Britain consented to a new EU initiative on the clear understanding that it would not be affected, only for its derogation later to be disputed. This surely is no way for the Union to proceed. After all if opt-outs are no longer legally reliable, the only alternative is a rather more promiscuous use of the national veto and that I submit would be even more objectionable to the integrationist majority in this House than it is to me."@en1
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