Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-10-26-Speech-4-149"
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"en.20001026.6.4-149"2
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"Mr President, it is a great pleasure to have the opportunity of commenting on this report by Mr Wuermeling and on the fundamental underlying question of making our law in Europe good law and clear law. I congratulate Mr Wuermeling on his report.
Etienne Dumont and his great English master, Jeremy Bentham, were inclined to make the point that since laws are always in some measure coercive, they are always in some measure evil. They may be necessary evils where they control yet greater evil; but they should only do so proportionately to the evil to be met and dealt with. We can accept this point and this report reflects that spirit, in demanding clarity of law, simplicity of law and proportionality of the legal means to the public end sought.
In addition, and vitally, the report raises the issue of subsidiarity, which is in some measure controversial in this Chamber tonight. Subsidiarity, indeed, comes from the work of Pope Pius IX and therefore from an enemy of the Benthamite approach to law. But here two different traditions of thought come together. It is not a good thing to take decision-making away from the most local level at which it can be efficiently exercised, whether that be the level of the individual, the family, the village, the town or whatever.
I receive letters from time to time, one only last week from one of my constituents living in a remote part of the West Highlands of Scotland. He said to me: "What are you people out there doing? For 2000 years or more people have been safely drinking the water from the burns (the little rivers), and now they are prohibited from doing so. Elaborate schemes of water purification are imposed upon them to no public good." I hear similar things from residents of the Island of Islay, where the proposal for the protection of the local seal colony by a grand international body is resented, because the people have looked after the seals better for the last 2000 years than we think a grander organisation is likely to do in the future. The point is made. Law should be made close to the people, and local knowledge, whenever it is the most relevant knowledge, should always be applied, rather than the grand over-arching scheme.
It is, however, also true that there are some public goods that can be pursued only at the most general level and there are, indeed, aspects of environment protection, aspects of species protection, for example, aspects also of single market law, aspects of law against protectionism, aspects of law to govern the Internet, which can only be approached at a level at least as general as the European level. The principle of subsidiarity, properly understood, points us in both directions: take decisions at the lowest level possible, but acknowledge that the lowest level possible may be indeed a very high level, when general goods are at stake that will be lost unless protected on the same terms everywhere. So that makes this stress upon subsidiarity very important.
I think my friend Mr Medina, and his colleagues, are wrong in saying that this is only a political principle. It is a constitutional principle and, like all constitutional principles, it has on the one side a political impact when we, the legislator, decide what law to make; but it has, on the other hand, a legal impact when it comes to the question of how the courts should interpret and apply the law.
May I finally commend to the House Amendment No 1 which asks that the Commission and the European Union take seriously the fact that we have, as well as the Union of the States, autonomous self-governing communities within. I represent Scotland in this House. Scotland and England formed the United Kingdom by Treaty in 1707 and have maintained it since then. For 290 years, however, Scots law, which remained a distinct body of law mid-way between the civil law of continental Europe and the common law of England and the Americas, retained a distinct system but was legislated only from Westminster.
We have created a Scottish Parliament in the last year. Scots private law has been sent back home; Scots criminal law has been sent back home. It would be an irony indeed if, at the very moment of achieving that, we were to transfer the whole of legislative power over private and criminal and commercial law to the Union. I do not think that is what is intended or will happen. But it is important to bear in mind the interests of subsidiarity at levels below the Member States, as well as between the Member States and the Union, and there is no reason at all why the constitutional principle that is at stake cannot be interpreted widely and generously at all levels of this great Union."@en1
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