Professor Gavin Barrett:

I thank the Deputy for those points. I will address each one in order.

The first one concerned the changes brought about concerning EMU without treaty change. What happened in this regard is that the provisions of the Maastricht treaty were the best that could be agreed at the time but they were wholly inadequate in many respects. An example of one of them, that impacted us, was that there was no bailout mechanism. We benefited from a temporary bailout mechanism, the European Financial Stability Mechanism, but that was replaced, ultimately, by the European Stability Mechanism. How was that introduced? It was not by European Union treaty change but by an external treaty. Similarly, when it came to fiscal discipline, how was this introduced? Well, partially, it was, famously, through the six-pack and two-pack of subordinate legislation, as well as through the introduction of the fiscal stability treaty. Again, we might have expected this to have come about through treaty change, but this was blocked by the UK and the Czech Republic, if I recall it correctly, at the time. Soft law was introduced then as well. The Euro Plus Pact, for example, was introduced in the form of soft law.

This kind of thing can be done by means of international, non-EU treaties, but the problem then is that a whole load of democratic safeguards are excluded. The European Parliament does not, therefore, get a role if this kind of thing is done, and neither does the European Court of Justice get an adequate role. It is a kind of second-best approach. We have operated in this way and we have done okay with it. Most recently-----