Former Lib Dem MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber Edward McMillan-Scott has been writing or Politics.co.uk about the Tories’ efforts to ensure that national parliaments can veto EU laws that they don’t like.

Edward clearly knows a fair bit about how the EU works, arguably significantly more than your average Eurosceptic Tory backbencher. He’s been in on the organisation within the EU that actually does represent the rights of national parliaments and it has asserted itself in recent years.

He explains how the process works:

The Lisbon treaty introduced yellow and orange card  procedures, which allow a third or more of national parliaments, acting together, to vet and temporarily block draft laws proposed by the European Commission.

This gave national parliaments a significant check on EU legislation and even a veto, when governments or MEPs also agree to block a Commission proposal. So there’s a feeling that some form of constitutional balance has been reached. The basis for such checks is legislative compliance either with the subsidiarity principle (that the EU should only act when member states cannot do so effectively) or proportionality (that “the content and form of EU action shall not exceed what is necessary to achieve the objectives of the treaties”). But in practise, only a handful of issues have been raised under these procedures.

There are plenty of areas of potential reform in the way that national parliaments are involved in EU law-making. It’s a process which has evolved over years. Some are advanced by the more ‘parliamentary’ countries, notably the Scandinavians, Germany and the UK. But let’s be clear: they all stop short of introducing a parliamentary veto.

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