European Union (Amendment) Bill

I will give way in a moment. Astonishingly, the treaty will also weaken one of the greatest strengths of the European Union for the past half century: its commitment to undistorted competition in the single market—an outcome that can only have resulted from the supine ineffectiveness of Britain's negotiators. On top of all that, the treaty creates for the first time sweeping provisions for its own amendment without recourse to further treaties, and it brings about fundamental change in the institutional structure of the European Union—changes that the Government initially opposed, then were happy to define as constitutional in their implications, and now pretend are matters of little importance, about which the people of this country need not be troubled. The most serious objection to the Bill, irrespective of its merits or lack of them, is that the Government intend to take it through Parliament without any of the consultation of the people that was promised at the last election, brazenly abrogating the commitment made by every party in the House to hold a national referendum in this event. The case for a referendum rests in part on the constitutional significance of what is proposed. When the former Foreign Secretary, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), was asked on 6 June 2005 what were the constitutional aspects of the treaty that merited submission to a referendum, he said they were the creation of a permanent President of the Council of Ministers and a European Foreign Minister. Both of those provisions remain in the treaty today, and the right hon. Gentleman is the Lord Chancellor today. That was his opinion at the time.