European Union (Amendment) Bill

The right hon. Gentleman gives me the cue to carry on with my analysis of the treaty and the Bill, because I want to consider the question of what was changed after the defeat in the French and Dutch referendums. On that occasion, there was one friend of the people of France and Holland who was not given an opportunity to say no, if it wished to do so: Britain should have been given its opportunity to say yes or no. The Foreign Secretary regularly parrots the only defence available to the Government, which is that the constitutional concept has been abandoned, and that there has been fundamental change. However, he omitted to mention that paragraphs 1, 4 and 18 of the mandate for the treaty set out how almost the entire contents of the draft constitution are to be brought about by changes to existing treaties.