European Union (Amendment) Bill

I believe that if the treaty is ratified we will have undermined our powers of self-government to the extent that we could be considered to be in a colonial situation. I have visited other members of the Commonwealth who have more powers over their legislation concerning immigration, asylum and criminal justice than we, the mother country, will have under this treaty. That is an extraordinary irony of history. Under the terms of the treaty, the whole area of justice and home affairs becomes a shared competence of the European Union—that is to say, the European Union and the member states will have powers to legislate. Crucially, however, it is asserted in article 2 that when the EU legislates in this area, member states will lose the ability to do so. In other words, we have not a shared competence but a residual role. That is profoundly important, particularly because attaching to this is the provision—