Treaty of Lisbon (No. 2)

I shall come on to energy liberalisation. It is right to point out that the Commission's current proposals are being strongly resisted by a number of member states. The important lesson that I draw from all of this is that we would not have reached this point in what I hope will be a substantial transformation of the EU energy market if it were not for qualified majority voting. It has provided a strong stimulus for reform of this important sector of our European economy. As I said, it would not have been possible to have reached this stage if it had not been for qualified majority voting. If we were to follow the advice of those on the Conservative Front Bench—I accept that not all Conservative Members feel the same way—we would be looking forward to a decade of introspection in the European Union, which would be damaging both to the EU and also, in particular, to the interests of the United Kingdom, which is my principal concern. I find it genuinely hard to understand the position that the Conservative party—officially, at least—is taking for two reasons. First, it wants to disown its role in relation to the Single European Act and the Maastricht treaty, both of which were in Britain's long-term economic and political interests and both of which rightly involved, in my view, extensions to majority voting in the Council. We would not have seen the opening up of markets in Europe without qualified majority voting. However, if that were not bad enough, there is the second problem with the Conservative party's position, which is that it now wants to blight Britain's future in the new enlarged European Union by renegotiating the basis of Britain's membership. It is that deadly combination of disowning the past and blighting the future which shows how grotesquely out of touch those on the Opposition Front Bench have become. [Interruption.] I believe also that howling at the moon, which is the best description that one can give of the Conservatives' policy on Europe, is no rational substitute for a sensible policy on Europe, but I am afraid that that is all we hear today from most Conservative Members.