European Union (Amendment) Bill

I agree. The one change that this treaty makes is to reduce the liberalisation, not through the clauses that we are currently debating but through the change secured by the French President which removed the pre-eminence of competition policy from the preamble of the original treaties. This treaty lessens the liberalising force that we would have if we stuck with the status quo. I want to focus on the new powers, and above all, the new references to security of energy supply. That is to be a shared competence, and has been pointed out, we can legislate only in so far as the European Community chooses not to. Decision making will primarily operate through qualified majority voting, and therefore we will have no veto, except in certain circumstances to which I shall refer later.