European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am happy to commend the right hon. Lady to people on her side of the equation; as in the earlier debate, she put the arguments from her point of view as well as they could be put—which is not very much. I really believe that the point I have just made, and which my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) made in his speech on the motion, is very important: we operate, and have always operated, not on the basis of a written constitution or the abstract principles so beloved of—if I dare say it—the Socialist International and all that goes with it, but on the pragmatic assumption that there is a need to adapt and evolve according to the requirements of the time, as Edmund Burke would have said of his time. There are principles we believe in, such as human rights, freedom, democracy and liberty, but we apply them periodically according to the circumstances of the time, not according to a fixed order of the kind prescribed in the arrangements we are debating.