Treaty of Lisbon (No. 5)

My hon. Friend is probably right about that. He made that point earlier in the debate to good effect. Let me summarise the position. The provisions of the Lisbon treaty on foreign, security and defence policy are therefore not difficult to characterise. They are, by common agreement across the House, more substantial than the Government have acknowledged. Although they are described as limited in their implications, even a short analysis suggests that their future implications could be far-reaching. For that reason, they have been, almost without exception, opposed by Ministers during the negotiations of the treaty, and for the same reasons they are opposed by the Opposition today. Yet the Government have at every opportunity tried to keep Parliament and the public in the dark about the treaty in general, and its provisions on foreign policy and defence in particular. They negotiated in secret. They have tried to cover up the importance of those provisions. Now they are delaying the crucial decisions about how they will work in practice until it is too late for MPs and voters to have any say on the matter at all. If the treaty is ratified, only the passage of months and years will inform us whether the assurances of the Foreign Secretary today were to be relied upon, but I suspect that the judgment of time on Ministers, whose complacent advocacy of these proposals has replaced their virulent opposition to them in the recent past, will be very harsh indeed.