Treaty of Lisbon (No. 7)

Yes, my hon. Friend is right. Of course it means power. Competence here is a euphemism for power, because it is an attempt to convey to people that the recipients of this competence might also be competent at it, which is not always the case. It means a shift of power. It means exclusive power over some of these areas. I had intended to list many more, but in the interests of time, I will not. On shared competence, the Government attempted to have trans-European networks and consumer protection kept as supplementary competences, which they are now, but again they gave way on this extension of EU power. This is equally true of the single legal personality. For the first time, the EU is explicitly endowed by treaty with its own legal personality—something that Tony Blair boasted of blocking as a potentially damaging proposal when the Amsterdam treaty was agreed.