European Union (Amendment) Bill

I take the hon. Gentleman's point, but does that not highlight precisely the difficulty of the textual approach to the treaty, which was born from creating a constitution that was subsequently abandoned? It reads not like a legal definition of treaty obligations but like a constitution, with many implications for the way the relationships among the component parts operate in practice. If everybody agreed that that is what they wanted, it might not present any great difficulty, but we are not agreed, and there has been much polemic and argument about the extent to which national sovereignty and the actions of the House may be restricted as a result of the treaty. I am always prepared to listen to the Minister, and I have read his comments to the Committees before which he has appeared, but the Government keep saying that Conservative Members are worrying about nothing. I am not so sure about that because I worry when I read texts that appear to be open to ambivalent interpretation. However, if the Minister is right, our amendment is innocuous.