European Union (Amendment) Bill

I wish to begin by drawing an historical comparison with an analogous time when people decided what laws they wanted their Parliament to exercise: the Putney debates, compared with which our debates are pretty tame. Much concern was expressed in the great Putney debates about who governs us and how; matters were dealt with in a manner that befitted their importance. We have had an interesting debate, and I congratulate Labour Members on their contributions to it. We are discussing hugely significant questions. I want to concentrate on new clauses 8 and 9, which I tabled. I endorse the arguments of my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) on amendment No. 13 and the customarily perspicacious remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Mr. Heathcoat-Amory) on new clause 5. I also pay tribute to the contribution of the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty), who has extensive knowledge from his extremely good chairmanship of the European Scrutiny Committee. I have not mentioned everybody, but I should add that I enjoyed the perambulations around the question of supremacy of the hon. Member for Cambridge (David Howarth), although I do not agree with him on that—but, not unnaturally, I do agree with him on the Bill of Rights question. This is not just a legal debate; it is a debate about the political will of the nation as expressed through the representatives in this House on behalf of the voters of this country. That is the measure of the importance of the debate. It is also about the question of whether we are able to demonstrate and reassert in the context of this Bill the principle of the supremacy of Parliament. That is not an abstraction; it is about essentially practical matters, as I shall explain. Against that background, let me also say that, with the leave of the Chair, I shall press new clauses 8 and 9 to a Division; I want to put that on the record, as I understand that that is a necessary formality. I wish first to refer to some comments of Edmund Burke, the great Conservative philosopher-in-action and politician and in many respects the founder of the Conservative party, in his famous essay, ““Reflections on the Revolution in France”” of 1789. William Pitt, whose biography our shadow Foreign Secretary has recently written, was then Prime Minister. Edmund Burke's words—which I paraphrase slightly—are worth bearing in mind. He said that they"““will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation and foresight can build up in a hundred years””." He went on to say that"““the best legislators have often been satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid and ruling principle in government…and, having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation…By their””—" the politicians'—"““violent haste and their defiance of the process of nature, they are delivered over blindly to every projector and adventurer, to every alchemist and empiric.””" What he meant by that was that it was possible, in a very short time, to pull down a whole constitution. I believe that, for practical purposes, that is what we have been doing with this Bill—not only in the manner in which our discussions have been truncated but in the impact that it will have on the constitution of this country.