European Union (Amendment) Bill

No, that is not my argument. The so-called innocuous change from EC to EU is not simply a change of terminology, because the EU incorporates not just the EC, but intergovernmental policy areas such as common foreign and security policy and criminal justice. In the same way, the other changes that the Government may propose to give effect to the treaty in existing UK legislation will also encompass matters of substance and are not simply matters of terminology. To demonstrate that, I need to pick up a number of themes that have emerged in the debates so far. The first point is that the treaty is almost the same as the European constitution, which failed at the hands of the French and Dutch electorates. That observation is now not seriously contested by Ministers. There are a few apologists from the Labour Back Benches who occasionally pretend that they are two different treaties but the Select Committee reports are decisive on this. When the Prime Minister says that the constitutional approach has been abandoned, he must know that that refers only to the form of the treaties rather than to their substance. The constitutional treaty brought the two treaties into a single document; the present one simply amends the two existing treaties without formally merging them. In substance and legal effect, however, the two treaties are the same.