European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful for the support for my amendment expressed in several quarters, particularly by my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Mr. Cash) and for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) and, slightly unexpectedly, by the Liberal Democrats, who support my amendment, although, as usual, for the wrong reasons. I must also mention the contribution of my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). Although we disagree about the substance of the treaty, his contribution to the debate certainly helped to analyse the issue, and his point was a good one: this is one of the very few occasions in these debates when we have been able to devote sufficient attention to one aspect of the Bill. The line-by-line scrutiny that we were promised has been comprehensively forgotten and that promise broken, but today at least we have been able to ventilate these issues at some length. The key point in my amendment is simply that clause 3(4) and (5) will give a power to the Secretary of State or the Treasury to make amendments to existing United Kingdom laws and statutory instruments, and some of those laws have been on the statute book for many years. That is supposedly to reflect changes in terminology, but it is quite clear from the way the clause has been drafted that it is not limiting. It does not strictly confine such amendments to the making of technical name changes, as suggested by the Minister. If such changes were strictly confined to making differences of name or number, that would have been stated in the Bill. However, those amendments simply have to reflect changes in terminology. At the start of the debate, I gave examples of where apparent changes in terminology in fact make substantive changes. The change from EC to EU is not simply a technical change, because the EU will include not simply all those matters in the existing EC treaty, but all the intergovernmental matters in foreign and security policy and in justice and home affairs. I gave some other examples, to which the Minister has completely failed to respond. I instanced specific statutory modifications that we know the Government want to make because they are listed in the previous Bill, which was introduced in 2005 to give effect to the constitutional treaty. Those modifications include amendments to the Export Control Act 2002 that will bring into British law provisions and obligations in the common foreign policy that prevent people from exporting goods and making technology transfers. The modifications also include alterations to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that completely change it by including reference not to the intergovernmental method of deciding criminal justice matters, but to the new measures in the treaty of Lisbon, which collapse the intergovernmental pillar and make criminal justice matters subject to the European Court of Justice and normal decision making through majority voting. The Minister owed us an explanation and a response to the detailed questions that I asked him about the amendments to British and UK law that we know the Government want to make—amendments that are not simply technical, but involve matters of substance. In view of the Minister’s poor response, I shall press my amendment to a Division. Question put, That the amendment be made:— The Committee divided: Ayes 189, Noes 291.