European Union (Amendment) Bill

I came into the Chamber earlier—it seems like quite a long time ago now—to make a brief contribution based on my personal experience in the House, which I believe is directly relevant to clause 3, curious though that may seem. Before that, however—and before you took the Chair, Mrs. Heal—the hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) threw down the gauntlet to my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), which I would like briefly to pick up. The hon. Gentleman held aloft the document, asked, ““Have you read this?”” and challenged us to say which of the items in it our constituents had written to us about. Hon. Members will be pleased to hear that I do not propose to go through the entire litany, but back in the autumn I sent out 35,000 cards to my constituents, 3,500 of which were returned, which by my miserable maths makes 10 per cent., which is about 10 times more than we usually receive when we send things without a reply paid envelope. In addition, I collected 3,500 signatures for a petition calling for a referendum on the constitution, which is what the treaty is. Those people writing to me made their views very clear. They were concerned about defence, about European foreign policy, about an extension of presidential powers and, most particularly, about the loss of the veto in a whole raft of areas. The hon. Gentleman held up the document and asked, ““Have you read this?”” As you will remember, Mrs. Heal, before the summer recess we did not have access to even the draft treaty in English, so I—poor, sad soul that I am—got a copy in French and tried to read it. It was, dare I say, pretty obscure. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green said that the document was ““opaque””. I would say that it is obscure. When the draft treaty came out in English, I heaved a sigh of relief and grabbed it, giving up on my miserable French, only to discover that it was just as obscure in English as it was in French—to me, at least. One thing shines through clause 3, however. You have sat in the Chair on numerous Committees considering various pieces of legislation, Mrs. Heal, as have I. In your years in the House, you will have experienced, as I have experienced, under—I have to say with shame—successive Governments, not just this one, a weakening of parliamentary draftsmanship. It has reached the point where increasingly lazy draftsmen write secondary powers into Bills saying that the Minister will have the right to do this or that thing by secondary legislation. There is a whole raft of potential secondary legislation that is not contained in very many of the Bills that we pass through the House. I see clause 3 as the European version of that writ large. Clause 3 is not about giving nation states a right to do as they see fit; it is about a right of the European Union to tell us in Parliament what we will do and enact by secondary legislation. If I am right—the Minister will no doubt clarify this when he winds up, but I believe that I am—we have failed to grasp one salient fact, as was mentioned earlier. In these Houses of Parliament, the law is the last resort and Parliament is sovereign. In many European jurisdictions, the legislature is bound up with the legal process—they are part and parcel of the same thing. If clause 3 goes through, we will find the European Court dictating to European legislators what we as United Kingdom legislators will then have to push through as secondary legislation. We shall find that we have no say over what we are enacting in many areas that are now the responsibility of this House. With great respect to my right hon. Friends the Members for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) and for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr. Duncan Smith), who have said otherwise, clause 3 is not unimportant. It is not the most important clause in the Bill, but it is not unimportant. It is tantamount to a Trojan horse. If it goes through, inside it and on the back of it will come whole rafts of changes that we shall have no power to resist. That is why it must not, cannot and should not stand part of the Bill.