European Union (Amendment) Bill

I sympathise with my hon. Friend's points. We have a directive that said that postal services would be liberalised across the EU. We decided to go early, but the French and others have pushed it back by a couple of years. They have not cancelled the directive. Some have pushed it back to 2013, but they have not cancelled it. The logical conclusion of the argument is that we cannot reverse the process—that appears not to be the policy of the Government or of the main Opposition party. Is my hon. Friend arguing that we should send our Minister to Europe to condone the refusal by other countries of Europe to liberalise their markets, thereby denying us the level playing field that we said that we would get? If the horse has bolted—if we have liberalised, and if this country will not reverse that process—why should we allow other countries to deny us access to their markets? The French did that by refusing us access to their domestic electricity markets until they were threatened with infraction proceedings by the Commission, when they had—