European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am grateful for the chance to take part in the debate. I had hoped to speak about the referendum on Second Reading, but unfortunately I was suffering from flu and had no voice that day, so I had to leave my comments until today. The debate on the amendment will be remembered most for the impressive sight of the Liberal Democrat party marching with sound and fury courageously towards the fence on which it has been ordered to perch tonight. The other thing that has struck me during the debates on the Bill is the backcloth of the Labour strategy towards Europe; it is based on the extraordinary belief that if they do not allow the British people the chance to express through a referendum their growing doubts about the European Union they will somehow come to love the European Union. That is gravely to underestimate the British people. We are told that a referendum is not needed because the treaty does not, in effect, do very much. That has been the main argument. It was even the argument when we were talking about the constitutional treaty: we were told that it, too, did not do very much. However, even if that were true, which it is not, as my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary impressively indicated earlier, it takes only a small step to walk through a doorway into another room; it takes only a small step to cross a dividing line. I believe that the treaty is the latest and the most significant step down the road of ever-closer union to the project of a united Europe which is at the heart of the policies of so many other Governments in Europe. We fool ourselves if we believe that somehow the treaty is not actually taking us one step further down that road, yet the British people have never been allowed to say whether they want to go down that road. Each step—each of the recent treaties—has been described in the House as insignificant, as not doing very much, but each, like grandmother’s footsteps, edges us closer and closer towards the goal of a united Europe. My growing disillusion with the way in which Europe is developing is shared by many others in the UK who, like me, did not start out as Eurosceptics. I supported the Common Market in the first and only referendum but, over recent years, my Euro-friendliness has been increasingly tested by a series of treaties, each incrementally diminishing the sovereignty of this Parliament and, therefore, of the British people without the British people ever being asked whether they wanted that to happen.