European Union (Amendment) Bill

I do not want to get into the history of referendums with my hon. Friend. The history of our debates goes back long and far, and remains perfectly amicable, but neither of us is going to persuade the other. I should like to make some progress. I have made my general point, and there are few original arguments to be made on either side of it. My hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr. Cash) and I have made most of them in our time. Unusually, I find the official position of all three political parties quite bewildering. I do not envy their Front-Bench spokesmen. They have had considerable difficulty in putting forward their near-incomprehensible positions. The Conservatives are quite unable to explain how the treaty differs from Maastricht and the Single European Act, upon which we consistently refused a referendum.