European Union (Amendment) Bill

It is, but that should not surprise my hon. Friend, because he has been a student of the matter for long enough. I draw the House’s attention back to the intriguing one-sided correspondence with the Government after the collapse of the constitutional treaty and prior to their decisions and the intergovernmental conference. It is reported in the European Scrutiny Committee’s third report of session 2007-08 that the Foreign Secretary’s predecessor stated that there was"““no negotiation in the run-up to the June Council until we saw the text for the first time only a couple of days before the June Council itself””." Everybody believed that that was when the new treaty was produced, but it was not. We know as a result of a leaked letter that Angela Merkel’s Government contacted the other Governments as part of the process of rebuilding the treaty. The Germans are wonderfully efficient. They are so efficient that they always keep their records and put everything in them. They are not trying to hide anything from their public, as our Government are. We can congratulate them on that. With ruthless efficiency, they rounded up what members of Governments had said to them in discussions and negotiations. They asked such things as how they could find ways to get the treaty through without having to show that the existing treaties would essentially have to be repealed. One question asked:"““How do you assess the proposal made by some Member States not to repeal the existing treaties but to return to the classical method of treaty changes while preserving the single legal personality””?" Another asked:"““How do you assess the proposal made by some Member States using a different terminology without changing the legal substance””?" Those are not just questions that the German Government or Angela Merkel wanted to ask. Essentially, they arose from minutes of meetings with either officials or Ministers of other countries. The letter is fascinating because it blows the Government’s position out of the water. The Government and Angela Merkel knew all along what the process was all about. Having learned the lesson of what had happened to the constitutional treaty, they wanted its provisions back. They felt that they could not proceed without them. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe is honest about that; he believes that Europe needs them to proceed to the next stage, as did Angela Merkel and many other European leaders. The letter shows that they needed to find a way to avoid any reference to the public, such as a referendum. The first point about which we should be clear is that the process is a classic, cynical political mechanism. If we believe that, we shall not go far wrong. I do not want to engage in the arguments about whether there were three or 38 things in the treaty—or, as the Liberal Democrats said on television today, that there are so many thousand words versus another so many thousand. It is all meaningless nonsense. The truth is that everybody believes the treaty is basically the same as the constitution. The collapse of the pillars and the nature of the debate are critical, so there is clearly some cynicism. There is another reason for a referendum. People talk about the principle that the House should decide, but the truth is that the principle has become a bit of a joke. What do we really think we decide on in this place that the Government have not already told us we must decide? When did the House last manage to insert an amendment at any stage of a European treaty that reflected the will of the public or the House? It has not happened. We know about the wonderful whipping system on both sides of the House—I do not blame the Labour Government for that; I had to defy it myself in my day. The whipping system guarantees that, to a greater or lesser extent, the Government have their way and their business.