European Union (Amendment) Bill

Thank you, my Lords, I accept the correction. That is understandable, bearing in mind the rational nature of this modest project we are all trying to construct in Europe. Why people on the Eurosceptic side of the argument get so incensed about it is beyond all rational thinking. Logically, treaty Bills have to be accepted in toto. That is inevitable because a national Government—the sovereign Government—of each member state have already negotiated the clauses and are therefore entitled to seek ratification with the majority they manage to secure in the one or two chambers of each parliament. It is two chambers in most countries, but only one chamber in Denmark and some other countries. The opponents forget that 19 member states had already ratified the original text of the old constitution and were, to put it mildly, frustrated by what was going on. If we are in a community, we have to occasionally pay attention to what the other member states want and need. The sovereign member Governments had to return to the exercise and re-present a modernised, non-constitutional type of text to the Union’s public. I am delighted that this whole exercise has restored the powers of the sovereign parliaments of each member country, which were increasingly being pushed aside by this ridiculous referendumitis, which is actually of the street—more and more, in fact, of the street of the extreme thinker—and of the gutter press in this county, as we know so well. Sadly, that is true more in the UK than elsewhere. That is one of the great dangers facing us all. Sovereign Governments and parliaments are very important concepts that we treasure in this country and elsewhere. We are all proud, patriotic British people—but also, I hope, increasingly and enthusiastically Europeans as well. We have re-established the rights of the sovereign Governments and parliaments over demagogic, crude, primitive and sinister populism. The Irish are the only ones who have to do it the other way because of their constitution, but every other parliament, including the European Parliament, has seen the dangers emerging from the anti-European street and an isolationist press. That is particularly so in Britain but is also the case, to some extent, elsewhere. I see from history that we had the Second World War and the atom bomb without a referendum. We joined NATO without a referendum, a much bigger so-called loss of intrinsic national so-called sovereignty. We outlawed capital punishment without a referendum, for obvious reasons. This Government launched an illegal war in Iraq without a referendum, and 10 years earlier the then Tory Government, quite rightly, flatly refused a referendum on the Maastricht treaty Bill. That must have been the biggest piece of this so-called loss of pretend sovereignty that I and others have ever witnessed, not least with the subsequent creation of European citizenship for the first time, a profound step that will develop later on alongside national citizenship, although it will not replace it. On 21 January, the Foreign Secretary reminded us that left-wing parties in all 27 member states supported the treaty of Lisbon, as did liberal and social democratic-type parties, but strangely only 26 conservative parties in the Union supported it. There is no prize for guessing which was the exception. I say for the benefit of noble Lords who do not remember that it was the British Tory party, denounced in the process by the right honourable Kenneth Clarke. I found that, for part of the time, I was sitting masochistically in the Committee stage in the House of Commons—a process that went on for several weeks—until I could stand the boring tones of Mr William Cash no more. He was there every day and I think made 275 interventions and about 80 or 85 speeches. I have never before witnessed such root and branch hostility by the Tory Front Bench and by the people on the Back Benches—some of them rather peculiar people—not just to the treaty and the Bill but to almost every aspect of the European Union. I never expected to witness that. I agreed with the right honourable Member for Rushcliffe, Mr Kenneth Clarke, when he reminded us that Mr Tony Blair’s volte-face on the need for a referendum on the previous treaty text was at the root of this absurd chaos and Sturm und Drang in Britain. What a contrast between the ludicrous antics in the so-called sovereign parliamentary scene at the other end of the building and the dignified and mature behaviour of the German, French, Italian, Spanish and indeed Danish parliaments, to name just a few. I am sure that noble Lords have appreciated the wiser aspects of this debate on a sensible Bill that we have witnessed today, with some interesting contributions from the Eurosceptics. I pay tribute to some of the interesting suggestions made by the noble Lord, Lord Lawson. A number of speakers brought out the essential points of this legislation. The constitutional approach of the previous text has definitely been abandoned and the amending treaty has taken its place. That is gaining more and more support in this country—in the business community, in the trade unions and in all sorts of NGOs. The NSPCC and even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are supportive.