European Union (Amendment) Bill

I had not really intended to intervene in this debate; I thought that it was going to be a rather cathartic experience for Eurosceptics opposite and I would just sit and listen. But I have listened with great interest to a number of the contributions, in particular that of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, who has just sat down. He appeals to us that he is really one of those Tories who is a good European and that he wants to be in Europe. But everything he then said showed that he wants to be a good European and in Europe providing that the other 26 countries of the Union change their opinion of what the Union is and bend their will to his. That is not pro-Europeanism. It is an individual sort of arrogance: ““We are the people who will tell Europe how to run its affairs and what it ought to do. If they were really good Europeans they would all change their minds and join in with our rather eccentric, limited view of what Conservative Europeanism is””. Earlier we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart. He took us for a wander down memory lane, through 1972 and the circumstances leading up to the 1975 referendum. That referendum is deeply ingrained upon my memory; I felt we were being dragged along by our own Eurosceptics in the Labour Party, and we had a fix of a referendum. That was not in order to paper over fundamental constitutional issues—there was no such issue to sort out—but to patch over the divisions inside the party and stay in power for the rest of the 1970s. That is what it was all about. My own recollection of that referendum was of even more concern to me. I approached the parliamentary bookmaker in the House of Commons, Mr Ian Mikardo, and asked him what odds he would give me on getting a yes vote in every constituency in the United Kingdom. He offered me 200-1, on which I had £10 with him. My big regret was not the fact that we won the referendum, but that those marginal parts of the United Kingdom, stuck there in the Western Isles and Orkney and Shetland, cost me the £2,000 from Mikardo. That indicates that we got a yes vote in every constituency in England, Wales and mainland Scotland; those two island constituencies were the only part of the United Kingdom that let us down. The David Stoddarts of this world, and the people who were leading the campaign to destroy our European engagement, were promising that the referendum would resolve the issue for all time. So far as I am concerned, in my party that issue is resolved.