European Union (Amendment) Bill

It is a great pleasure to be a friend of the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, while not being a friend of the United Kingdom Independence Party. As an independent Peer, I am in a remarkable position; that is, I have no political baggage whatever; I have no commitment to a referendum on the original constitution; and I have no commitment of a political kind to having no referendum on this treaty. I offer only the view of a citizen. I have no political baggage. I do not have to transcend, as everyone else over there has said, political points or political history. There will be no transcending on my part. I fully understand that we will have nine days of debate and come to a serious decision at the end, with a vote no doubt, on whether this treaty should be discussed with a view to ratification, as the Government propose, in the parliamentary procedure, or whether it is of such importance and such a constitutional nature that there should be a referendum. That is the main part of the issue ahead of us. It is the soap. Today, we have the trailer, because we have not come to that decision, and there are disagreements in the Committee on whether there should be a referendum. So we will come to that. For the moment, I shall stick to the narrow issue of the amendment as proposed. We are sometimes so wide of perspective in this Chamber that we do not quite notice the narrow points, so I allocate to myself a chance of looking at the specific point. I heard the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Howell, but I question whether it is right to change the system under which we simply list treaties, as we have in the past, important or not, in the European Communities Act. On the whole, I would prefer not to do that, because we have followed a different procedure, even on important treaties, in the past. My second point has not been made and may be disagreed with by the movers of the amendment. The amendment as proposed is in Eurospeak. When people start talking about altering constitutional arrangements, they are easily understood in this Chamber. However, in the greater part of our kingdom, people do not clearly understand what that implies. I can understand that some Members might like to spell out in much greater detail, as suggested here, not in these words but in a fuller description, what this treaty is concerned with, but, as it stands, it does not tell the citizen very much. It tells us that we are specialists; we know about constitutional arrangements or think that we do; but ordinary citizens do not gain very much from there being written in at the beginning of a list of treaties something which says that this treaty alters constitutional arrangements. I understand the motivation behind the amendment, but it does not do much good for the consumer for this to be written out. It tells them very little. I make that point because I have not heard it made by others. In the course of nine days of debate, it is extremely important that one or two points be made which have not been made by other Members of this Committee.