European Union (Amendment) Bill

The trouble with that is that I think that someone who tells a lie is a liar. I do not know how the noble Lord draws a distinction between saying that those who have told a lie are not liars and that those who told a lie are something else. But we will let that stand. If the noble Lord is willing to say that we are not liars, but that we have told a lie, we will let that stand. It seems a peculiar distinction to want to make. Even if some do want to describe the changes as constitutional, we must all admit that this is an argument about whether or not we support the move towards a referendum. We went over this point in enormous depth for more than 12 hours at Second Reading. I fully understand that we will go over and over it again, but it seems that essentially what the noble Lord, Lord Owen, based his very powerful argument on was the question of whether the words in the amendment merit inclusion in the Bill. He said that he believed that the changes were constitutional and, therefore, merited inclusion in the Bill, because that should have been done with Bills on previous treaties. I do not think that that argument stands up. To make an unprecedented move to include these words in the Bill is to single it out and to single this treaty out as being of paramount importance and having more constitutional impact than its predecessors. Otherwise, why single it out? Why say that this treaty merits that sort of treatment when other treaties do not? I do not believe that anyone who has looked at European treaties over the years can honestly believe that this treaty has more constitutional impact than the treaty of Maastricht or the Single European Act. It simply does not. I do not know of an academic, any colleague of mine who has held office in the Foreign Office, a politically neutral civil servant or anyone else who would say that.