European Union (Amendment) Bill

I understand that the Conservative Party is not going to take part in this amendment, so we will be left in ignorance of its position. I meant the Conservative Front Bench—I was not suggesting that the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, who sits on the Back Bench with me, was necessarily speaking for the party. In fact, he says that he certainly was not. So we do not know where the Conservative Party stands. As to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Hurd, it may have felt at the time of Maastricht that he had to come back and face Parliament. It may feel like that now. However, even at the time of Maastricht it was not like that and it certainly is not like that now. Parliament—the House of Commons and your Lordships’ House—cannot propose this legislation. Of course we accept the point of the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, that the Commission receives all sorts of proposals from countries and lobbyists. However, that does not alter the fact that it has a near-monopoly of proposing legislation, which is then negotiated in COREPER and passed in the Council of Ministers. Once it is through the Council of Ministers, there is nothing that the House of Commons or your Lordships’ House can do about it. My noble friend Lord Willoughby de Broke mentioned several examples—I have two that are going through now. One is the tax on the resale of art, particularly modern art, which is doing immense damage to the art market in this country. The other is the control of food supplements—vitamins and health foods—that the Government are also opposing in Brussels although it does not look as if they will succeed. So it is simply not fair of your Europhile Lordships to pretend that this is democracy as we have known it. We accept that the European Parliament can block legislation, but we repeat that it cannot propose it without the consent of the Commission. The Minister read out a list of eminent Eurocrats who inhabit your Lordships’ House, and of course we acknowledge that—it is one of the things that makes your Lordships’ House such a Europhile place. However, it really does not help if the Minister and other noble Lords say, ““There is nothing to worry about here, because this was part of the original Treaty of Rome in 1957””. Indeed it was—I said so myself. This has always been part of this project, but that does not mean that we have to accept it. Noble and Europhile Lords, and Europhiles generally, very often advance this point. They say, ““This is nothing new, so it is all right””. The answer is, ““It is not all right just because it is there””. Nothing that any noble Lord has said will convince me that the ancient privilege of the British people to elect and dismiss those who make their laws has not been broken by our membership of the European Union. I refer to the House of Commons, not the elected Government. The people’s pact is with Parliament; it is not with the transitory Government of the day. That is why more and more people—millions of them—do not like this project and want us out of it. However, I accept that we are not going to reach that conclusion now, so I am happy to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.