European Union (Amendment) Bill

There is clearly no pleasing some Eurosceptic Members of your Lordships' House. It was for many years a staple in the Eurosceptic documents I used to read from time to time as a painful duty that there was no mechanism provided for leaving the European Union. We all understood that one could leave it and that there was no way of stopping a sovereign state from doing so, but to clarify this some thought it would be a good idea to put this explicitly into the text. Having been presented with a gift horse, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, as always, has looked in great detail at the back of its mouth and discovered a number of teeth with which he is not at all satisfied. We are on the fourth day in Committee on this Bill and we need to make progress. The characteristic search of our Eurosceptic colleagues for some statement or document which suggests malign intent or even conspiratorial purpose sometimes stretches the indulgence of the Committee. Following the previous Committee day I searched Google for the Farnborough agreement 2000. When I entered ““Farnborough agreement 2000””, the top three most-cited responses were: an agreement between the Ministry of Defence and Farnborough aerodrome; an agreement with Farnborough local authority on environmental management; and an agreement which the Farnborough football club had made with a Canterbury company for the distribution of a newly designed football shirt. The Farnborough agreement between defence ministries has not enormously grabbed the public’s attention, which perhaps makes it a little less than the issue of central importance which the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, suggests it is. We recognise that Mr Prodi has been a gift to our Eurosceptic colleagues, partly because he has such an unfortunately loose manner of expressing himself. He is not one of the most talented of European leaders. We also recognise that unnamed officials quoted by the Daily Telegraph—or an unnamed French official quoted by Le Figaro, as the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, was suggesting the other day—are not always the most reliable, particularly when we cannot discover who they were or whether they even existed. This claim to uncover a secret understanding behind the false consensus of normal political discourse, which we keep hearing again and again on different amendments, seems a little—