European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am certainly not advocating the daily or weekly use of referendums, but I thought I heard from one or two noble Lords remarks about voters not being well informed enough to take the same wise decisions as Parliament. I stand by what I said. We talk here about codecision and structured co-operation, article this and article that. I have myself been guilty of that twice today. Millions of our countrymen are not familiar with this arcane private language, but that does not entitle us to brush them aside. The ordinary voter has a pretty good grasp of what is really at stake here. Travel abroad shows them different conditions in Germany and Spain; prices and the jobs market give them a pretty good feel for the trade-off between inflation and recession at home. The only real reason to oppose this amendment would be to clear the way to adopt the euro without consulting the people. As recently as last September, Gordon Brown and David Miliband both repeated their promise that they would not do that. I was glad of that. For reasons not quite clear to me, they said that the currency was of even more constitutional significance than the Lisbon treaty. Nevertheless, the people have already been led up the garden path once on the constitution and disappointed in their expectations.