European Union (Amendment) Bill

What a fabulous debate this has been. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blackwell on having initiated a debate that has been extraordinarily useful and which I hope gets reported in the media across the United Kingdom. I very much enjoyed the appearance of the noble Lord, Lord McNally. I recall a phrase, ““the elephant has at last entered the room””. It was his constant refrain that all we were trying to do in this House was to set elephant traps for him. Well, he has come and he has fallen straight into it. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Waddington on having elucidated a reaffirmed commitment. However, I have to announce to those who read Hansard that I detected that it was through clenched teeth. It may be that that was just the appearance at the time, but he did seem to speak through clenched teeth. I still have my suspicions, bearing in mind what he said before—and this afternoon—about referendums: that they are some form of convenient fig-leaf. I cannot quite picture the elephant with that fig-leaf in reality. However, we shall return to that. My noble friend Lord Blackwell started an important debate, and my noble friend Lord Brittan had some very interesting contributions to make—he said that a referendum does not take an issue out of political debate. Well, I think that often it takes it out of party-political debate and enables the issue, either for or against, properly to be discussed. But I was not sure whether he was dismissing it as a Bonapartist device or a populist device. It was interesting to note that he described both those aspects with some derision—