European Union (Amendment) Bill

I never until this moment understood how much bureaucrats hated referenda, as the noble Lord does. It is with great sadness that I hear what he says, which is really about the sort of people with whom he mixes and the sort of company that receives a copy of the constitution and throws it straight into the waste-paper basket. My view of what happened in France was that the personality of Jacques Chirac loomed large over the referendum, but that the majority of the French people did not want that particular constitution. The noble Lord should not dismiss so easily the right of the people in a referendum to decide on these very important issues.