European Union (Amendment) Bill

We have heard many of these arguments before, with the exception of the Welsh connection, so I will not repeat them. The nub of the Government’s dilemma comes down to whether the treaty of Lisbon is, in effect, the same as the constitutional treaty on which they promised a referendum. I must return to the point that has been made repeatedly; namely, that the two differ because the Lisbon treaty, it is claimed, is an amending treaty and the constitutional treaty was not. However, the constitutional treaty was just as much an amending treaty as the Lisbon treaty is, because they both would make amendments to the existing treaty text. When the constitutional treaty was published, the Government made it clear that most of its text was the same as that of the existing treaties but was published with the amendments incorporated in it. To claim that the Lisbon treaty is different because the treaty only lists the amendments is to play with words. You have to look at the text side by side once the amendments have been included. Amendments were incorporated in the constitutional treaty and amendments have been incorporated in the Lisbon treaty. The two texts both have amendments incorporated. That is what we need to concentrate on. At an earlier stage, I made the claim that, having looked at the two texts side by side, I could find only two articles in the constitutional text that were not reproduced in whole or in part in the Lisbon consolidated text. The Leader of the House kindly wrote to me following that. While she declined to provide her own analysis, she attached analysis of the two texts by Professor Steve Peers for Statewatch. The analysis that she provided lists 35 differences between the constitutional text and the Lisbon text. That is of itself interesting; it gets us to the ground where we can at least talk about those individual differences and how significant they are. Many of them are insignificant. If anything, the analysis reinforces the point that, if we are now able to compare the two texts and look at the differences, as the Minister has invited me to do, we see that those differences are minor. What is more significant is that, as I go through the 35 differences provided to me, I can find only two articles in the constitutional text that are not reproduced in whole or in part in the Lisbon text. I wrote to the Minister on 8 May to make that point. On the basis of the information that she has provided me, is she prepared to accept that? If she accepts it, as I think she must, surely it fundamentally blows away the argument that these texts are different in kind or in substance. The differences can be reduced to a small list and few of them have any significant effect.