European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I am beginning to think of the opt-in, opt-out area as rather like the Schleswig-Holstein dispute. Very few people understand it and I am not at all sure that I am one of them. Clearly, it was deliberately designed to be a very obscure area. That is one of the reasons my party is sceptical about the extent of opting-in and opting-out. Indeed, as my question in the middle of the Minister’s previous speech suggested, there are areas where we appear to have opted out but where we are nevertheless taking an active part. I have sometimes wondered very unworthily in the past few years whether this is designed to obscure from the Daily Mail, the Telegraph or the British public how deeply involved we are in all this. This is a worst-case amendment, as I think the noble Lord recognises. It is a belt-and-braces measure to address the difficulty of dealing with those foreigners across the channel and the possibility that they might somehow outwit the British on occasions, or perhaps that the present Government or any future Government might fall over their feet so badly in trying to do the delicate dance they do between opt-ins and opt-outs and when they are half opting in and when half opting out that they might end up facing this penalty. My position and that of my party group is that we are participating in an ongoing system. We hope that we are negotiating in good faith. We do not expect our partners in the European Union to double cross us and we should not operate on the basis that we expect that. We want to see the whole justice and home affairs area work more effectively. We want to see the United Kingdom participate in that as constructively and as fully as possible. On that basis we do not support the amendment.