European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am sorry, my Lords, it was 1867. Bagehot held that the sovereign had three principal rights or powers: to be consulted, to encourage and to warn. Inherent in those three rights is of course a fourth: the right to be informed. As I understand it, that is still the generally accepted position today and is reflected in the Prime Minister of the day’s weekly private audience with Her Majesty. I think that it is also generally accepted that the Queen has one further duty, which is to maintain a Government. One thinks here of a possible hung Parliament and the situation that arose in 1974. There are two other vital aspects of our unwritten constitution. One is that the Queen acts on the advice of her Ministers. The other is that in her Coronation Oath, the Queen promised to govern us and the Commonwealth according to our respective laws and customs. Many feel that those two aspects have been growing steadily more uncomfortable with each other since we joined the European Community in 1972, but that they may be brought into irreconcilable conflict by the treaty of Lisbon and as the European Union develops the powers that it will receive under that treaty. The first of those positions—that the Queen acts on the advice of her Ministers—is well put in the letter that Buckingham Palace is currently sending out to the large number of people who are writing to the Queen asking her to withhold her consent from the Lisbon Bill, unless it has first been supported in a referendum of the people. I cite the relevant passage from that letter: "““Policy on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and the strengthening of relations between Member States is entirely a matter for the Queen’s Ministers and not one in which it would be constitutionally appropriate for Her Majesty to intervene””." The possible conflict between that tradition and the Queen's Coronation Oath turns on the interpretation of what are ““our respective customs””. There are those—I imagine that the Government are among them—who hold that our respective customs include the custom that the Queen acts on the advice of Ministers, whatever it is and from wherever it comes. That is the end of the discussion as far as those who adhere to that position are concerned. Many do not agree—mostly in our Eurosceptic movement, of course, which now comprises a majority of the British people. They point out that, at the time of her Coronation Oath, the advice that Ministers gave to the Queen was unfettered by our membership of the European Union. They suggest that the British people’s most important custom was that they elected and dismissed all those who made their laws. They say that that is still our most fundamental custom. However, we have now reached the point where a majority of our national law is imposed by Brussels, on much of which the Government of the day can be outvoted and for which the House of Commons and your Lordships' House have become irrelevant. They fear that that situation will become worse under the Lisbon treaty, which grants the EU its own legal personality superior to that of the member states. They ask: who is and who will be really giving advice to the monarch? Is it her Ministers, or have they become merely the mouthpiece for much of what they propose? They also ask such questions as where the new EU president will leave the position of the sovereign as his role evolves. Will he come to receive ambassadors and sign treaties on behalf of the European Union with its new legal personality? Who will take precedence if the Queen visits the institutions of the European Union? These are the sorts of questions that the report requested by the amendment should seek to answer. We expect the amendment to be supported on all sides of the House. I beg to move.