European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, perhaps I can come back to the fundamental case put by the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, in moving the amendment. As I understand it, his case is based not on whether referendums are good or bad, not on whether this treaty is good or bad and not on whether the Opposition, when they were in Government, had a referendum on the treaty for which they were responsible. His is a very straightforward point: he claims that the Government promised a referendum on this treaty at the time of the last election and that, in all conscience, therefore, the Government should hold the referendum now. That, as I understand it, is his fundamental case. My fundamental case is very straightforward too: it is that this treaty is not the constitutional treaty upon which a referendum was promised. At the time of the defining of the mandate for the new treaty at the intergovernmental conference, all 27 heads of Government agreed that: "““The constitutional concept, which consisted in repealing all existing Treaties and replacing them with a single text called ‘Constitution’, is abandoned””." That was not a statement of Her Majesty’s Government; it was a statement by the heads of all the Governments at the IGC. The old former constitutional treaty would have been legally unprecedented. I have heard no one challenge that point. The abandoned treaty would have legally abolished the European Community and the European Union and would have refounded the European Union under a single constitutional order. The EU, in legal terms, would have become a new entity based on a single new founding treaty. The constitutional treaty, had it been passed, would have abolished all the previous treaties that we have discussed in your Lordships’ House. The Single European Act, the Maastricht treaty, Nice and Amsterdam would all have been replaced by a single treaty.