European Union (Amendment) Bill

Again, my Lords, the noble Lord is sidestepping the point I am making. I am not talking about what the right honourable Peter Hain may have said; I am making my point about whether or not the old constitutional treaty was legally unprecedented. I believe it was. The legal authorities say that it was. What Mr Hain may or may not have said in this respect, interesting as it may be politically and a jolly good way of making a bit of a political point, is not relevant here. If we really are having a serious debate, which the noble Lord says he wants, let us do so without the political point-scoring. I return to my point, not the points made in another place. The abandoned treaty was legally and constitutionally unprecedented. All the previous treaties that we have seen amended their predecessor treaties. The constitutional treaty, had it survived, would not have amended them but would have abolished them, and it would have introduced a single written constitutional treaty for the European Union. The Lisbon treaty, by contrast, follows the pattern of previous treaties in constitutional terms. It amends existing treaties. In effect, it does constitutionally what the Single European Act, Maastricht, the Nice treaty and the Amsterdam treaty did: it makes amendments to its predecessors. The previous treaties neither repealed nor replaced their predecessor treaties. The old constitutional treaty would have done that, and this one does not. That is the fundamental case I am putting.