European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, at the end of the noble Baroness’s intervention she asked whether my point was a red herring. Let me answer that if it is going to get the House excited. No, it is not, for precisely the reason that she stated. If we had had the old constitutional treaty, we as a country would have been signing up to a constitutional position that would have been unprecedented for us. We have not had that sort of element in our constitutional make-up before. I thank the noble Baroness for making the point so very well on my behalf. That is the fundamental difference between the constitutional treaty and this treaty. In fact, if the Opposition were to win this argument—I do not believe that they will; I certainly do not believe that they ought to—the country would then have a referendum on something constitutionally different from the undertaking to have a referendum on the old constitutional treaty. That would have been a referendum on a treaty which would have been the totality of the existing provisions of European Union treaties for the past 50 years, which have made up so much of our constitutional position in Europe. A referendum on the Lisbon treaty, however, would be a referendum only on this single amending Act. It would be an Act of no more importance than its four immediate predecessors. That would be a very different proposition from that of a referendum on the old constitutional treaty, and that is why no promise has been broken. The 27 Heads of Government knew what they doing at the IGC when they decided that mandate for the Lisbon treaty, when they decided that the constitutional concept of a single text called a constitution is abandoned—everybody agrees that that is the case. They recognised the clear difference between the proposition in the old constitutional treaty and that in the Lisbon treaty in terms of their constitutional impact. So should this House and so should the Opposition. It really is time for them to abandon their argument, which, however hard they try, they simply cannot stand up.