European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, it is this side now. We have heard from the Cross-Benches. The noble Lord, Lord Neill, spoke previously. I shall be brief. I want in part to answer the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Symons. If she is correct in her prediction that the Government will win this vote tonight, the Government will live to regret it. They may live to regret it as quickly as Friday when we hear the result of the Irish referendum. Even if they do not do so then, I believe that what Nick Clegg said before he was leader of the Liberal Party and before he changed his mind on this issue is true. He wrote in the Guardian that if the parties in this country were going to deny a referendum about the treaty to the British public it would increase cynicism not just about politics but about politicians dealing with Europe. He said that, if denied a referendum, the public would think that the politicians did not, as he put it, have ““the cojones”” to carry the argument about a referendum to the public. There was something rather ironic in the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, attacking the Labour Government for not taking the argument about the treaty and Europe to the public when what he was doing was to argue against taking the issue to the public. Comparisons have been made with the Maastricht treaty, with which I was involved. On the most important aspect of the treaty of Maastricht, which was the possibility of the introduction of the euro to this country, the Conservative Party—followed by the Labour Party—promised to have a referendum were the euro ever to be introduced. That pledge, on that most important part of the Maastricht treaty, still applies and is still upheld not just by the Conservative Party but by the Labour Party as well. It was the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who said on 3 July 2007 (at col. 803 of the Official Report) that the Maastricht treaty involved ““a smaller transfer of power”” than this treaty. He may not have meant it; it may have been a slip; but perhaps it was a slip in which he spoke more wisely than he knew. However, the point is not a sterile argument about one treaty compared with another. The fact is that we have had a whole series of treaties—Maastricht, Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon—all of which have gone a bit further. Have we reached a tipping point? Have we reached a point at which the accumulation of powers justifies this issue being put to a referendum as was promised by all political parties at the previous election? The public have demonstrated, again and again, that they would like a referendum. It has been demonstrated in opinion polls. My noble friend Lord Brittan said that if you ask the public whether they want a referendum about anything, of course they would always say yes. Possibly; but if they have actually been promised a referendum they are quite likely to want it even more. We have had referenda organised in 10 parliamentary constituencies under the auspices of the Electoral Reform Society, in which large numbers of people have voted and shown that they do not wish to accept this treaty. In one such referendum held in the constituency of Eastleigh, represented in another place by Mr Chris Huhne, more people voted for the principle of having a referendum than had for Mr Huhne at the general election. On the point that the treaty of Lisbon differs from the constitutional treaty, at the very beginning of our debates the noble Baroness—although she handled each debate with great charm and skill—said, rather insidiously, that we should not have any quotations from foreigners. I could not really understand why: could it just be because almost every head of state is on record as having said that the differences between the treaty of Lisbon and the constitutional treaty are non-existent? With one exception, I will adhere to what the noble Baroness said. I will not quote the Belgian or Finnish Foreign Ministers; I will not quote Bertie Ahern, or the Italian or French Prime Ministers, but they all said it, again and again. I will not quote their actual words, but when the now Lord Chancellor, Mr Jack Straw—I do not think he is a foreigner—was asked in another place what constituted a constitutional treaty, and therefore made a referendum necessary, he said that you ought to have a referendum if it is a constitutional treaty, and what constitutes that is having an EU President and an EU Foreign Minister. Well, we have a different name for the Foreign Minister but those two proposals, which he said justified a referendum, are still here. The noble Baroness, Lady Symons, argued that the constitutional treaty is very different from the Lisbon treaty, and that it repealed existing treaties whereas the Lisbon treaty does not. Yet, as my noble friend Lord Blackwell pointed out, she did not say that while the constitutional treaty abolished the treaties, it then went on to write the provisions back into the text. So, what is the actual difference? Now, this is where I will break the rule and quote one foreign politician, because President Giscard d’Estaing, the author of the constitution, gave the answer when he said: "““In the treaty of Lisbon, the tools are largely the same. Only the order in which they are arranged in the toolbox has been changed. Why this subtle change?””." I quote this because it is as revealing as all the other quotes that I am not using would have been: they tell us the motive. He went on: "““Above all, it is to head off any threat of referenda by avoiding any form of constitutional vocabulary””." There, we know it. I could, indeed, also quote the correspondence that the German presidency under Angela Merkel circulated in canvassing this idea of using the device of having not a constitutional treaty but an amending one, with its political advantages. If there is any doubt that there is no difference between the two, it was made clear by my noble friend Lord Blackwell in pointing out that the Government have very kindly not just given us the treaty, but printed the consolidated text. With that and the amending treaty within it, we can compare it with the original constitutional treaty, and they are virtually the same. The other point made was that Britain was perhaps signing a different treaty from that signed by other countries, because of the Government’s red lines. But the point that I made to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, needs an answer. I pointed out to him that at the moment when the Government made their promise to have a referendum they had achieved many of their objectives on the red lines. In particular, they had achieved the objective that foreign policy was not subject to control outside this country. The noble Lord answered me by saying that the red line remained in place, but that is not the point. The promise was made that we would have a referendum, even though the red line had been achieved. They said that the treaty, even with the red lines, deserved a referendum, so why are we not having one now? The noble Lord, Lord Owen, said, in his usual very even-handed and fair way, that there were differences between the two, but they are not large. I agree with him. There is the difference in how the Charter of Fundamental Rights is treated, subject to a protocol. But many people, including Select Committees in the other place, have argued that the protocol is not guaranteed to be watertight, and many academic lawyers have argued the same. So it would hardly seem that that by itself justified the abandonment of the commitment that was given to have a referendum. This is a sad day for politics. I make no criticism at all of those who, like my noble friend and my noble and learned friend sitting beside me, have always been against referenda and who have made clear in the past their opposition to referenda on this sort of issue. Maybe the arguments are not overwhelming and maybe there never should have been a promise to hold a referendum; maybe it was not wise and maybe the treaty is not as different from others as I profoundly believe that it is. The fact is that the Government made a promise and should stick to it. The Liberals also went along with it, but they have not just ratted—they have re-ratted and re-re-ratted. First, they were for a referendum, then they were for abstaining, adamant for drift—and now they are firmly against a referendum. Who knows where they will be tomorrow? If this amendment is defeated tonight, it would certainly be bad for our involvement in Europe but, above all, it is bad for politics in this country.