UK Parliament / Open data

European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I also welcome the sentiments expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, but the strategy—or more accurately its tactics—are wrong. We do not need this on the face of the Bill. It would simply re-open the issue of the legitimacy of the Lisbon treaty. One of the depressing things about the whole European debate in this country is that it is seen as a zero-sum game. It is perceived as being the concession of sovereignty and a concession that is lost. It is never seen as a win-win situation; namely, that we are sharing sovereignty not to do the same things, but to do more things and do them better. The Lisbon treaty, as has been pointed out several times during the course of today's debate, is essentially a facilitation treaty. It is enabling us to do rather better what we are already empowered to do. It is to manage shared sovereignty, as it has already been agreed, more effectively. To come to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about what sort of information effort we need in order to embed in the British consciousness a greater awareness of the benefits of European co-operation and integration, surely the essence is to move the agenda on. The whole point of this treaty is to move the agenda on. I urge the Government Benches: instead of endlessly going round this course talking about the red lines and trying to confirm to people that no sovereignty or the very least amount of sovereignty has been shared, start to make the case for what you can do with shared sovereignty about the problems which everybody now acknowledges are at the centre of our public life, such as climate change and other problems. That shift of gear would be crucial. I should like to make one other point which has been made from our Benches tonight. The challenge for the Conservative Party is quite straightforward. It can either pretend that this is an unresolved issue, that it will not accept the parliamentary verdict at the end of the day on the Lisbon treaty and will wish to re-open this if and when they have the opportunity. If they do that they defer the whole ability of this country to move forward in Europe. They have got to accept what has now happened. They have got to tell us what their forward agenda is. If their forward agenda is to return to a European free trade area they had better forget it because that is nobody else’s agenda. The agenda is now quite different. I look forward to a new realism from the Conservative Party on the future of Europe and a new willingness to co-operate on discussing what the future agenda is and how we make use of the management enablement of Lisbon to take the whole thing forward.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
702 c649-50 
Session
2007-08
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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