European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I propose to speak in favour of ratification as soon as possible, so I hope that any person in the Gallery who proposes to shout about that will do it now and get it over with. We have heard many voices including, just a few minutes ago, the powerful voice of the noble Lord, Lord King, telling us that the lesson to be learnt from the Irish referendum is that we should have had a referendum in this country as well. The lesson is precisely the opposite—that the Irish referendum has proved that any such referendum was totally inappropriate. I realise that the Irish Government had no option because of the Irish constitution, but I find it almost impossible to imagine any issue in recent years less suitable for decision by referendum than this one. For a referendum, you need an issue that is big and simple. That was true of the 1975 referendum on whether we should stay in or get out of the European Community, as it then was. It was true of the 1997 referendums in Scotland and Wales on devolution. It is emphatically not true of the Lisbon treaty. There is no single big issue—it is a collection of small ones. Few of them are simple. Some are comprehensible only to experts. Taken together, the changes are mainly administrative ones which need to be made following the enlargement of the EU and which will make the EU more democratic. Why then did the Irish referendum fail? I do not criticise the Irish electorate. There is a simple principle which applies to all of us. If we are asked to vote yes or no to a proposed change and we do not understand it or know what the impact of that change will be, most of us will vote no, as did the Irish.