European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I have agreed not to divide the House on the passage of this Bill, as I did for Maastricht, so I thought that I would touch on some of the highlights of our proceedings—or rather, on some of the most depressing facts about our EU membership as revealed in our debates. The first is that, despite two Written Questions and further questions in debate, the Lord President has been unable to identify any areas of our national life not now controlled, or capable of being controlled, by Brussels. That is not what the British people voted for in 1975, and they do not like it now. Then we discovered that only eight out of the 27 member states support the UK in reforming the common fisheries policy and the common agricultural policy. The reform of the latter is blocked until 2013 anyway, and with that line-up in the Council there does not seem to be any prospect of reform in the foreseeable future. The noble Lord, Lord Bach, promised me a Written Answer on how many of the 25,000 children whom he said are dying every year from malnutrition and associated disease owe their deaths to the CAP, and on the level of other suffering. On the CFP, we are also waiting for an answer on whether any research has been done on the damage to the seabed caused by the 50,000 articulated lorries-worth of dead fish being thrown back every year. One chink of light in our proceedings was that the Government assured those of us who dared to criticise the EU that we will never become guilty of the European crime of xenophobia, even after the EU becomes a state, with its new legal personality. I fear that over the years, as the EU gets more and more powerful and arrogant, that guarantee will prove worthless, but it will have to do for now. However, we failed to extract a promise from the Government that the EU’s developing riot police—its gendarmerie force—will not be deployed on British soil. If it ever is, that would cause the people’s disdain for the whole project of European integration to rise and to turn rapidly to hatred. We also failed to get any guarantee that the EU will not intrude further into our direct tax affairs. That will not endear the project to our people either. And, of course, we failed yet again to get the Government to set up an unbiased cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership. Yet again, it was perfectly clear that the Government shied away from such a project because they know that the result would be unacceptable to our people and would lead to our speedy withdrawal. Perhaps the most surprising and depressing highlight for me was when a former Foreign Secretary, supported by a former High Court judge, moved two amendments that would have given our British courts superiority over the Luxembourg Court of Justice’s jurisdiction in two areas covered by the treaties. I found it difficult to believe my ears that such noble Lords had not understood the most basic legal mechanism by which this project proceeds: that the Luxembourg Court is the final arbiter in all EU matters, and that there is no appeal against it. That was very surprising. I turn to perhaps the brightest moment for me in our proceedings, which was when the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland—my noble friend, if I may refer to him as that—