European Affairs

I am extremely glad to follow the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), although I do not agree with her about everything, particularly the sovereignty Act, which will give us a genuine opportunity. I certainly would not say that out of deference to the leader of my party or my Front-Bench colleagues; I say it only because I believe it. None the less, what the hon. Lady said was based on knowledge. I very much agree that these debates are badly attended, and I deplore the fact that people are besieged and completely cowed by the complexity and the labyrinthine bureaucracy lying behind so much of what is churned out by the European Union. It is encapsulated by what Giscard d'Estaing—it may have been somebody else, but it does not matter—said about the Lisbon treaty: it was made complicated deliberately so that nobody would understand it. That is how we are being governed. This is not about government through the European Union; it is about power and control over our Government through majority voting and the lethal power of co-decision. It is about the transfer of power, no less than during the 1640s, when movements were made towards a constitutional monarchy but were denied by civil war, which was followed by the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the 1660s. We transferred power away from the Stuarts after James II to the Hanoverians, maintaining the fiction that we were preserving the monarchy. Actually, it was a transfer of power. That is what this is all about. The same happened again in the 18th century, followed by the Reform Acts. The hon. Lady represents Birmingham, like John Bright, and the great Reform Act and the granting of the vote to the working class were followed by the secret ballot and then, thank heavens, by the vote for women in the 1920s—that was the transfer of power. Then came the European Communities Act 1972, which was a real transfer of power. That is why she is right when she talks about a referendum, as I have done so often. In 1975, the Labour Government, to their credit, gave the people of this country the opportunity to express their view. I know which way I would vote. I voted yes in 1975, but I would not have done so if I had known what would happen. I voted that way not because of ignorance or naivety, but because we were lied to. That is the bottom line. We were told that we would be given the opportunity to engage only in the European Community. We were told in the White Paper—I remember it very well—that we would keep our national veto because it was in our vital national interests to do so. The White Paper went on to say that to do otherwise would undermine the very fabric of the European Community. The veto was necessary, according to the White Paper, for the sake of the European Community, which has become the European Union. The reasons why we need to have a referendum are absolute. The people of this country are being denied the opportunity to have their say, and they ought to have their say because many millions of them have been born since 1975, and they have been denied the opportunity to express their view. It is really important that we have a referendum, and I have by no means given up on the idea that we will have one through a Conservative Administration. We need one sooner rather than later, but that is only part of the problem. The real problem, which is associated with the reasons for the referendum, is that there has been such a significant change in the functions of the European Union. Much more power has been transferred to the bureaucracy and to the labyrinthine process that I witness every week at the European Scrutiny Committee, on which I have sat for 25 years. I may add that I have been consistently outvoted, because every Committee in those 25 years has been packed with people who vote the other way. I say with respect to the hon. Member for Luton, North (Kelvin Hopkins) that, occasionally, he votes with me, and I am grateful for that, but such support is contrary to the normal trend. Indeed, on crucial matters, such as the assessment of treaties, I have to write minority reports.