European Affairs

That may be true, but the problem is about political will and the opportunity that people have to express those views not just in a referendum, but even in this House. People are faced with mind-boggling complexities, and it is completely impossible to run the country. We are in charge but not in control. We are not governing the country in line with the democratic wishes of the people. As I said in The Daily Telegraph the other day, we are merely acting as managing agents for the European Union. The situation is exactly the same when we come to the argument on financial services. We have been through that issue, I have spoken about it over and over again in the House, and I have written to the Financial Times about it many times. We are told that we will have national supervision, but we should forget that, because, as I said in the financial services debate the other day, rules, which will be imposed on us by European regulations, will require certain actions. The question of whether the Commissioner is Monsieur Barnier or anybody else may be important, but the real question is, where does the power lie? As of yesterday, when we allowed the relevant measure to go through and the Chancellor of the Exchequer made his deal, the City of London was effectively no longer able to exercise that power over financial services. I have been critical of the trade associations in the City of London for allowing that supranationality. In the papers today, I have seen some incredibly hypocritical cant from the leaders of those organisations, who could have put up a real fight but allowed the whole thing to go through, putting 15 per cent. of our gross domestic product at risk. Indeed, I was very glad for the support of my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Mr. Field) when I spoke in the debate two days ago. He agreed that the practitioners whom he had met—he is more likely than many of us to meet them—realised that the situation was not good for their businesses. Many young people are leaving the City of London to go to Zurich, Monaco and other places precisely for that reason. The real question is one of power and sovereignty, and that is why I applaud the sovereignty Act proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). I have had discussions with him and my hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh (Mr. Francois) about it, and I will continue to have them because I do not give up—ever. They know that we must have a proper sovereignty Act. My point to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston is this: the competition of the sovereignties is very real and we cannot allow ourselves to be run by a judicial autocracy; there is the political power to consider. In March, in an important speech on the Human Rights Act 1998, Lord Hoffmann set out his objections to the way in which the Strasbourg Court is arrogating to itself federal, judicial and quasi-political activity. The same could well apply to our own Supreme Court, for the same sorts of reasons. In his very important Maccabean lecture, Sir John Baker, one of the greatest of all legal historians, launched a proper and incisive attack on how Parliament—this Parliament, here in Westminster—has allowed itself to lose its credibility, as the hon. Lady has also said. We have lost credibility, not so much in respect of the kind of questions that have been blasted all over the newspapers, although those have contributed, but because we have lost the confidence to exercise our role of accountability in respect of the Government of this country, who themselves, by one remove, have abdicated their responsibility by their policy of appeasement on the European Union.