I am glad that the hon. Gentleman raises that point, because I understand that the new Governor of the Bank of England will apply for British citizenship, but if he has to wait as long as most people have to wait, his term will have expired before he gets it. Unfortunately, he is already married with two children and so cannot marry an EU citizen in order to get here more quickly. Otherwise, he could become an EU citizen and would not need to apply for British citizenship. Anyway, the hon. Gentleman is trying to distract me into a debate on the merits of citizenship applications, but I will not be tempted, even though I have huge respect for him and his great knowledge of the subject.
This is about exercising treaty rights. The Government have decided to have a seven-year transition period, as the previous Government did with regard to Romania and Bulgaria, uncomfortable though that was, and I think that is the right and sensible course of action. When a country joins the European Union, if it is to be the kind of European Union I want us to belong to, every country and every citizen should ultimately be treated equally. Sadly, some EU citizens are treated differently because they happen to come from certain countries, which I think is wrong.
I appreciate the sincerity, honesty and principles of the hon. Member for Bury North, who was against the treaty in the first place, but once a country signs up to a treaty and successive Governments have endorsed it—the British people have not done so since we entered the EU, which is why I favour a referendum—they sign up to all of it. That is the least the Government can do to protect the labour market, but at the end of the seven years the transitional arrangements will lapse, as they will for Romania and Bulgaria on 31 December 2013, and rightly so in my view.
The Home Secretary announced that she was looking carefully at those arrangements for Romania and Bulgaria and could extend the transition period, but I knew that of course that would never happen. Her view on this aspect of policy, which is that emergency measures could be introduced to prevent people from Greece or Italy coming here if there is a crisis in those countries, has come to nothing. She wrote to me and mentioned work going on, but not much work can be done on laws that we have signed unless we break our work on the treaties. I am absolutely certain that the Foreign Office’s view on such emergency arrangements is different from that of the Home Office because, funnily enough, I have seen no such proposals come before the House to try to stop Greek citizens, for example, coming here. That would be very difficult, if not impossible, to do. All we can do with accession countries is give them a seven-year transition.