Well, Madam Deputy Speaker, that certainly was some night last week, wasn’t it? It was the great European arrest warrant debate that never was, and the night we apparently passed something as important as the European arrest warrant by proxy. In my 14 years as a Member of Parliament, there are certain things I thought I would say in the House of Commons, but I thought that asking Mr Speaker that “the Question, That the Question be not now put, be now put” was something belonging to a Monty Python sketch, not to a Hansard report of the House of Commons. I wondered how all that would appear to my constituents, but they loved it. They thought that it was surreal comedy at its finest, to the extent that one of them asked, “Is it like that every night, Pete? If it is, I would never have voted to leave this place.” Here we are: we are all back in our seats—like déjà vu—all over again, only this time we have an actual vote on the European arrest warrant to accompany the debate.
The Tory obsession with European exit has taken us to the very point of withdrawing from a process that ensures the effective transfer of foreign criminals to face justice. Listening to some Conservative Members—I have a great deal of fondness and respect for some of them—it seems to me that anything prefixed with the word “European” is viewed with maximum suspicion, and that anything involving European co-operation and EU nations working together is to be resisted at all costs. Let us be clear that that is what this is all about. This has absolutely nothing to do with the most effective and convenient way of ensuring that criminals are brought to justice, but everything to do with keeping Europe out of any role in the institutional affairs of the United Kingdom.