My Lords, I have been given permission to speak in the gap, which I will do very briefly. I will start with how I come into this issue. When I first arrived in the House of Lords in 1972, there was the European Communities Act. I served on the European Community Committee, which later changed its name to the European Union Committee. Your Lordships will remember the brief intervention at the beginning of this debate by the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, when the Minister was speaking. He might find it more awkward, now that he is on the Woolsack, to intervene when the Minister speaks again. However, his intervention drew attention to the work of the European committees, in this place and the other place.
What did we do? We were given drafts from the European Union of directives and regulations. We were then given the opportunity to comment. We called evidence, we wrote a report, we sent it back to the Commission in Brussels and surprisingly, you may think, a lot of our recommendations were accepted. Therefore, when the Minister said that the European committees had no power to veto the drafting—I have forgotten his exact words—that got missed out, because we did have a good opportunity to do so in looking at the drafts.
Where are we now? I have heard every speech except one. I begin by giving the score. Only 10 speakers have spoken permanently pro Bill. One or two others have hesitantly spoken pro Bill, out of a total of 58 speakers. That gives a message, does it not? My noble friend Lady Young of Old Scone said that we should not pass this Bill. I suggested to my Front Bench that we should oppose the Bill—that we should not allow it to go any further. I am afraid that I was told that this was not the policy. I then moved towards the Liberal Democrat Benches. I got more favourable noises but certainly not “We should not pass this Bill”.