European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I accept that entirely. I pay tribute to the way in which the noble Lord, as an independent Labour Member, has kept his long-standing traditional views. He sounds like a Tory when he speaks about Europe. I was talking about the Tory party right wing; I was not talking about the party as a whole. Even in the Commons, I assume that there are still some Members of that party who can be characterised as pro-Europe. The astonishing thing is that we are told on good authority that ours is the only Parliament of the27 member states in the EU where this existential original debate still goes on, with all those old repeated arguments and discussions from the days when we joined and when that was endorsed in the 1975 referendum. Some Members might wish to say that that is a good thing, but I think that it is rather a pity, because it is living in the past. The nostalgia that the noble Lord, Lord Moran, very movingly expressed—I share many of his views about Queen Elizabeth I and our glorious periods of history subsequent to that—has nothing to do with our membership of the European Union nowadays. One detects some nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. As the global village gets more and more united, with all the countries in the world working together, the EU is just the European logical representation of that process. Why do more and more countries want to join? Norway and Switzerland have been mentioned as countries that do not want to take part, but that does not change the central argument. Ten countries joined recently, including the two Mediterranean islands, and subsequently two Eastern European countries came in, making 27. Eighteen of them have ratified the old text of the constitution, let alone what happens with the negotiations for a revised constitutional treaty. It should not be called the constitution; that was always a misnomer. The original document was far too long-winded and boring. It is not just Giscard d’Estaing who should be criticised for those 300 pages but also the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, who was the scribe or secretary to that process. He went along with it; it was a mistake and put people off. I rather congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, on introducing the Bill, although I was not in the House when he introduced his Bill four years ago. I do not know whether he had the Second Reading at an earlier date in the parliamentary calendar then. It seems funny that, as I recall, his Bill was one of the first to be introduced in this Session, yet the Second Reading is taking place on 8 June. I would have thought that he could have easily secured an earlier date for Second Reading, which would have then given us a chance to get the Bill into Committee. When I had my own European Bill—it was somewhat different, being about European flags, town-twinning and so on, and was supported by my noble friend Lord Watson, whom I thank again for that—the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, not only kindly did not press his amendments but did not ask for any vote against the Bill, although normally we do not vote against Bills on Second Reading. I was grateful for that. I would welcome the chance of discussing these matters in Committee, but I fear that that will not now be easy from the point of view of the Bill making any realistic progress.