European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I shall not deal with that because the noble Lord did not answer the points made by my noble friend Lord Watson, and I was referring to something that was said by the noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke. I do not want to take up too much time today. The realities of these matters are not at all along the lines enunciated by the Euro-sceptics and anti-Europeans today. The joint article by the Spanish Foreign Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Luxembourg in the Independent newspaper on 16 January this year states: "““Europe’s challenge at the beginning of the 21st century is firmly to anchor the European integration project””—" all that that means is sovereign countries working together— "““in a rapidly changing and complex world. To embark upon this journey we will need both to revive the spirit of the founding fathers, men such as Schuman and Monet,””—" I only wish that the British had been there at the inception— "““and to arm ourselves with the necessary means. The [new] Constitutional Treaty is without a doubt, the best tool in our bag. If it did not already exist, we would have to invent it””." Without it, we will not have the machinery to ensure that the European Union functions efficiently in the future. We insisted, as a Conservative Government under Mrs Thatcher, on majority voting to ensure that the single market would work. The bulk of the European Commission’s legislation, voted for by the European Parliament and by sovereign member states on an equal basis at the Council of Ministers, was to ensure that majority voting existed to make the single market work properly. The bulk of the current legislation made by the Commission still reflects the gradual, painful and often slow completion of the single market. That process is continuing. The British public are very realistic about these matters. Consider the British diaspora in other European countries. Nearly a million British people live in south-east Spain, 600,000 live wholly or partly in France, 55,000 work in Germany, and the diasporas of other countries live in this country, too—in Britain, there is the revered figure of the Polish plumber. All these represent mobile populations who travel around the member states. Why should we have a rigid separation, with Britain standing alone saying, ““We are different from all the others””? We can be proud and patriotic Britishers, but we can also be enthusiastic Europeans. The President of France, Mr Sarkozy, said that he was worried that the Prime Minister-designate—I am not sure whether that is his official title—might not be sufficiently European and that he might not agree to the extension of qualified majority voting to certain areas, to pass decisions that would undoubtedly very much help this country. A noble Lord referred to us as being oppressed and ruled by ““jackboot””. I share the objections of my noble friend Lord Watson to the use of that obvious reference to Germany. That country became a model of democracy in the period after the nightmare of the Third Reich and the Second World War; we were involved in that process; we worked with the Germans, and they worked with us. I cannot think of a more democratic country, and their English is often better than ours. The danger, as suggested in this debate by the ““antis””—who are living in the past, old-fashioned and unable to see the modern future—was that we would be outvoted, oppressed and bullied into doing things against our will. We have been outvoted on only two or three occasions in a formal vote, with or without the use of qualified majority voting in the modern sense. Normally, decisions are made unanimously; and that process preserves even more the intrinsic, national and individual sovereignty of each member state. So what is the anxiety all about? I cannot understand it. In conclusion, if the Bill makes progress, we can hold further discussions. The Independent newspaper, on Wednesday 21 March, published a long list of50 reasons to ““love the EU””. All of those reasons concerned practical, home-spun issues such as reducing the cost of mobile telephone calls. That is a good note on which to end my remarks.