European Union Bill

The hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) referred to clause 18 as a judicial Trojan horse. I would like to refer to the Bill as a whole as a pantomime horse. It is clear from what the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) said that there must have been some very interesting discussions within the coalition about exactly what would be put into the Bill and quite how it would be justified. I do not know what discussions went into the explanatory notes, but it would have been interesting to have been a fly on the wall, particularly looking through the references to the justifications for the list of items in schedule 1. The notes state:"““provides that any proposal to remove the UK's veto over the use of any of the Treaty Articles listed in Schedule 1 would require a referendum.””" The reality is that many of the issues that are being proposed as requiring a referendum are not massively significant. As the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) pointed out, the real issue for many Back Benchers, mostly on the Conservative Benches, but I accept that there are one or two on the Labour Benches too, but not myself, is a referendum on the issue of in or out of the European Union. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), I have also been very much an opponent of the idea of referendums. I would agree with former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher, when she quoted the former Deputy Prime Minister and then Prime Minister Clement Attlee as saying that referendums were the devices of demagogues and dictators. There is a large element of truth in that. We must be careful if we get into a situation where we start to move away from parliamentary sovereignty and democracy towards a referendum-based society. If we are not careful we could end up like Italy, and the way in which Italian politics have developed over recent decades is not a model that we should follow. I want to say clearly that there is a range of reasons why the Bill should be opposed, but one of the most important is that it does not address the real issues that face the European Union. We should be having a debate about the rise of Asia. We should be having a debate about how the EU is effective globally; how the External Action Service can get the resources and the competent people to be able to play a role in avoiding conflicts and tensions and building peace around the world, as well as having its diplomatic role. But we are not doing that. We will not have, as has been pointed out from the Front Bench, the pre-European Council debate that we have always had on the Floor of the House, because the Government, for their own internal reasons, have deemed it something that they do not wish to have, and today becomes a very poor substitute.