European Union Bill

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) who, in his short and effective speech, demolished some of the more windy and high-blown rhetoric that we have heard tonight. Sovereignty is a wonderful topic for a seminar but is rather more difficult to define than one might imagine. In many continental legislations, the people are sovereign. The American constitution starts: ““We the People””. In such a system, it is not the Parliament or Congress that is sovereign but the people, who grant to the President or Parliament the right to govern in their name. In other countries, there are checks and balances known as a constitution or as direct democracy through forms of plebiscite and referendum. We have never gone down that path and have always refused a written constitution. In his book, ““The English Constitution””, Bagehot contrasted the flexibility that the lack of a written constitution affords Britain with the American constitution, which he said was so rigid that it could be broken only through the civil war that was taking place as he was writing or compiling his book. The additions that the hon. Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and his colleagues on both sides of the House propose to clause 18 are superfluous because they will not add one extra bit of strength to the Bill. The Bill is cynical and worthless. The Government—or at least the Conservative part of the Government—may have campaigned in opposition as Eurosceptics but they have found that they have to govern as Eurorealists. I congratulate the Minister and the Government on being very Eurorealist since the coalition was formed in May. They have accepted a number of measures that require Britain to pay money or accept collective decisions, and have shown no desire to oppose the proposed changes in the Lisbon treaty to effect greater economic governance in Europe that were decided collectively by all 27 member states. They hide behind the convenient and comforting myth that that only affects the eurozone but, precisely to ensure better and more effective governance, much of which will involve a degree of fiscal discipline, we are gradually moving in the direction of greater co-ordination of our economic and fiscal policies in Europe. It will not be a case of giving orders or dictating tax levels—some countries might want to put up VAT, some might want to put up income tax, some might want to put up corporation, petrol, environmental, housing tax or whatever, and that will remain their individual decision—but much greater co-ordination is coming fast down the tracks. We live in such an open trading economy that if we want the European Union to remain open to all of our products, services, people and capital, we will require greater co-ordination. The Bill discusses holding referendums if there are treaty changes that the Government do not like, but that is a contradiction, because no Government are going to sign a new treaty, then bring it back to the country for a referendum. Government's responsibility is to negotiate the best deal on a treaty that they can achieve for the country. That is the whole point about the EU—it is an association of nations bound together by a common treaty, and the amendments cannot change that substantial fact. In many areas of national life, the treaty that binds us together in the World Trade Organisation is far more powerful. It can dictate what British goods can be exported, or what Britain has to accept in imports from other countries. That is what the WTO exists to do. It was formerly called, if hon. Members remember, the general agreements on tariffs and trade, and it was a treaty. After 1945, Britain set it up, along with many other treaty-based organisations. There has been much generalised waffle about the common fisheries policy, but an equally important treaty that delineates our territorial waters is the law of the sea, which obliges countries to obey its provisions.