European Union Bill

It is a great honour to participate in this important debate. Members have mentioned the number of people who come into their constituency surgeries to talk about Europe. I am not overwhelmed with European issues in my surgery, but I do hear a lot of concern about Europe when I go to businesses and large organisations in my constituency. They are getting concerned about regulation, excessive interference and so on, and they think—and are sometimes right to think—that it all emanates from the European Union. It is therefore important that we give due consideration to the need to allow the electorate as a whole to speak about Europe. That is why the Bill is so important. It will, once and for all, stop the disgraceful situation of a Government promising to have a referendum on a significant change—the treaty of Lisbon—and then failing to do so. The Bill will prevent that, and quite right too. The Bill will do a few other things as well. It will encourage a better understanding of Europe, because we will discuss it more often and engage the electorate with the issue more comprehensively. They, in turn, will learn more about Europe and our relationship with it. That will be good not just because it will deal with the incorrect assumption that the electorate will not be able to understand a referendum question, but because it will ensure that they become much more interested in what we are doing about Europe. The same applies to the situation in Parliament. The Bill means that we will pass a lot more Acts of Parliament if and when changes are made to our relationship with Europe. Those processes, taken together, will make us less reactive to what happens in Europe and much more proactive in ensuring that Britain's interests are properly discussed, represented and promoted. The Bill will be really important for that reason. New clause 9, tabled by the Labour Front Benchers, is a blatant attempt to look good without being good. They are attempting to suggest to everybody that they want referendums, but they are actually suggesting a deliberate mechanism to ensure that they would not necessarily need to have them. That is what it is, that is what it would do, and that is why we must not accept it. Let us consider the discussions that we had about the treaty of Lisbon versus the Giscard d'Estaing constitution. The Labour Front Benchers attempted to say at the time, and repeated earlier today, that the treaty of Lisbon was not anything like the Giscard d'Estaing constitution. Absolute piffle—that was just not the case. The treaty was a fundamental change, and it required a proper referendum. If Labour cannot get that right, how would the committee that it suggests make any progress? How could it resolve the problems? That answer is that it could not and would not, because it would be subject to the pressures of Government, the whipping system, which my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) mentioned, and so on. The committee would not have enough teeth, or be cohesive enough, to enforce the approach that we need when it comes to deciding whether we should have a referendum. To make matters worse, we would be asking Parliament to decide what was substantive and what was not. That is also the problem with amendment 11, which would lead us into trouble and is also unnecessary. As I have said, Parliament will have to pass Acts if there are substantive changes, or any changes at all that affect our relationship with the European Union. New clause 9 is slightly misleading. The Opposition want to look as though they wanted referendums, but the new clause would make it possible not to have them at all, which is wrong.