European Union Bill

For me, the debate is not about the wording of the new clause, but about a question of principle. It is also about whether we are a democratic nation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) pointed out, and as many of us have argued for so many years, the question of why we are here in this House, ultimately, is entirely dependent on our relationship to the electorate. This is about democracy, not government. We began our proceedings on the question of sovereignty some time ago, when we debated clause 18. In that debate, I made it clear—I believe that we won the argument—that the real question was whether this country would be able to govern itself or would end up being increasingly governed by judicial supremacy, and the European Scrutiny Committee report clearly demonstrated that point. For those of us who watched, for example, the recent BBC 4 programme on the Supreme Court, there is no doubt at all about the attitudes of some of the Justices in the Supreme Court and of many senior academics who are deeply influential in the Foreign Office and elsewhere. I know that the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), understands that extremely well; I have heard him say so. There are serious questions about whether the judiciary seek to undermine—not deliberately, but by their language—the sovereignty of this House. So a referendum is about whether sovereignty—the ultimate authority for the government of this country—belongs to the Government, the Prime Minister, No. 10 Downing street and the like, who are elected and accountable to this House, which in turn is accountable to the electorate. Of all those different components of our constitutional arrangements, untidy as they may be, the most important is the sovereignty of the people. Indeed, under our constitutional arrangements, we cannot even have a referendum unless it is endorsed by Act of Parliament, but that is the moment when the people of this country speak to their representatives, who by mutual accord reply, ““This issue is too big for us. We have dithered for too long. We have not resolved these questions. We have allowed your self-government and your Parliament to be subsumed into and absorbed by the decisions that other countries take, by majority vote, so that the laws passed by this House are no longer passed exclusively by Members of Parliament, but by the process of the Whips, the process of government and by the acquiescence and the Europeanisation of this country, which nobody can deny.”” Anybody who has listened to these debates over the past few days will be in no doubt that, whatever this Bill purports to do—the window-dressing that it represents, the aspiration to hold referendums after this Parliament—there is a continuing process of Europeanisation on criminal law, criminal procedure, civil matters, the whole immigration process and the issues of citizenship. They are increasingly being taken away from this House and transferred to the European Union. It is a policy of transfer. The talk is of the transfer of competences and powers. What about the political transfer that takes place on a daily basis? Only this afternoon, I was in a European Committee on the stabilisation mechanism. A total of £8 billion of British taxpayers' money has now been committed to the prospect of bailing out Portugal and Spain, for no other reason than that, during the interregnum between two Governments a few months ago, the outgoing Chancellor entered into an unlawful agreement and the incoming Chancellor effectively endorsed it. For the British people, £8 billion is now at risk in times of austerity. The question is, who made those decisions? I wager that the people responsible include those in the Treasury. The legal advice that I asked the Minister to provide and the other advice from the Treasury has been denied to me. The answer will be published tomorrow. It was given to me only 20 minutes or so before these proceedings began, and it effectively states, ““You can't have the answer to these questions, because if we give them to you it will be inconvenient for the running of government.””