European Union Bill

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Deben will no doubt be pleased to hear that I agree with every word that he has just said, and I do so with a good deal more feeling than I agree with the views of the coalition. In her speech at Second Reading, the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, said that the use of referendums in this Bill is unprecedented in terms of constitutional practice. That is absolutely true, but I would go further than that because I believe that important parts of the Bill are unconstitutional. Those parts of the Bill are the provisions that will require, for effective enactment, favourable decisions from both Parliament and a referendum. Here, when a Bill comes before Parliament, the decision by Parliament to enact the Bill may be overridden by its rejection in a referendum. Nothing like that has ever happened before in this country. What is proposed will set a precedent which could, and may well, lead to referendums being put on an equal footing with decisions by Parliament. We could, of course, consider a fundamental change to our constitution that would enable referendums to be incorporated into our system of legislation. However, this Bill is definitely not the place for doing that. I believe that once a Bill has been approved by Parliament, it is the law and cannot be overridden by a referendum imposed not by itself but by Parliament at an earlier date. Of course, it would be open to Parliament, when considering a Bill, to say that all or part of that Bill should come into force only when approved by referendum. That is what we did on the Bill concerning the referendum on the voting system. However, what cannot be done within the constitution is to say that Parliament can require a future Bill to be made conditional on support in a referendum. That is a condition which must be decided only by Parliament when it considers that Bill. That must certainly be true for future Parliaments; in my view, it is absolutely clear that there is no way in which much of the legislation here can remain beyond the life of this Parliament. I further believe that it is probably also true that future Bills introduced in the present Parliament cannot be required to bring with them an agreement from a referendum. We need to deal with this issue much more thoroughly than we have done so far.