European Union Bill

I support my noble friend's amendment. It is the practice in this House to start a Committee stage with an extremely abstruse point and this is certainly extremely abstruse. However, I argue that it is the tip of a rather large iceberg which is the overload of the list of things that have to be subjected to referenda set out in the rest of the Bill. This is the kind of entrée for that and it is absolutely right that we should have a serious debate about it now and not just treat it as a minor and abstruse matter. The inclusion of decisions taken under Article 48(6) is a very clear symptom of a disease which seemed to be caught by the Government when they sat down to draft this Bill. Instead of opting for a very simple Bill, which would have subjected actual treaty changes to a referendum requirement—changes either to the Treaty on the European Union or the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union—they included a large mass of other material, including Article 48(6). That is likely to multiply by quite a lot the damaging effect that this Bill, if enacted, would have. I hope that the Government will think again about the inclusion of these issues within the scope of the Bill and thus be willing to look kindly on this amendment. One relevant point is that when this House ratified the Lisbon treaty and conveyed our instrument of ratification, which helped, along with the other 26, to bring it into force, we approved a whole series of ways of implementing Lisbon, of which the Article 48(6) issue is one very small part. We deposited our instrument of ratification and Lisbon came into force and the coalition Government accepted that. However, I think that the Government need to pause for a minute to think about whether we are really acting in good faith when we alter the means by which we will deal with these decisions somewhere along the line and introduce a different method of doing so. Noble Lords will gather that this argument does not apply at all to a decision to have a referendum on a change to the treaty. There would be no question of bad faith about that. I think that we would be quite wrong to do so, but if we wish to subject a future treaty change, a change to the Treaty on European Union or the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, to a referendum requirement, that is absolutely our own business. We can decide that and cannot be accused of bad faith. However, when we start tinkering with the way in which we shall approve items that are, as it were, subcontracted under Lisbon to the Council acting by unanimity, and impose new requirements which were not there when we deposited the instrument of ratification, we are taking real risks with that intangible concept—but one which is important within the European Union—which is the confidence that every member state has in the good faith of the other member states. I say that not because I have thought of that problem off the top of my head, but because it was brought to the attention of the committee set up in the other place to scrutinise European legislation, when it held an inquiry into the sovereignty issue, by the now retired director-general of legal services to the Council Secretariat, a man of extraordinary brilliance who gave successive British Governments massively good and helpful advice on many occasions. In his testimony, which is on the record for anyone to read in the proceedings of Mr Cash's committee, he very delicately said that if the British Government systematically involve themselves in subjecting decisions taken under Lisbon to a referendum requirement, at some stage there is a real risk that the issue of good faith will be raised. I hope that the Government will look very carefully at this matter and see that we need to cut away a good deal of the areas listed for requirement—among them, most particularly, the one we are discussing now.