European Union Bill

I am not too keen on giving way now. We have had a long debate. I do not want to be rude in any way and I greatly respect the noble Lord, but if I could be allowed to get past my first paragraph, that would be quite a treat. I was going on to say that it is because of that dissatisfaction that, in our programme for government, from which I was reading, the coalition made a commitment to introduce legislation to establish a referendum requirement for treaty changes that transferred power or competence from Britain to Brussels—I cited the words referring to powers—and, in the process, to strengthen the power of the British people to exert their influence over such decisions and thereby increase their engagement with those decisions and the work of the European Union more generally. I may say that that task was notably pushed aside in a rather cavalier way by the previous Government, with the result that there was a very noticeable decline in public enthusiasm for and commitment to the European Union. I do not want to rehearse in depth the arguments that I went over on Second Reading related to the principles, but I repeat that, contrary to the views of those who have depicted the Bill as some kind of anti-European device, I see it firmly as a tool to strengthen our position, role and effect as a member state of the European Union, because of its impact on citizens’ involvement with the issues before them and their engagement with the EU. Of course, that means referenda. If, like my noble friends Lord Deben and Lord Garel-Jones, you do not like referenda, that is a perfectly respectable position to hold. They will recall that, again and again, referenda have been used. At the time of the Lisbon treaty and the ill fated constitution for the EU, all three parties were in favour of referenda. That was the position then. No doubt the noble Lords had their objections then, so it is not surprising that they will have their objections now. I respect that, but this is a difference that we cannot necessarily bridge. Either we are ready to see the use of referenda in this electronic age or we deplore them and think that they are in some way an attack on parliamentary sovereignty. I do not believe that to be so, because Parliament remains sovereign regardless.