European Union Bill

I think that we have agreed that we are concerned with powers under Article 48(6) and the noble Lord is worried about powers rather than competences. It is true that the transfer of powers is not defined in European legislation, so we have to look at these detailed points, such as the surrender of certain vetoes or the removal of the availability to hold to a veto, and look at issues where a sanction is imposed on the United Kingdom which involves the limitation of a power moving to the higher levels of the European Union and taking it away from this country. These may be small powers. I want to come to what I believe to be a canard—that all this will lead to an endless series of referenda. It will not and I shall show exactly why it will not. But they are transfers of power and they come in a variety of forms. I have mentioned two or three. I will seek to get a longer list as we discuss these things but the pattern is there. The pattern of power must be considered as well as the pattern of competences. Let me address what lies behind the amendment and the worry about Article 48(6); namely, will this procedure as applied to the transfer of powers as well as to the transfer of competences which would trigger the referendum requirement, provided they got over the significance hurdle, the exemption hurdle and other hurdles, lead to numerous referendums on trivial issues? If it did, I think that I would agree with some of the rather cruder and blunter criticisms of the Bill that this would not be a sensible way to proceed, with constant concerns about quite small issues triggering a referendum for the whole United Kingdom. Clearly, that would be absurd. First, one has to face a fact which I think some of us—the very wise and experienced noble Lords on the Benches on all sides of the House—must know very well. Treaty changes, whether they have or have not transferred competence or power from the UK to the EU, have been very rare. That is for the obvious reason that it is very difficult for any country in agreeing a treaty change in any of the member states, some of which have referendum provisions with similarities to those proposed in the Bill, to get those treaty changes through. There have been enormous difficulties. To bring home the point, the last treaty change, the Lisbon treaty, was packed with all sorts of smaller issues—they tend to come in packages for the very good reason that getting a treaty through on anything is extremely difficult—took 23 months to ratify in 27 states, not to mention the three years of the constitutional treaty which went nowhere. The noble Lord knows all about that. We expect a similarly lengthy process with the current treaty changes, even on the tiddler, as it were, of the eurozone stability mechanism, which the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, mentioned, and certainly with future accession treaties as well. Before we move on to—