European Union Bill

I am grateful to the Minister for his considered reply. I strongly agree with his point about public disquiet and concern. Particularly in this House, we underrate the extent to which public opinion has moved against the European Union in recent years. However, the Bill will do absolutely nothing to remedy that concern and disquiet. What we need to do, and this is a responsibility particularly of the Government, is to be out selling in public the truth about the European Union. However, I agree with the analysis that the Minister provided at the outset of his remarks. He was also quite right to range widely before focusing on my amendment, because, alas, the debate had ranged very widely. I did not realise how many of the captains and the kings would come in and how much Sturm und Drang we would have as we ranged over the battlefield. Quite a lot of the debate was, as the noble Lord, Lord Richard, pointed out, technically a little bit out of order, but it was very interesting. I have to disappoint one or two noble Lords who spoke in favour of my amendment—and I note that only two spoke against it, none of them from the government Benches. My disappointed comes from the fact that the scope of my amendment is extremely narrow. If the Government were to accept it, and I do not know why they do not, the particular procedures applying to treaty amendments that result from the simplified process would fall away and all treaty amendments would be handled in the same way. I do not know why Clause 3 is needed as well as Clause 2. I was not arguing today that nothing that is done by the simplified procedure should ever justify a referendum—that is my view, but it was not the argument that I was making today. My argument today was that there was no need for Clause 3 and no need anywhere in the Bill for any reference to Article 48(6). We need proper, substantive definitions based on the content of a treaty amendment—what it says, what it does—to decide how significant they are and whether there is a requirement for a referendum. I will probably be somewhere else on the spectrum of that debate from the Minister. You need to address the substance of the treaty amendment, not the process by which the treaty amendment was arrived at. Clause 2 refers to: ““Treaties amending or replacing TEU or TFEU””. The title of Clause 3 is: ““Amendment of TFEU under simplified revision procedure””. If Clause 3 vanishes, the only procedure you would have would be that set out in Clause 2, and it would apply to all treaty amendments. I cannot see why the Government do not buy that. The Minister spent a long time trying to persuade us that you could, under the simplified revision procedure, transfer competences to the European Union, despite the plain wording of Article 48(6) that you cannot transfer competences to the European Union by that root.