European Union Bill

My Lords, I thank the Minister. The thought of him as a French spy is vastly entertaining; I had never thought of him in quite that sense. It has cast a whole new light on his part-time activities. I was not entirely clear from what he said—I will have to read his remarks in Hansard—about the differences that he was drawing between Crown dependencies on the one hand and overseas territories on the other, but we can look at that. There is a specific point about Gibraltar. I fully concede the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, that it is a very remote possibility, but an issue that comes up again and again is self-determination for dependencies and overseas territories. The issue regarding Gibraltar is that it would not be able to exercise self-determination in the way that other overseas territories do because of the treaty of Utrecht. In my day, if you moved away from that treaty for a single moment you were in deep trouble. I make the point because it means that Gibraltar is in a rather special position; it is not just that it is part of the European Union. Of course, one might say that the Spanish would be bound by the same issues. The point is not for us to think of every possibility, racking my brains as I am so to do. The point is to have legislation that is as clear as possible. We should make this clause clear so that we are not left with someone trying to think up some clever eventuality where we might have a real difficulty on our hands; rather, we should forestall such difficulties by having greater clarity. It is an absurdity to think that an issue that affected only Gibraltar could be the subject of a referendum in Darlington, Dagenham and Dorking. That really would be a silly position for us to be in. I hope that the Minister will kindly give this a little more thought so that when we return to this issue at a later stage we might be able to have a greater meeting of minds.