European Union Bill

My Lords, I have listened to the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, with great interest. He is about the only speaker on the other side of the House who has had a good word to say about the Bill in any shape or form, and even he was fairly grudging when he did so. It reminds me a little of the story of the man who was going through the courts in a civil action and lost at first instance. He went to the Court of Appeal and lost there; he went to the then House of Lords and lost there too. When he came out he turned to his counsel and said, ““Where do we go next?””. His counsel looked at him and said, ““You know, we should breed from you””. The noble Lord’s is about the only support for the Bill that we have heard either at Second Reading or today. I start by making it clear that I do not like referendums. I believe basically in parliamentary democracy—that is what this country has lived with now for many generations and I hope that it will go on doing so for a large number of generations to come—so I do not approve of a situation in which it is felt for one reason or another that it is necessary to consult the electorate in the way that, for example, the Swiss do. I have some knowledge and experience of Switzerland, and I am bound to say that I find the extent to which they hold referendums there extraordinary. The polls are not very high; people do not take a great deal of interest in them. Occasionally there is an issue that excites people, in which case there is a proper contest. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said, it is the same in the United States: if you see all the issues that are put on the ballot papers, you realise that it is consultation gone mad, to the point where it is distorting public opinion. So I do not like referendums; I am in favour of parliamentary democracy. Let us look at the Bill. If we pass it and it becomes law, what are we going to be faced with in terms of referendums? It is all very well for the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and I am sorry that he is unwell, to stand here and say, ““It doesn’t matter; there aren’t going to be any referendums anyway because this deals only with trivial issues and no one is going to have referendums on that sort of thing””. I do not believe it. I know exactly who would want referendums on that sort of Bill; one usually sits on the Benches behind me and the other one sits down at the other end of the Bench below the Gangway. Of course they want referendums. The scope for judicial review proceedings is considerable. If I were a practising barrister, which I no longer am, I would say in terms of the future of my profession that on the whole this would be a Bill to be welcomed as there will be a lot of work in it for members of the Bar, but that is not a good thing. If this is going to be only about trivia, why on earth are we legislating? Either it amounts to something or it does not. If it amounts to something, I am against it; if it does not amount to anything, we should not be doing it. What is the point? This is an edifice that has been erected for political purposes that will do serious damage to our constitution.