European Union Bill

I apologise as I am standing up. Mine is the first name attached to the Clause 3 stand part Motion on the Marshalled List. The Minister gave extremely courteous answers to the questions that I asked. I am very grateful to him for taking my questions seriously, but I have to say that the answers that he gave do not satisfy me. He has not explained the substantive reason why we need Clause 3 as well as Clause 2, nor has he answered my question about why there is no significance test in Clause 2 but only in Clause 3. He and I agree that you cannot use Clause 3 to transfer competence; you can use it only for things that do not transfer competence. The converse is not true. In Clause 2, you could, under the ordinary treaty revision procedure, do things which did not transfer competence. You could do very small things such as changing the number of justices in the Court of Justice. You would have to do that as a treaty change and you would probably, almost certainly given the structure in Brussels and the advice you would want to take from the court, do it with the heavy procedure. Therefore, it seems to me that the significance test ought in logic to apply in Clause 2 unless the Minister’s position is that anything, however insignificant, done under the standard treaty revision procedure will require a mandatory referendum. The minatory warning of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, about the foreigners who read our Hansard is valid as regards bundling. I would add a second—the idea that, as the Minister said, what will happen is that, "““a whole raft of issues requiring attention can be wrapped up and packaged””.—[Official Report, 5/4/11; col. 1670.]" If we are imposing a referendum requirement on that package, it really is an insult to the public. We are asking them to vote on a package, not on the merits of individual measures. It seems to me that the idea of bundling is not just bad practice in Brussels, and not likely to be followed in future in Brussels—people are trying to get away from it—but is also inimical to the idea of a referendum, where the purpose, presumably, is that the people answering the question understand it. If there is a raft of six or eight questions and you get only one yes or no because it is a bundle, that seems to me to be acutely unsatisfactory as a way to proceed. I also did not hear a satisfactory answer to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, about urgency. It is perfectly possible to envisage circumstances where waiting for a year, a year and a half or two years might not be in the UK’s interest. Therefore, it seems to me that the Liddle clause, bringing in urgency and national interest, is an extremely good idea. But even if that were accepted, I cannot see any need to have Clause 3. I will not press my point now and I apologise for burdening the House with my arguments at too great a length, but we will have to come back to this on Report. Will the Minister please read what we have said in this debate and my questions and consider whether they deserve serious answers? Will he also please look back to what the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said in his striking speech at the start of our first day in Committee in which, as a member of the Minister’s party, he gave strong advice that there would be many fewer problems with this Bill if there could be some movement on the 48(6) procedure in Clause 3?