European Union Bill

I am sorry that the noble Lord’s absence from earlier debates has not enabled him to catch up with where this debate has got to. Some of us were attempting to reduce sharply the number of provisions that require a referendum, for a number of reasons that are not the ones that the noble Lord, Lord Stoddart, gave but are related, as the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, said, to whether or not you believe in representative parliamentary democracy and the powers of Parliament. A number of us who have done so have put forward amendments that would effectively leave in the Bill the strengthening from the ratification of Lisbon powers, which means simply that if these changes were to be made there would need to be a resolution in both Houses, but would leave intact in the Bill a requirement for primary legislation before Britain could agree to that. That would be a strengthening of parliamentary authority in areas such as this, which in any case require unanimity. The idea that there is not a lock there is completely aberrant. What there is not, if you follow the amendments, is a lock plus a referendum, and that is for principled reasons that I have briefly attempted to explain. I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, but really and truly the situation is not quite as he suggests. Those of us who are trying to reduce the number of referendums are not trying to weaken the power of Parliament but to strengthen it.