European Union Bill

My Lords, I think we are straying back to a Second Reading debate, because we seem to have moved somewhat from the amendments. I shall return to what the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, said about emergencies and new technical developments that could arise and that are reasons that he is using to justify his amendment. Of course emergencies will always arise—they are part of life’s rich panoply—and there will always be new developments, but even if they did require changes to treaties and so on, we know that that will take a considerable time. Emergencies can be dealt with by multilateral agreements, bilateral agreements or in a range of other ways, and we deal with them that way all the time. I have worked with an international treaty: the Belfast agreement. We had specific arrangements with the Irish Republic. They were codified. I suspect that people on the streets of Britain talk of little else but codification from what I have been listening to this afternoon. The debate is so complicated that it causes the eyes to glaze over. We had specific areas of co-operation set out in an international treaty and discovered that an emergency arose. It was the prospect that we would not have enough gas on both sides of the Irish border. What did we do? Because we did not have it codified and it was not part of a treaty, the two Ministers—I was one of them—reached a bilateral agreement that we had ratified through our existing processes. We were able to do the job and get the pipeline built in a fraction of the time that it would have taken had we taken it through a formal process. I believe Governments will always be able to find a way to work together in an emergency and that when things are part of an elaborate process, that does not guarantee speed. The amendments talk about the effectiveness of the single market, effectiveness in mitigating climate change and effective financial regulations. Effectiveness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. If you talk about all these issues, you are talking about pretty well everything in modern life and policy. Not an awful lot is left if you include all these issues. A fundamental underlying mistake is being made here; nations that require referendums as part of their existing constitutions are not rendered useless negotiators in Brussels. A number of our fellow members of the European Union have referendums as an integral part of their constitutions. Do we mean that the Danes or the Irish are unable to negotiate? Of course not. They are able to do it, and they sit down with fellow Ministers who might not have that requirement. Does that mean that the Danes, the Irish and others are hogtied and unable to negotiate? Over the years, they have sometimes done a jolly good deal. The recent referendum in the Irish Republic on the Lisbon treaty was initially rejected. They went back to the table and got a better deal, and then it was passed. I do not believe that that indicates in any sense that, just because a referendum might be required, a Minister, or a Government, is paralysed. In fact, the evidence is to the contrary. Of course, if it gets far too detailed and concerns trivial matters, I would agree, but I do not think that we are facing that. In any event, this Bill is about the future. It is not about the past. I believe that there is sufficient wriggle room in the existing treaties and that you would be a pretty bad Government or a pretty weak Minister if you could not find something on which to hang a hook to move a particular measure forward. I am not confident that this Bill will be a showstopper for the European Union. Of course it will not. The European Union will continue. We have many treaty obligations in it, which I believe will be honoured, but this Bill is about preventing expansion and trying to restore public confidence. It is precisely because people do not believe politicians any more that this sort of Bill is necessary.