European Union Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, made the point that the arrangements made under the NATO treaty, about its command structure and the obligations on members, have the effect, whether described as law or not, of determining how we behave in the defence of this country. It is impossible to argue that that is not substantively the case. As I said earlier, this clause provides, more than anything else, the opportunity for continuous internal division and splits—not harmonisation or bringing people back to political activism and political understanding but rather the alternative. If the argument flows in the other direction—that we will never use it, or that the process of being bound to the mast is not really there and we will sail by without anybody noticing that it is happening—the Government should, out of courtesy to the House, simply make a statement that this is a form of dressing up a political proposal for people who feel disenfranchised in any respect by what has happened in the development of the European Union. They should say that that is what it is for; it is not at all for anything practical. That is really the status of this clause.