European Union Bill

My Lords, I want to express very real appreciation for what the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said and to say how strongly we agree with that. We greatly appreciated the comments about what we were attempting to do yesterday. The aim was not to make life impossible in the terms of the Bill but to try to inject some rationality and proportionality so that it would have a genuine sense of balance about giving people the opportunity to deal with major issues in the way that the Bill describes and not to mix into that so much detail that it could not conceivably achieve that objective. I want to add one further thought because I think it bears very strongly on the style of work that we try to achieve in the House. The noble Lord, Lord Hannay—and I am going to be very cautious about putting words into his mouth—said, I think it was yesterday, although the days begin to blur into one after a while, that when he is making a proposition he prefers it to be in his own words rather than in words that are put into his mouth. My appeal to noble Lords opposite is this: it would be helpful to address the arguments that we put. It may be easier, and it may indeed be tempting, to stand up a complete fiction of an argument because it is easier to knock it over. I seem to remember that that was the style of debating societies in schools for 13 year- olds, but it was scarcely the way in which we got a serious discussion. We mostly learned that you did not get a serious discussion that way, and we matured out of it. I hope, as we pursue this discussion in Committee, and later at Report, that we do each other the courtesy of addressing the points that we are actually making, rather than some fictional point that is easy to destroy. That will not carry this Bill any further whatsoever. That is why so many issues around this clause—and indeed the issues that are likely to come up around the schedule—are so telling.