European Union Bill

My Lords, I can only say that I strongly agree with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, has made. It does not make any sense at all either historically or in terms of what is required now. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, about specific deployments and whether the wording is helpful or unhelpful also leads me to an area of agreement. It appears to me that, in choosing this drafting in the Bill, the Government have once again ignored a fundamental principle of political process. Any of us, whether we are in this House or have been involved in other organisations where some politics, with a big P or a small p, are going on among those who are taking part will recognise the circumstances perfectly well. I have found, as I suspect many noble Lords have done, that people occasionally welcome the chance to speak out and say that they do not like something. They like to be given the visible opportunity to fight their corner and, in the end, they find it far easier and a much more comfortable position to be seen to have been defeated in whatever it was they were arguing and to live with the result than to appear to have supported the issue in the first place. That, I think, is a commonplace in political life. I do not deny for a moment that I have enjoyed the fact that I have been able to present an argument and have lost it and that something else potentially more rational than anything I suggested has then happened. That occurs in the normal course of political life. Unanimity, which could allow a slightly different process to occur in relation to enhanced co-operation, gives room for real politics in really difficult circumstances. Therefore, I say to the government Benches that, when they reply and explain to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, what Clause 7(4)(c) means—I, too, am quite keen to know what it means—perhaps they will tell us how they expect real politics to work. I refer not just to how they have locked out the possibility of it working but how they expect it to work and how they expect to give Ministers who are in senior, responsible and authoritative positions the ability to do the job that I think the people of the country expect of them individually and of Parliament.