European Union Bill

My Lords, obviously the past is made up of facts but, as today has illustrated richly, the retelling of history is made up of the view taken by those who look at the facts. Having listened to what has been said in this debate, I have to say that some of the accounts of the facts do very scant justice either to what took place or, indeed, to some other countries. To be told that people were made to vote again and that the referenda were enforced appears to give very little credit whatever to the determination of the peoples of Denmark, Ireland, France or Holland, and I do not see why we should spend our time here insulting them. They were perfectly capable of settling the first propositions put in front of them and they were perfectly capable of assessing the changes. If it is said that, for example, consent was finally achieved in Ireland because of the financial problems that the country was facing—bailed out, it was said, by the straitjacket of the euro—I find that an astonishing bit of history. The banking and liquidity collapse of the country appears to have had no role; the sub-prime derivatives in which the banks of that country were so heavily involved that it had to set up a ““bad bank”” to deal with the mass of debt that had been accumulated appears to have had no role; and the massive speculative forces in property, finally producing a major financial threat which arose from those kinds of difficulties, also apparently had no role.