European Union Bill

The debate that we have had over the past hour and a half has been valuable. I imagine that it has not escaped the Minister that not one person has spoken in support of the Government’s draft—not one. There have been different points of view about what is wrong with it and how to remedy it but there has been no support apart from that from the Members of UKIP, whose embrace I suspect would be mildly toxic to the Government since their sole objective is to operate the provision that would withdraw us from the European Union. The noble Lord, Lord Willoughby de Broke, produced a lot of totally irrelevant analogies with the action taken by the French last year on the Roma, with the Danes and so on. They were all taken by executive action, not by legislation. He was proposing that Parliament should actually disallow a ruling by the European Court. If we did that, it would not be infraction proceedings that we would be getting; we would be on to the road out, which is exactly what he would like to achieve.