European Union Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Stamford, referred to the argument about Parliament and said that the party positions had changed. However, I said at the beginning of my remarks on the Bill last week that we are nothing if not consistent in our consistencies. This House voted so that people such as me in Northern Ireland would have a referendum on our constitutional future and that we would decide. As recently as on a visit to Northern Ireland last week, the Prime Minister said that the decision about its future lay with the people there; he did not say that it lay with Parliament. If we want to take the argument to its logical conclusion, that Parliament decides everything, why did Parliament provide for referenda in the first place? If you are going to be consistent in saying that such matters are a decision for Parliament, you do not have referenda. However, we do have referenda. We had one in 1975, and we have had a number since. Therefore, the argument that Parliament always takes the decisions is simply not true. Edmund Burke was quoted again. He is very popular in this debate, but we are talking about the 18th century and things have moved on. Life has changed. We have a totally different world in which people are, thank God, educated and able to participate in a meaningful way and no longer require people who can read and write to interpret things for them. As a new Member, it has struck me from the very beginning of our debates on the Bill that it is hard to construct an argument that we support the Bill in broad terms, inelegant though it might be, without automatically being deemed to be someone who does not want to have anything to do with Europe. I refute that. There are positive things about Europe, but, as the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, said, in the view of the British people Europe has been systematically salami-sliced. I think I understand why that is. There is a small group of people at the heart of Europe who, for perfectly legitimate reasons, believe ultimately in a large superstate to rival the United States. We saw an example of that last week when one former Prime Minister said that we now need a leader. I am not speculating on who he thought that person might be, but the implication is that the nation state is not held by some people to be the fundamental building block of the European Union. Indeed, the nation state is merely in transition towards something else.