European Union Bill

I am not sure that that intervention is entirely on target. I thought the noble Lord was going to berate us about the Murdoch press, and I do not think that the two newspapers to which I referred belong in the Murdoch stable. I am quite happy to collaborate with the noble Lord on that if he will collaborate with me on getting the BBC to fulfil its duty to explain to the British people how the European Union works. I think I got as far as saying that three amendments were carried against this Bill which together emasculate it entirely and deny the British people any chance of a meaningful referendum on our relationship with the failing project of European integration, which they do not like. The point I now want to make about those amendments is that they were largely proposed by noble Lords in receipt of a forfeitable EU pension, most of them undeclared, and they were all carried by the votes of noble Lords who did not declare their interest. I can but suggest that the Privileges Committee revisits this subject before the Bill returns from the Commons and does the obvious thing. As the Bill now leaves us, there is one other regret that I would like to record. It is that the Government did not respond to a question about the background to this Bill which I put to them twice. The Government’s excuse, no doubt in their mind when they designed the Bill, may be that the Bill should not have allowed us to discuss the EU’s real defects: its common agricultural and fisheries policies, its wasteful and fraudulent use of vast sums of taxpayers’ money and its entirely undemocratic and secret law-making process which now controls so much of our lives. The question I put was this: given that even our political class is beginning to see that the euro was and is designed for disaster—