European Union Bill

My Lords, as the person who tabled most of the amendments that are the subject of this debate, I should say a few words. One is meant to rejoice when a Minister eats a large quantity of humble pie. I have to say, I am not rejoicing at listening to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, eating humble pie for having helped to lead his party to the various majorities that confirmed the Lisbon treaty. Frankly, it is a sad day when the Liberal party recants from the policy that it has pursued for so many years, saying that it is out of touch with the people and has not taken sufficient account of their views. Leaving that to one side, I took the trouble to listen to the debate in the other place. I think I was the only Member of your Lordships’ House who did so. It was rather a sad occasion, much less well attended than this one. I am glad to see a wonderful cross-section of the views held in this House, which will no doubt be vigorously debated in the minutes or hours that follow. There was practically nobody there. When the noble Lord says that the decision was adopted by consensus, it was the consensus of around 15 or 20 people. They were mainly the people who went into the Lobby against the Government on Clause 18 and managed to muster 22 votes. They are therefore people who, by their own admission, would much rather than Britain was not in the European Union. That is a perfectly respectable position to take; it is the position that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, takes. On the matter that we are discussing now, I support the amendment. No one, including me, is persisting with the amendments that we tabled to the Bill and were voted on in this House. They would have reduced the number of referendums substantially, though not to only three. The amendment did not affect the provisions that would have required a referendum if any general constitutional treaty, such as Lisbon, Nice, Maastricht or the Single European Act, had come forward. That was not covered by the amendment that was rejected by the House of Commons. Only the numerous provisions that provide for 56 other referendums were covered. I should like briefly to make three points in favour of this amendment. First, on marginalisation, given the problems with holding a referendum at particular moments in our parliamentary cycle, there is a risk that people may be minded to vote for reasons that have nothing to do with the question on the ballot paper. Therefore, a British Government would be compelled to reject a change in Europe that they believed to be in the British interest and wished to support because they did not feel able to go to the country in a referendum. This is exceedingly serious. That is why we should all listen rather carefully to someone I respect enormously, Sir John Major, who said at Ditchley in the annual lecture that he gave last Saturday that Britain was at risk of being a semi-detached member of the European Union. I know that is not the object of the Government. I have heard many government spokesmen flatly deny that and say how active we are. However, they should take this risk seriously. The second problem is the one that has been alluded to already by the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, which is that this is a major extension of plebiscitary democracy in a country that has hitherto prided itself in putting its faith in representative parliamentary democracy. This is not a small subject. Frankly, what is odd about this is the huge extension of the plebiscitary approach in one sector of our national and international life, which is not applied to any of the rest of it at all. When it was suggested in our earlier debates in Committee and Report that perhaps the Government were in favour of referendums on reform of the National Health Service or the education system, strings of garlic were hung around the government spokesman’s neck. They swore mightily that they had no such thought. But this is a very odd way to go about constitutional change. It really is pretty peculiar to introduce this huge raft of potential referendums into this area. Finally, on my third point, I support this amendment because the lack of flexibility given by the Bill, if it were to pass and become an Act, is a major danger. It imports rigidity into the whole British approach to Europe and, by transposition, it risks importing rigidity into the whole evolution of the European Union. Institutions that do not have the means to reform and adapt themselves become fragile and risk falling out of contact with what they are meant to be doing. This is a really serious problem being caused here, and these rigidities are liable to damage both the European Union and our own national interests. The purpose of the amendment is to provide a little bit of flexibility where none exists in the present Bill, which is why I support it.