European Union Bill

My Lords, I had not intended to speak in this debate and I will be extremely brief. I rose to speak only because so many of my noble friends have made rather powerful speeches, but ones with which I disagree. I take very seriously the point made about moving too far in favour of plebiscitary democracy. One has to agree that that is a real danger. Balanced against that has to be the fact that the seeping away of the power of Parliament to the European Union is also an extremely serious issue. I agree in general that referendums should be held largely on constitutional issues because they are a good way of settling how we live with each other and how we are governed. We had quotations from the side opposite and from Cross-Benchers in earlier debates from Edmund Burke and the judgment of members of the legislature. One might quote back at them Tom Paine, who argued that constitutions belong to the people: that it is not for politicians to decide the rules by which government is conducted—sovereignty comes from the people. While I think that referendums should be on constitutional issues—important constitutional issues, as has been said—the totality of our relationship with Europe is a huge constitutional issue. It is therefore right that referendums should play a part in that. That poses the question: is it right that we should have in this Bill so many different powers and so many different issues all rolled into one that might, as has been said, give rise to a flood of referendums on trivial issues? I do not believe that that will be the consequence of this Bill. That has been said before in our proceedings on the Bill, so I shall not go on about it at any great length. I will say, however, that that will not happen because: first, these measures are likely to come in packages; and, secondly, there are reserve powers—reserved to the nation state and left out of the previous treaties of Lisbon, Nice and Maastricht—because individual countries in the past have wanted to preserve them, and not necessarily Britain. There are other countries in the European Union, and one can look through the minutes of the constitutional convention leading up to the Lisbon treaty to see how some other countries in the past have argued for the veto to be preserved in certain areas. This is not just at the insistence of British politicians.