First, I want to put on record my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) on a brilliant, deft and extremely well-conducted speech in which he dealt with complex interventions in a very, very mature fashion. I congratulate him not only on his speech but on its content.
I am extremely glad that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, despite the fact that referendums were completely off the agenda for some time before the announcement was made in the Bloomberg speech, or in relation to the Bill, has said in the past, as I said in a short intervention, that he thought there should have been a referendum on the Maastricht treaty. Of course he was right, and I shall explain why in a moment. In 1996 I introduced a Bill, for which I was given what could be considered a bit of a going-over by the then Chief Whip and the Whips, one of whom is now a Minister. It was an entertaining experience, and all I can say is that it made no difference whatsoever to my attitude to the need for a referendum, as I shall explain.
My right hon. Friend was right: the most important principle of the Bloomberg speech is the fourth principle, which overrides all the others, as they all depend on it. He said that the root of our national democracy is our national Parliament, but the essence of that democracy is when it is decided by Parliament that we shall give the people the right to make the decision, which is the ultimate test of trust in the electorate.