This has been a thought-provoking debate—and, in some places, just provoking! I would say to the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Mr Davidson) that I am afraid my Unite membership card has suffered irreparable damage during the course of this debate, but I thank him for his graphic advice on what I should now do with it. After recent events in Falkirk, I suspect there might be a few other people taking very similar advice.
It is good to see the House so full on a Friday. I gather that it has something to do with the provision of hog roast by the Prime Minister last night. One participant told me that burgers were being served by him, but they were a little bit rare. Perhaps that explains why so many left the Chamber so fast after the Foreign Secretary’s speech!
As a Liberal Democrat, I like referendums—and we have been consistent supporters of them. We supported all the referendums on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We were quite happy with the referendum on the European Community in 1975, and we even went along with the referendum on AV—the alternative vote system—although we obviously cannot win them all. At the time of the Lisbon treaty, we alone supported an in/out referendum for this country—not at four years’ remove, not for some future Parliament, but at that time. We got absolutely no support from the Conservative party at that stage.
I am afraid that that was the completely consistent position through to the general election of 2010, and it is more or less our position now. The Deputy Prime Minister has set out our position, the only difference being that in the meantime we have passed the European Union Act 2011, which rather watered down the Liberal Democrat commitment to an in/out referendum and adopted—[Interruption.] Conservative Members may laugh, but they have obviously not read their own manifesto of 2010. What is in the European Union Act 2011 is precisely the basis on which Conservative Members fought the last general election, which was the idea that there should be a trigger relating to the transfer of power. The Conservative manifesto stated that in the event of a transfer of power from the British level to the European level, a referendum on that transfer would be held. That is exactly what went into the European Union Act in 2011. We will quite happily use that to trigger—that is fine—but we are still committed to an in/out referendum, and I am still going to argue for one.