It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), who is right to say that this omission—this flaw in the Bill—was pointed out at a very early stage and that the anomaly of the situation of the people of Gibraltar could have been rectified much earlier. That reflects the nature of the Bill, which in many respects—I am sure we will come on to them—is not very well thought out. It was, in effect, a public relations exercise to cover up the deep division in the Conservative party over the question of whether or not to remain in Europe.
That has been highlighted clearly in today’s Economist, the front cover of which has a road map that goes onwards and upwards to Great Britain, with a little cul-de-sac off to the right marked “Little England”, accompanied by an image of the European Union symbol with a cross through it. I think that the risk of the little Englander is the real issue behind much of the Bill.
The subject of new clause 1 is Gibraltar. It raises the obvious question of what would happen if Gibraltar exercised an expression of its destiny, as the hon. Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) eloquently put it, and voted to remain in the European Union but the UK voted to leave, perhaps with the votes of people in Scotland, which may by then have voted, in theory, to leave the United Kingdom. I am not clear where that would leave Gibraltar. It is included in the European Union only by virtue of the UK’s membership of the EU. It is represented in the European Parliament, not in its own right, but only by virtue of being a British Crown dependency.