I am so pleased to have been supported by the noble Lord. I was rather afraid that he was going to find something that I had got wrong in the law and I would not like to argue with him, although I have done on occasions, as he knows, because I do not like lawyers to be left to themselves. But he has, with legal elegance, expressed what seems so obvious for anybody who has dealt with European law.
I say to my noble friend is that one of the problems we all have is that those of us who have worked in the European Union, who have argued these laws line by line, and who have worked with our neighbours to do this wonderful thing of bringing countries together to have common laws, encounter the constant difficulty that those who do not like the European Union do not understand the way it is done. Very often, the reason they are opposed to it is because they have never
understood the brilliance of the mechanisms that we have there. We may lose them—I say “may”—but we do not want to lose the environmental protection that they have given us.