My Lords, this is my third time speaking and my third time doing so after the noble Baroness, Lady Bull. I do not know whether there is any significance to this.
Anyway, this Brexit debate is nothing if not a contest between two visions of the future. There is no surprise about that. However, the debate has become so dogmatic, dug-in and devoid of good old English common sense that it is has also given rise to two versions of history. Just as the EU today claims moral ownership of the Good Friday agreement as if it had taken part in the negotiations and suffered thousands of casualties during the Troubles, there are some remainers who give the EU credit for ending the Cold War—so much so that, in our debate on 28 January, to the applause of others sitting opposite us, the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, gave the then European Community the credit for bringing down the Berlin Wall.
This is entirely false. I was living in Germany, married to a German. I was there in September 1989, the very first time East Germans—