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European Union (Amendment) Bill

The biggest difference in content undoubtedly concerns justice and home affairs. By securing an opt-in provision in relation to EU co-operation on policing and criminal justice, the Government significantly changed the force of the treaty as it applies to the UK. That ought to be accepted by all parties. I also believe that there is a real difference in how the charter of fundamental rights now applies to the UK, which the protocol, declaration and other treaty amendments have achieved. I know that that is contentious, but I am sure that we will debate it at length in the Committee of the whole House. The most significant differences between the two treaties lie in the constitutional terms of those treaties. While Lisbon is just another amending treaty making a number of important, if modest, reforms, the constitutional treaty was something quite different. It abolished all past treaties, to replace them with one document: a new constitution. I believe that people have passed over that point and failed to grasp its significance. The Labour Member of the European Parliament, Richard Corbett, has it right when he points out that the DNA of mice and human beings is 90 per cent. the same—it is just that the remaining 10 per cent. is quite important. It is the same with the difference in nature between Lisbon and the constitutional treaty: the 10 per cent. difference moves one from a mouse of an amending treaty through to a fully evolved constitution. A referendum on the constitutional treaty would therefore effectively have been a referendum on the whole of the EU—Rome, the Single European Act, Maastricht, Nice and Amsterdam. It would have been about the complete constitution.