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Lisbon Treaty (No.1)

I am glad that I gave way to my hon. Friend; he has made a devastating point. If I have time later, I want to give the House an instance relating to immigration and asylum in which the Government are in dispute with a European law that they have signed up to and cannot now get out of. They ought to be extremely cautious about their existing responsibilities, and still more so about those that we are now being invited to sign up to. We are talking here about the coercive power of the state, and the power to define punishments and to set the rights of the accused and of victims. It has always been regarded as particularly important to subject those powers to the highest standards of accountability and control. People obey the law because, ultimately, they obey their own laws. In an earlier intervention, the use of the pronouns ““we”” and ““us”” was mentioned. It is when laws become ““their”” laws—someone else's laws, imposed laws from another jurisdiction—that people feel less inhibited about disobeying them.