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Lisbon Treaty (No. 3)

If the hon. Gentleman cares to examine what John Bright and his great friend Cobden did, he will find that they were huge supporters of free trade and rightly argued for international institutions that would open countries up to it. However, we cannot have good words and nice policies unless we have a mechanism of enforcement, and since day one of the European Economic Community, the European Court of Justice has been that enforcement mechanism. I fully accept the points made by my hon. Friends about the Laval and Viking cases, but on balance the court has been good for workers and for Europe. If we adopted the Opposition amendment, we would throw out the proverbial European Court of Justice baby with the bathwater of the whole European Union. We have heard some remarkable language in this debate. The right hon. Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr. Lilley) talked about a foreign jurisdiction; actually, a British judge serves on the Court. Furthermore, the World Trade Organisation is a foreign jurisdiction—any treaty organisation into which we freely enter and whose adjudicating panel's or Court's binding rulings we accept is a foreign jurisdiction. For heaven's sake, I thought that Britain wanted to extend the concept of the rule of law globally and internationally into as many different areas as possible.