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European Union (Amendment) Bill

Of course any market needs a degree of regulation; that is obvious. The most extreme capitalist understands the need for laws; Adam Smith wrote books about that. Every market needs the rule of law, but that is not what I am referring to now. The point on over-regulation is not my observation; it as an observation the Government make. The Minister referred to attempts—of which we have had plenty—to turn back the tide and launch deregulatory initiatives in the EU. We have heard it all before; it never works or it never happens. I am a member of the European Scrutiny Committee. We are still on the receiving end of a blizzard of new proposals, directives and regulations. We were told that with enlargement everything would seize up if we did not get more majority voting in the constitution. That was another lie, of course. We did not need the constitution in order to enlarge, and we now have 12 new member states and even more laws are coming out of Brussels even without the extensions in majority voting in the treaty. So we are on the receiving end of a torrent of over-regulation, which far exceeds the rule of law necessary to regulate any free market sensibly.