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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I am delighted that my right hon. Friend has said that. As it happens, for 20 years before I became a Member of this House I was advising many, if not most, of the biggest companies in the UK on the whole question of the impact of legislation. I have also written many articles on the manner in which business, as I mentioned in a speech in 1986, has failed to concentrate on getting the European regulatory system right. That is why I was so cross—as was my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells—when Lord Jones as he now is came as Digby Jones to the European Scrutiny Committee and had the brass neck to say that we were not doing our job properly, when the CBI under his director-generalship had actually made no representations to us at all. My right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal should therefore be more careful about the amount of experience to which he alludes.