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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 4)

That is absolutely true, but the right hon. Gentleman was also questioning people's ability to spend their own money, was he not, through co-financing? That is a much bigger debate, and I understand the sensitivities around it. We share a commitment to the British national health service, but we also want choice to be extended. Finally, I shall deal with the issue on which the Conservative spokesman spent so much time: the threat to the competitive market within Europe presented by the Sarkozy approach to national champions. The hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge is right to stress the current spasm of economic nationalist thinking about energy companies and so on, not just in France but in Spain and Italy and sometimes in Germany and elsewhere. We should not be totally self-righteous about this. We have had and continue to have national champions of our own, but they take a different form. The debates that I have tried to provoke in the House on BAE Systems relate to a British national champion where politics and commerce have become rather dangerously intertwined. We should not be too pious on the matter, but the hon. Gentleman is right that there was a retreat from a commitment in the treaty to an undistorted internal market. The objective legal position remains very much as the right hon. Member for Leicester, West said: we have exactly the set of rules governing the single market and competition policy that prevailed before. Neelie Kroes, the Dutch Liberal who presides over competition policy, has spelled out clearly where we currently stand. The protocol on internal market and competition which was agreed at the European Council clearly repeats that competition policy is fundamental to the internal market. It retains the competition rules that have served us for 50 years, and reaffirms the European Commission's duties as the independent Commission enforcement authority for Europe. Nothing formally has changed, although the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge is right that there is a change of mood that is potentially worrying and it is right to signal our concerns about that. In conclusion, it has always been understood that we on the Liberal Democrat Benches are strong supporters of the European project. We are not uncritical. There are areas where we have fundamental disagreements. We have been critical of agricultural policy, particularly its protectionist features. We have been critical of the European budget and voted against it a few weeks ago. We believe that there should be more subsidiarity, including in areas of social policy, which should not be prescriptively applied at a European level. None the less, the fundamentals of the European project are sound, they are reflected in the treaty, and that is why we support it.