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Treaty of Lisbon (No. 5)

My hon. Friend may be correct, but the point of aspiring to have statesmen rather than politicians is that they can get beyond that and consider genuine national interest. Whatever the institutional arrangements that may have been created, no one can persuade me—they should not try—that we should require anything other than unanimity on foreign policy. As long as that remains the case, and it must, if we have statesmen governing our affairs, not only in this country but in other European countries, and they want to argue for a common foreign policy on any matter that is important to this country, it should be based on substantive agreement on genuine issues, not on cobbling together some form of words that pretend to a spurious unity.