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European Union (Amendment) Bill

I will go away and refer to some dusty tomes and study passerelles, but I remember in the Maastricht process our being told that the justice and home affairs pillar would be quite separate and independent and there for all time, and that it was a safeguard against those matters ever being subsumed within the general Community provisions of the first pillar, which related to the market, fisheries policy and other aspects that were already part of the Community method and were under the supervision of the European Court of Justice and the authority of the European Commission. There has been a great deal of incremental change through treaty methods—through the conclusion of a treaty—and there are a significant number of incremental changes in this treaty. I believe that we have been less than vigilant in scrutinising them—in respect of defence, to take one example from many. The Government must take responsibility for that as they put in place the process for scrutinising the Bill. That is, however, an argument of the past and for another day. We need to look carefully into how the treaty opens the door to new possibilities for incremental change on a quite different basis and in a quite different way from the already substantial incremental change that we have seen. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wells said, if these provisions are unamended the Bill will be dispensing with the need for the procedure and paraphernalia of intergovernmental conferences and treaties conducted in the full spotlight of public attention before treaty changes can take place. Under the Lisbon treaty, it will in future be possible to have change without a treaty and all the accompanying paraphernalia—the intergovernmental mandate, the intergovernmental conference and the treaty ratification going before individual member states. All that will go out of the window; in future, we will have change without a treaty, and change brought about on a case-by-case basis.